Introduction

This case study looks at debtors and prisons in Norwich during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is the result of the investigations by people living in Norfolk who responded to our appeal for history detectives.

Debtors in prisons throughout the land regularly presented petitions to Parliament requesting relief.

The recovery of debt was of everyday importance to many people.

From 1670 onwards, Parliament passed Acts every few years for the relief of imprisoned debtors.

John Harrison Yallop was a leading money lender in Norwich in the early nineteenth century.

The history detectives are people living in Norfolk who responded to our appeal.

The English economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied on informal networks of credit and debt at all levels of society, from wealthy gentry and merchants to shopkeepers and labourers.