behalf. The same group swore during Acton's trial in 1729 for murder that the strong room was the best room in the house. Ginger writes that Acton and his wife, who lived in a comfortable apartment near the lodge, knew they were sitting on a powder keg: "When each morning the smell of freshly baked bread filled ... the yard ... only brutal suppression could prevent the Common Side from erupting." 1729 Gaols Committee The common side did erupt after a fashion in 1728 when Robert Castell, an architect and debtor in the Fleet prison, who had been living in lodgings outside the jail within the rules, was taken to a "sponging house" after refusing to pay a higher prison fee to the Fleet's notorious warden, Thomas Bambridge. Sponging houses were private lodgings where prisoners were incarcerated before being taken to jail; they acquired the name because they squeezed the prisoner's last money out of him. When Castell arrived at the sponging house on 14 November he was forced to share space with a man who was dying of smallpox, as a result of which he became infected and died less than a month later. Castell had a friend, James Oglethorpe, a Tory MP who years later founded the American colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe began to ask questions about the treatment of debtor prisoners, and a group of debtors, perhaps at Oglethorpe's instigation, lodged a complaint about their treatment with the Lord Mayor of London and his aldermen, who interviewed the Fleet's warden on 21 December 1728. In February 1729 the House of Commons appointed a parliamentary committee, the Gaols Committee, chaired by Oglethorpe, to examine conditions in the Fleet and Marshalsea. The committee visited the Fleet on 27 February and the Marshalsea on 25 March. William Hogarth accompanied the committee on its visit to the Fleet, sketching it, then painting it in oil (left). The painting was commissioned by Sir Archibald Grant, MP for Aberdeenshire, standing third from the right. The man in irons is thought to be Jacob Mendez Solas, a Portuguese prisoner. The committee was shocked by the prisoners' living conditions. In the Fleet they found Sir William Rich, a baronet, in irons. Unable to pay the prison fee, he had been burned with a red-hot poker, hit with a stick and kept in a dungeon for ten days for having wounded the warden with a shoemaker's