‘Bygones’ at the York Castle Museum

The York Castle Museum, despite its name, is located not in a castle but in a pair of former prisons built largely of stone salvaged from the former Norman castle that once occupied its site.

Given its identity as a social history museum, one focused on how people lived and worked and connected, perhaps the location is not ironic. At any rate, I knew this would be an unusual museum before I arrived, just from learning its  original name, “Dr. Kirk’s Collection of Bygones.”

Mechanical tableaus and a torture show hint at ‘old-time amusements’

And that is what it was. Dr John Lamplugh Kirk, a physician and amateur archaeologist in North Yorkshire, had amassed a vast collection of objects ‘relating to the study of Social History,’ and advertised for a town or society willing to give the collection a home.

York was the winner, and the city bought the Female Prison to house it. Expansion over the years has seen the museum grow into the former Debtors Prison as well.

The heart of the museum, the living successor of the Collection of Bygones, is Kirkgate, a reconstruction of a late Victorian street lined with shops and other businesses. Some are only show windows, but many can be entered for a better view of the curiosities and mysteries inside.

Note the Temperance Cocoa Room below. It was in York in the 1650s that the Society of Friends, the Quakers, began. Quakers founded three of Britain’s great chocolate companies—Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry’s—in part because they believed cocoa was an ethical alternative to alcohol.

Printers’ samples on display in Kirkgate’s book shop; aside from the fanciful artwork, the text is worth a look.

Kirkgate is the relatively respectable part of town; behind it in a series of back streets and alleys, there’s a left-over cell or two, and an example of slum dwellings.

Another major exhibit, away from Kirkgate, compares and contrasts the lives of four different families. The first two are from the mid-1800s, but represent two quite different classes of society. An upcoming lady of the upper middle class is concerned whether her home has too many decorations and laments that she is only able to afford one young servant.

At roughly the same era, a woman living on the rural moorlands describes life with her farmer husband and three children in their one-room dwelling. She feels fortunate to have enough to get by, but worries that their way of life is threatened by urbanization and industrialization.

Stepping back a couple of generations and a few rungs up on the social ladder, a Georgian lady of quality is concerned about keeping up with neighbors who are building a new house, but is pleased to be getting new and stylish furniture and a new ‘tasteful’ paint job and a ‘lovely little harpsichord.’

And another few generations back, a wealthy lady notes the Civil Wars of the 17th century and comments on social change: meals are no longer shared at a common table with the servants, modern fireplaces are appearing and for the wealthy, decoration is becoming quite extravagant, though the funiture is still quite simple.

Leaping ahead in time, the museum has an exhibit called 1914: When World Changed Forever. It’s an intriguing thought—World War I certainly did change the world forever… but so have many other eras, including others chronicled at the York Castle Museum.

Look closely at the map of Europe to see the nations shown as animals

And that certainly includes another era represented by one of the current exhibits, The Sixties.

You might wonder why this clearly-older pub, the King William Hotel, is part of the 1960s exhibit. And the answer is, after a run of a couple of centuries on a street in York, it was picked apart, packed up and moved to the Museum—in The Sixties!

The York Castle Museum has even more to offer, as well as changing temporary exhibitions. It’s a reasonable walk from the center of York, along streets that are themselves worth a look!