language and English. Prisoners who could read were given access to books. News on the progress of the war, including successes and defeats on both sides, was reported to prisoners. In April 1799 French prisoners at Liverpool were reported to have performed plays by Voltaire in a neat prison theatre they had constructed. In July 1799, Dutch prisoners at Norman Cross sought permission to use one building as a theatre. The Sea Lords refused. However Foulley's model, depicting the prison as it was in about 1809, shows a theatre in the south-west quadrangle. Religion There was no prison chapel but a Catholic priest resided in the garrison barracks. From 1808, the former Bishop of Moulins Étienne-Jean-Baptiste-Louis des Gallois de La Tour, who lived in exile at Stilton, was permitted by the Admiralty to minister and provide charity to the prisoners at his own expense. He later became Archbishop of Bourges. Health Sick prisoners were initially treated in the prison hospital by two French Navy surgeons and 24 orderlies. As the number of prisoners increased, disease spread throughout the camp. 1,020 prisoners died in a typhus outbreak in 1800–1801. A special 'typhus cemetery' was dug near the camp. Leonard Gillespie, Surgeon to the Fleet, wrote in 1804 that pneumonia was common with some cases becoming fatal carditis. There were also many cases of consumption. A brick house for a resident British surgeon was built adjacent to the prison hospital in 1805. A peculiar outbreak of Nyctalopia or night-blindness affected many of the prisoners in 1806. They became severely dyspeptic and completely blind from sunset until dawn, to the extent that their fitter companions had to lead them around the camp. Various treatments were tried and failed; finally they were cured with black hellebore, given as snuff, which relieved the dyspepsia and restored their night vision within a few days. A total of 1,770 prisoner deaths were recorded, the majority from disease, during the time the prison was in operation, although the records are incomplete. Craft and prison economy At the outbreak of the war, the Transport Board wrote that "the prisoners in all the depots in the country are at full liberty to exercise their industry within the prisons, in manufacturing and selling any articles they may think proper excepting those which would affect the Revenue in opposition to the Laws, obscene toys and drawings, or articles made either from their