Lancaster Castle: the Rebuilding of the County Gaol and Courts

Contrebis 2019 v37 LANCASTER CASTLE: THE REBUILDING OF THE COUNTY GAOL AND COURTS John Champness Abstract This paper details the building and rebuilding of Lancaster Castle in the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth centuries to expand and improve the prison facilities there. Most of the present buildings in the Castle date from a major scheme of extending the County Gaol, undertaken in the last years of the eighteenth century. The principal architect was Thomas Harrison, who had come to Lancaster in 1782 after winning the competition to design Skerton Bridge (Champness 2005, 16). The scheme arose from concern about the unsatisfactory state of the Gaol which was largely unchanged from the medieval Castle (Figure 1). Figure 1. Plan of Lancaster Castle taken from Mackreth’s map of Lancaster, 1778 People had good reasons for their concern, because life in Georgian gaols was somewhat disorganised. The major reason lay in how the role of gaols had been expanded over the years in response to changing pressures. County gaols had originally been established in the Middle Ages to provide short-term accommodation for only two groups of people – those awaiting trial at the twice- yearly Assizes, and convicted criminals who were waiting for their sentences to be carried out, by hanging or transportation to an overseas colony. From the late-seventeenth century, these people were joined by debtors. These were men and women with cash-flow problems, who could avoid formal bankruptcy by forfeiting their freedom until their finances improved. During the mid- eighteenth century, numbers were further increased by the imprisonment of ‘felons’, that is, convicted criminals who had not been sentenced to death, but could not be punished in a local prison or transported. Transportation of prisoners to the USA ceased in the 1770s with that country’s independence but resumed in 1788 to Australia (Hughes 1987, 1, 41). Probably the worst feature of Georgian county gaols, by modern standards but also by those of thinking people then, was that little attempt was made to segregate prisoners according to their category: men were often 39 Contrebis 2019 v37 imprisoned with women, and convicted criminals with debtors and people awaiting trial. However, the prison reformer, John Howard, did note that male and female felons at Lancaster had separate day rooms and sleeping quarters (Howard 1777, 436). Responsibility for the good order of a county gaol lay with the High Sheriff, but the County’s magistrates also had the right to inspect the premises. As members of the gentry, they were almost all humane men, but they had few ideas about what steps to take. Little progress was made until a remarkable man, John Howard, the ‘patron saint’ to this day of penal reform, appeared on the scene (Champness 1993, 22–3). He was a Bedfordshire magistrate and, after he had been made High Sheriff for the county in 1773, he was shocked by the conditions in Bedford Gaol. He then began at his own expense to study the problems and to find solutions. He persuaded Parliament to pass two Acts in 1774, which laid down that prisoners must be segregated according to their sex and category, that they should have communal day rooms but single cells for sleeping, and that sanitation and ventilation should also be improved (Webb and Webb 1922, 38). Howard (1777) published a book called The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, and thereafter spent several months of each year visiting and revisiting prisons in England and on the Continent, to encourage every authority to adopt the standards of the best. He literally worked himself to death, dying in 1790 of typhus caught while visiting a Russian prison (Morgan 2004). An Act of Parliament in 1784 allowed the Justices of the Peace (JPs) ‘to rebuild and repair’ county gaols. A serious outbreak of typhus in 1783, which killed the Keeper of Lancaster’s gaol, had already led the Lancashire magistrates to set up a Committee to carry out improvements there and the minutes of its proceedings provide a detailed record of building activities at the Castle over the succeeding decades (Lancashire Archives QAL/1/1). The name of Thomas Harrison did not appear in its official records until 3 October 1786, although it is clear that he had been involved in meetings in 1784 and 1785 (Ockrim 1988, 74–5). Figure 2 Painting by Freebairn (1800) representing the Courtyard of Lancaster Castle before the works undertaken in the 1790s. (Champness 1993, 12: Lancaster City Museums) There was no overall plan for the development of a new county gaol in Lancaster Castle. Harrison produced plans piecemeal, firstly in July 1787 and then in July 1788 (Champness 2005, 27). None of these plans has survived, and indications of the progress of the building work in the records are 40 Contrebis 2019 v37 sparse. His planning was tightly constrained by the existence on a fairly small site of substantial remains of the walls and towers of the medieval Castle between which he had to build (Fig. 2). It can, however, be seen what Harrison designed on the plan (Fig. 3), printed in Clark’s Account of Lancaster (Clark 1807, 16–17). Figure 3 Plan of Lancaster Castle (after Clark 1807) showing Harrison’s buildings: Male Felons’ cells (top); Debtors’ Arcade, Crown Court and Shire Hall (left). (Champness 1993, 31; Lancashire County Library) Like every architect of his day, he preferred to design in the Classical idiom, using motifs derived from the buildings of Greece and Rome: but since all his new works were going to be placed between medieval buildings, he proposed to use what were then called ‘Gothick’ motifs, at least in the main façades, like battlements and pointed windows. The first example of modern gothic in England was Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, of the mid-eighteenth century (McCarthy 1987, 1– 2, 63–91). Gothic was adopted in Lancaster mainly to blend with the nearby buildings, but there may also have been a wish to allude to the medieval origins of the English legal system. Construction began in 1788 and the first building to be finished, in 1789, was the four-storey Keeper’s House, which stands to the north east of the Gatehouse (bottom right on Fig. 3). Its basic form was a tower with a flat face to the outside, pointed windows and a semi-octagonal front to the courtyard, so the Keeper could see something of life in the gaol. This was the model for all the prison buildings Harrison was to design at Lancaster. Next, in 1792, came the Female Felons’ Prison (Champness 1993, 27), which was built immediately to the west of the Gatehouse (Fig. 3, bottom) to comply with the law of 1774 by separating the women prisoners from the men. It 41 Contrebis 2019 v37 roughly matches the façade of the Keeper’s House, to make a symmetrical group around the Gatehouse. At much the same time, south of the Keep (Fig. 3), an attractive arcade was built (Fig. 4) to give some shelter for the debtors, who were allowed to wander around the courtyard. Two storeys of further accommodation for debtors were built above this arcade, and also a workshop block in front to the east of the Keep. Figure 4 Lancaster Castle Courtyard as drawn in 1824 by James Weetman, a Liverpool merchant imprisoned for debt. Left of the Keep (centre) is Harrison’s debtors’ wing and the Female Penitentiary, and to the right of the Keep the four-storey towers containing the Male Felons’ sleeping cells and the two-storey Turnkey’s Lodge. (Champness 1993, 26; Lancaster City Museum) These works had been built within the walls of the medieval Castle, but Harrison’s plans for a further programme of major works could not start until the medieval castle wall, north of the Keep, (see Fig. 1, top) had been demolished and a more extensive area had been enclosed by a new high wall. This allowed the enclosure of the roughly semi-circular site of the Male Felons’ Prison (Fig. 3, top), which is divided fan-wise into four triangular exercise courtyards, separated by walls radiating from a central point, where stood the two-storey Turnkey’s Lodge, from which one warder could see everything. This work was finished in 1796 (Champness 1993, 27). Standing between each pair of courtyards, two broad, four-storey towers were built; they can be seen from outside, rising above the walls. On each side they have barred Gothic windows, but these light the corridors, not the cells. These cells were used only at night, when convicted prisoners slept alone. They have iron doors, which could be barred and locked, with a barred ventilation opening above them. Such accommodation was typical of what was then regarded as the best practice. Solitary confinement at night was not a dreamed-after privilege but the norm. It aimed to encourage a convicted felon to examine his conscience in the hope that he would come to feel the need for repentance and reformation (Howard 1777, 43). As work progressed on the County Gaol, the authorities thought that it would be fitting to replace the Crown Court (then in the medieval Hall) and also the Shire Hall (then in the Keep), presumably, 42 Contrebis 2019 v37 to make them worthy of the County Palatine of Lancaster with its royal connections. Before new court buildings could be erected, however, land had to be bought beyond the castle ditch to the west and then surrounded by a high retaining wall to form a terrace (Fig. 1, left). It was not until 1796 that the Medieval Hall, which stood to the south-west of the Keep, was gutted.

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