Village Lock-up - Rise of The Village Lock-up

Rise of The Village Lock-up

The majority of surviving village lock-ups date from the 18th and 19th centuries when rural communities struggled to police thefts, burglaries, shootings, drunkenness, the obstruction of watchmen and the stealing of livestock. During this period a number of lock-ups were built as a temporary place of detention for local rogues and miscreants until they could be removed to a town. Over time they became synonymous with drunkenness and many references to this coupling can be found in famous works of literature, including Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, and The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby by Charles Kingsley which contains the following line:

'Put him in the round house till he gets sober.’

An 1830 description of a lock-up in Taunton describes:

'. . . a hole into which drunken and bleeding men were thrust and allowed to remain until the following day when the constable with his staff of office take the poor, crippled and dirty wretches before a magistrate, followed by half the boys and idle fellows of the town.’

Some lock-ups also had stocks, ducking stools, pillories, or pinfolds alongside them and the origins of the 18th century village lock-up evolved from much earlier examples of holding cells and devices.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, refers to a round-house as a place of detention for arrested persons and dates its first written usage to 1589.

In 1281 a structure similar to a common village lock-up (the Tun) was erected in Cornhill, central London. It was a two-storey barrel shaped design and had a single cell on each floor.