In 1777 was published, at a low price to ensure wide circulation, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. It was a Domesday book for gaols, a comprehensive survey of custodial institutions in the British Isles and well beyond. There had been published accounts of English prisons before. In the late sixteenth century John Stow had included those of London in his Survey, and reports had been published on the Marshalsea and the Fleet. But there was nothing like this. It took longer to compile than the Conqueror's audit, but it was done not at royal command and by an army of civil servants but by one tireless, middle-aged, and middle-ranking landowner of modest means traversing the country on horseback and in all weather, visiting and revisiting innumerable carceral institutions, gathering a wealth of facts, and writing up his findings and recommendations in a massive volume. He dedicated his great work of benevolence to the members of the House of Commons in gratitude for their encouragement. They, in turn, were duly grateful to him for his extraordinary endeavours.

And extraordinary they were, not only in their extent and detail, but in that they had been undertaken at all.