Catalogue description Records of the King's Bench Prison and the Queen's Prison

The court of King's Bench had jurisdiction in civil pleas in cases brought against persons already in its custody. In the fifteenth century, if not earlier, litigants discovered the benefits of using King's Bench procedures in cases which would otherwise have been brought in the Court of Common Pleas or elsewhere; in consequence, the notion of the 'custody' became elastic. In 1452 it was ruled that a defendant on bail was 'in the custody of the marshal of the King's Bench' for the purposes of being sued in King's Bench. Thenceforward there developed a standard procedure whereby a plaintiff brought a 'bill of Middlesex', alleging a trespass within the court's geographical jurisdiction, and then, when process on that suit brought the defendant theoretically within custody, the defendant was sued for some other, allegedly genuine, matter. Thus, from the late fifteenth century onwards until 1832 (when the Uniformity of Process Act abolished the stratagem), the vast majority of persons alleged in preliminary process to be 'in the custody of the marshal' were in fact not; only those subsequently committed by rule or order of the court were really in custody.

In consequence, the majority of the marshal's prisoners, from the fifteenth century on, were persons committed, on a plaintiff's writ of capias ad satisfaciendum, for undischarged liabilities following a civil action for debt or similar - a procedure abolished for most purposes by the Debtors Act 1869. Other, more short-term, prisoners were on remand pending trial, either under King's Bench's local jurisdiction at first instance or on transfer of their cases from inferior courts. Thus, by the eighteenth century, the King's Bench Prison had long been one of London's largest prisons for debtors. It lay on the north side of Borough Road in Southwark, not far from the Marshalsea Prison.

By the Queen's Prison Act 1842 the Fleet and Marshalsea Prisons were abolished and the Queen's (King's) Bench Prison was re-named the 'Queen's Prison' and appointed the only prison for debtors, bankrupts, and other persons who might lawfully have been imprisoned in any one of the three prisons.

The Queen's Prison was itself abolished by the Queen's Prison Discontinuance Act, 1862 and the prison building was used thereafter as a military prison.