Looking for our ancestors who led the lives of good citizens and followed trades and professions is hard enough, but trying to shine a torch into the dark corridors of prisons in British history presents a number of problems, not the least of which is the lack of coherent and reliable records. In the 1990s this situation was not helped by the fact that prison governors were given the option of destroying some categories of records or sending them to county record offices. Some – not all, thankfully – were perhaps not advised by historians regarding which papers to save.

Wars, fires, demolition and cavalier attitudes to documentation have all played their part in clouding the picture when we come to try an overview of prison records.

There is also an aspect of the subject that relates to the major narrative of penal history. This is the difficulty of finding and reading sources before the Georgian era. The medieval and early modern periods with regard to prison present a multiplicity of possible court processes and locations of custody. In addition, many records of the period are in Latin or in Old and Middle English of course.

But this does not mean that the task of finding an ancestor behind bars is impossible. There are some helpful guidelines to point the researcher in the right direction. When I undertook the work for my forthcoming book on the topic for the Pen and Sword genealogy series, I managed to find where the help lies in this context, and in this feature I have selected the core sources, both for records and for the prison lives of our ancestors who transgressed and became familiar with the inside of a prison cell.

Prison history essentials
British prison history may be summarised in four phases, and understanding this will help in taking a constructive overview of the research task.

Pre-Tudor
Finding prisoners means finding courts and trials. Our courts systems are confusing and complex. In the centuries after the Norman Conquest, courts could be run by manorial lords, bishops, deacons, the first of the king’s courts, and by the thirteenth century, by the travelling judges on the assize circuits. This means that sending someone to prison, for centuries, meant holding them to await trial. That could be a short time or it could be months.

The records of the various courts were written on rolls, and in Latin mostly. County record societies, over the years, have been busy translating some of these, and many are available online. A glance at some of these records will reveal that, for many years, a large proportion of the accused standing trial escaped prison sentences; the wealthy people mostly apply here, naturally. The king saw a good source of income in imposing fines rather than using prison as a punishment.

Tudor to Regency
In the 1550s came the bridewells, or houses of correction, beginning in the institution actually at Bridewell in London. These became basically a mix of factories of cheap labour mixed with a tranche of other offenders, from deserters and beggars to petty thieves. This was a state initiative; the church and manorial courts still continued as they were.

This means that slowly, and piecemeal, the bridewells across the land began to have more staff, and the staff had defined roles, from the governor down to the gatekeeper. But records of prisoners are rare, so we have to rely on the court records to find out about offences and sentences. The great prison reformer John Howard had a profound effect on penal matters when he published The State of the Prisons in 1777. This was the result of Howard’s extensive travels around England and Ireland, giving a documentary account of what he saw in the local gaols.

It was a mixed picture. Some gaols were run by local magistrates and some by the church. There were also many special courts created through these years (such as the Court of Star Chamber by Henry VII) and so the detective work has to be persistent.

The Regency and Victorian reforms
In the nineteenth century, the revolutions in prison came. The penitentiary had been conceived and so, by the 1870s, the whole prison system was rationalised and many local gaols were abandoned. Before then, in the 1820s, Sir Robert Peel had worked to have Gaol Acts passed, and these made many reforms.

For researchers, the significant time is in the mid-Victorian years, because documentation really began to be generated then. Prison governors and local magistrates had to provide detailed returns on prisoners’ lives, acts and monitoring. It was an age of statistics and prisons fell in line with so many other aspects of life.

By the last decades of the Victorian period, records proliferate, as the state began increasingly to control the prison system. By the early twentieth century, women prisoners were dealt with separately, following the early establishment of Holloway back in 1852.

The twentieth century
By the end of the nineteenth century, there had been marked development in the treatment of young offenders and of ‘criminal lunatics’ as they were called. Borstal had appeared, and then a number of special institutions for the custody of the mentally ill. All this reflected changes in the criminal law, of course, as various statutes in the first sixty years of the twentieth century reformed the nature of custodial sentences and of the concomitant court processes. The notion of having prison sentences include more educational and health factors came along, especially in Wormwood Scrubs, which had many initiatives in these areas.

Documentation proliferated of course, but for the historian there is the frustration of finding that so many records are closed for long periods. However, most county record offices and their archives have plenty of material in the categories of the mainstream records.

The standard records
The most reliable paper sources are the establishment records. This means criminal registers, prison returns and court records. The prison registers between 1770 and 1951 are formed by a massive collection of data, and these are from all kinds of prisons. The years covered comprise the changes in the prison establishment first of all in the late Regency legislation, and then in the radical revisions of 1877.

There are also the Home Office Prison records covering these years, along with specific records for the principal London prisons following Millbank in 1816. Then there are the county prison registers from the main cities and towns; the information is often substantial, particularly after the legislation of the 1860s.

The information in these registers is mainly concerned with the data required in order to identify a man (more important of course before the arrival of the ‘mugshot’ pictures). Hence a lot of attention is given to physical characteristics.

There are a number of versions of the document. A nominal register may have these headings: gender; weight; name; age; degree of education; trade; date of commitment; name of magistrate; offence; place where offence committed; where tried; sentence; where born; place of abode; marital status; whether they had children or not; required to do hard labour or otherwise; number of times in custody; date of discharge; other remarks.

The return of prisoners for 1878 in Lincoln has all this information and more. It also includes a list of punishments administered, and we know from this document that there were four punishments at that time: whipping; irons/cuffs; solitary or dark cell; and stoppage of diet.

The return of prisoners material has these headings, as it is a basic statistical document on the overall regime: number of separate cells; certified cells; punishment cells; average number of prisoners at one time; daily average in half year; number sentenced to hard labour in a year; number sick; deaths by natural causes; total sickness cases for year.

At the centre of all these categories is the calendar of prisoners. A typical crown calendar has entries on the names of prisoners dealt with; this example is from the calendar issued in 1801 at York:

JOHN NOBLE of North Cave, in the said Riding, Labourer, committed on the 18th day of April, 1801, for not obeying an order for the maintenance of a female bastard child, chargeable to the township of Beverley. Ordered to be imprisoned until delivered by due order of law.

Debtors
For centuries, debtors mixed with convicted prisoners. As is the same today, becoming deeply in debt through credit was very common. Once again, the tireless reformer John Howard provides us with some facts which are very enlightening in this context:

‘Debtors crowd the gaols (especially those in London) with their wives and children. There are often by these means, ten or twelve people in a Middle-sized room; increasing the danger of infection and corrupting the morals of children&helli; Yet the little probability there is of an industrious woman being of much service to her family in a prison; the number of men in the same room; and of lewd women admitted under the name of wives; proves that this affair needs some regulation&helli;’

Howard also points out that, in 1776, in five London prisons these were the numbers in common categories:

Debtors     1274
Felons, etc.    228
Petty Offenders 194
Total       1696

It is obvious that debtors behind bars were a problem.

Huge numbers of debtors filled the local gaols in the centuries before the nineteenth century reforms; once inside the prison, the debtor could most likely find him or herself stuck in a limbo in which the production of goods with value would be the only way out, apart from hard cash of course.

Transportation
Transportation presented a valuable opportunity for the criminal classes to be taken well away from Britain and there to work in the new colonies. An Act of 1717 stated ‘in many of His Majesty’s colonies and plantations in America there is a great want of servants who by their labour and industry might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to the nation’.

There was also the settlement of colonies by workers and families. A work by Benjamin Martin printed in 1744 put the matter clearly: ‘From a generous care and concern for mankind and a compassion for every distressed person&helli;The design of the settlement was to was to provide a place of refuge&helli;’ But influential thinkers and writers saw the value of forced transportation.

The option of transportation was always there, as a useful destination for lawyers to consider when it came to requests and pleading for pardon or for the saving of a condemned person’s life. James Boswell, the biographer, was also a lawyer, and in one long campaign in 1774 in which he tried desperately to save the life of a client called John Reid, he wrote to the Earl of Pembroke to ask for help. In his letter he wrote, ‘John Reid was my first client in criminal business when he was tried in 1766. I have therefore a particular concern in his fate and wish much that he should not be hanged&helli; It would therefore be happy if a transportation pardon could be obtained for him at once&helli;’ It didn’t work. Boswell lost his client. The man was hanged at the Edinburgh Grassmarket.

Later, after the loss of the American colonies in the American War of Independence, Britain lost the lands previously used as locations for convict labour, and so, after 1776, the system switched to Australia. In 1788 Botany Bay, near Sydney, was the new first destination, with other places being established later. The resulting developments were very important in the overall development of the British penal system. Estimated figures for transportation were given by the 1837 Report of the Select Committee on Transportation. That document stated that between 1787 and 1837, 75,200 convicts were transported to New South Wales. Soon after, between 1817 and 1837, 27, 729 were sent to Van Diemen’s Land, the modern Tasmania.

Conclusions
In this brief survey of the subject, it is clear that tracing prisoners is an onerous task, but it has to be said that research in criminal history has a special reward for our labours: transgression throw a light into some of the most intimate elements of past lives, as crime naturally deals with extremes of behaviour. The subject also enlightens many political and social contexts that wrap around our ancestors’ lives.