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A sponging-house was a place of temporary confinement for debtors in the United Kingdom. If someone were to get into debt, their creditor would lay a complaint with the sheriff, the sheriff sent his bailiffs, and the debtor would be taken to the local sponging-house. This was not a debtors' prison, as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. The debtor would be held there temporarily in the hope that they could make some arrangement with the creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his novel ''The Three Clerks'' of 1857: If debtors could not sort matters out quickly, they were then taken before a court and transferred to a debtor's prison. Sponging-houses had a terrible reputation, which was made clear in a description by Montagu Williams, a London lawyer who knew them well, in his ''Down East and Up West'' of 1892: The idea of the sponging-house was based on that of the sponge that gave it its name, which readily gives up its contents on being squeezed. The sponging-house was the place where debtors had any available cash squeezed out of them, partly to the creditor's benefit, but also to that of the bailiff who ran it. In French, “''éponger une dette''” (sponge-up a debt) means to repay one’s debt. ==Notable sponging-house residents== *Henry Fielding – author *Michael Arne – composer *Theodore Edward Hook – author *George Morland – painter *John Murray – Universalist minister () * Gilbert Stuart - painter 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sponging-house」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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