Hard to find a place to stay in Montreal in the cold of winter? Here's a traditional solution to get free rent from the 1800s

 

 Bridget Maddigan (1846-1909) offers a lesson for those who seek a surefire method of avoiding paying rent for the cold winter months.

  Maddigan made the news many times over the decades in Montreal but her final mention also betrays the free rent strategy she employed before her violent, premature death on 27 December 1909.

   Maddigan's untraditional living arrangement offers an idea for cheap, free refuge that might be useful to some even to this day.

   In the summer Maddigan would live with acquaintances, usually a man named Timothy Riordan. 

    In the wintertime she'd live rent free, in local jails. 

   By 1909 she had been wintering behind bars for at least 15 years, years, after her husband died, according to a friend.

   Maddigan was born in Ireland and was a chronic visitor to Montreal jail cells from an early age, most usually for vagrancy, known then as the crime, or misdeameanor of being "loose, idle and disorderly." 

    Her court sentences are mentioned many times in Montreal newspapers, starting from 26 June 1860 when she pleaded guilty along with James Creamer and Marie Anne Sullivan, on charges not disclosed in the newspaper.  The next year, on 22 February, she and Elizbeth Hackett, Theresa Stanley and Mary Anne Delaney got 30 days for the loose idle and disorderly thing. She was sent back to jail for 10 days and three weeks later that year.  

  Her pattern continued through 1878 when she was busted for being drunk along with Ellen Crane, Anne Reddy, Zoe Page, Thomas Murphy, Ann Finn and Patrick Waddick and was sentenced to a pair of months for it on 9 February.

  Upon being released she was sent back in for another month for swearing in public on Beade Street, wherever that was. Three years later she got fined $13 for assaulting and breaking the window of a woman named Henderson.

   Maddigan had a pair of sons, Robert and David and was married to an Anglican.

  Anyway, Maddigan got beaten to death in a home on Farm Street between Wellington and St. Patrick. Farm Street is a now-disappeared street one west of Bridge.  

  The culprit was Timothy Riordan, 55, who kicked her in the head after getting irritated at her constant begging him for money for booze. Riordan had recently been forced to sell his oven to pay his bills. Riordan's daughter was also living in the home with her tiny infant who slept in a pile of rags.

   Riordan ended up killing Maddigan by knocking her to the floor and kicking her in the head.

  Her body was found outside on the street by a young neighbor and police quickly arrested Riordan. He was tried and a judge found him insane a few months later. He was sent to the Longue Pointe insane asylum, now known as the Louis Hippolite Lafontaine hospital. 

   So anyway, staying in jail probably isn't a great way to solve your housing issues but if you opt to go that route, be comforted knowing that you won't be the first to try that strategy.