York Castle Prison is a really exciting new project that has been taking up a lot of our time. We’ve just made our plans public (see this Yorkshire Post Article).
The idea is based on the fact that the Castle Museum building is an incredibly interesting historic monument in its own right. This has been a bit obscured in the past by the desire to display as much of the huge and wonderful museum collection as possible.
But, from July 17, the whole of the ground floor of the 18th century Debtors’ Prison (pictured) will be given over to telling the story of the site. And it is a truly revealing, and sometimes terribly moving, tale.
The project team has been lucky enough to have first sight of the material that the project researcher, Katherine, has discovered. All sorts of unexpected facts about the building have come to light, but for me it’s the stories of the individual prisoners and prison staff that really have most impact.
To give just one example, there is the case of William Petyt, a poor weaver who was imprisoned in the Castle at the same time as his mother, Ann. He went into the prison only for owing money, something most of us can empathise with, but he never came out. Defending his mothers’ honour, William got into a nasty scrap with the jailer and was held in an underground dungeon for 11 days as a punishment, dying a few days later. The jailer was accused but acquitted of murder; ironically his own circumstances later changed and he, himself, died as a debtor in the Castle Prison.
