living "within the rules" or "within the liberty" of the King's Bench prison; this meant that he was a King's Bench inmate who, for a fee, was allowed to live outside, within a certain radius of the prison. Although legislation prohibited jailers from having a pecuniary interest in the sale of alcohol within their prisons, it was a rule that was completely ignored. Howard reported that, in the summer of 1775, 600 pots of beer were brought into the Marshalsea one Sunday from a public house, because the prisoners did not like the beer in the tap room. Common side Prisoners on the master's side rarely ventured to the common side. John Baptist Grano went there just once, on 5 August 1728, writing in his diary: "I thought it would have kill'd me." There was no need for other prisoners to see it, John Ginger writes. It was enough that they knew it existed to keep the rental money, legal fees and other gratuities flowing from their families, fees that anywhere else would have seen them living in the lap of luxury, but which in the Marshalsea could be trusted merely to stave off disease and starvation. By all accounts, living conditions in the common side were horrific. In 1639 prisoners complained that 23 women were being held in one room without space to lie down, leading to a revolt, with prisoners pulling down fences and attacking the guards with stones. Prisoners were regularly beaten with a "bull's pizzle" (a whip made from a bull's penis), or tortured with thumbscrews and a skullcap, a vice for the head that weighed . What often finished them off was being forced to lie in the strong room, a windowless shed near the main sewer, next to piles of night soil and cadavers awaiting burial. Dickens described it as "dreaded by even the most dauntless highwaymen and bearable only to toads and rats". One apparently diabetic army officer who died in the strong room—he had been ejected from the common side because inmates had complained about the smell of his urine—had his face eaten by rats within hours of his death, according to a witness. When William Acton ran the jail in the 1720s, the income from charities, collected to buy food for inmates on the common side, was directed instead to a group of trusted prisoners who policed the prison on Acton's