The Marshalsea was a prison in London, used in the past. People were sent there when they could not pay what they owed — a debtors’ prison, not mainly a place for thieves in the way we imagine prisons now. It stood on the south side of the river, in Southwark. Charles Dickens knew it in a hard way: his own father was locked up there, and later Dickens set a large part of his novel Little Dorrit inside it. The building is gone; it closed in the 1800s. The name looks as if it had the word sea in it, but it does not mean the sea. It comes from marshal — an officer of the king — plus an old English word for a seat, the place where that officer sat and judged. You will almost only meet this word in history or in Dickens.

馬夏爾西監獄（舊時倫敦關欠債人的監獄）