the Prison Act 1877, they were administered by the royal household, the aristocracy and the bishops, and run for profit by private individuals who bought the right to manage and make money from them. Prisoners had to pay rent, feed and clothe themselves and, in the larger prisons, furnish their rooms. One man found not guilty at trial in 1669 was not released because he owed prison fees from his pre-trial confinement, a position supported by the judge, Matthew Hale. Jailers sold food or let out space for others to open shops; the Marshalsea contained several shops and small restaurants. Prisoners with no money or external support faced starvation. If the prison did supply food to its non-paying inmates, it was purchased with charitable donations—donations sometimes siphoned off by the jailers—usually bread and water with a small amount of meat, or something confiscated as unfit for human consumption. Jailers would load prisoners with fetters and other iron, then charge for their removal, known as "easement of irons" (or "choice of irons"); this became known as the "trade of chains". The prison reformer John Howard travelled around the country in the 1770s inspecting jails, and presented his research in The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777). In a jail owned by the Bishop of Ely, Howard wrote, prisoners had ten years earlier been kept chained to the floor on their backs, with spiked collars round their necks and iron bars over their legs. The Duke of Portland had a one-room cellar in Chesterfield that housed four prisoners, with no straw or heat, which had not been cleaned for months. Lord Arundel owned a jail in Penzance, where Howard found a debtor in a room 11 ft × 11 ft and 6 ft high, with a small window. The door of the room had not been opened for four weeks. Debt in England Before the Bankruptcy Act 1869, debtors in England were routinely imprisoned at the pleasure of their creditors. Around 10,000 people in England and Wales were in prison for debt in 1641, often for small amounts. In the 18th century debtors comprised over half the prison population: 945 of London's 1,500 prisoners in 1779 were debtors. According to John Wade, writing in 1829, in London in 1826–1827, 753 people were imprisoned for debts under £5, for between 20 and 100 days. In Southwark that year the debts