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A sponging-house (more formally: a lock-up house) was a place of temporary confinement for debtors in the United Kingdom.
If a borrower defaulted on repaying a debt, a creditor could lay a complaint with the sheriff. The sheriff sent his bailiffs or to arrest the debtor and to take him to the local sponging-house. This was not a debtors' prison as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. Debtors would be held there temporarily in the hope that they could make some arrangement with creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his 1857 novel The Three Clerks:
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. They could be much feared,
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. In the sponging-house, 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. Scottish English has the verb to spung, meaning to rob. The English-language term spunging-house dates from at least 1699.
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