Caption for main photo: Landscape water colour of Hindon Madhouse circa 1830, showing it consisted of the main house plus a jumble of other buildings in a large walled enclosure.
Welcoming back David
Yay! David Aneurin Morgan is back with another one of his riveting history blogs. When David sends me an article, I am always reminded that we don’t need ghosts for weirdness in Wiltshire. Real life is sometimes just as strange. Without further ado, here it is; The Hindon Madhouse.
The Hindon Madhouse
Emma’s Weird Wiltshire posts deal with ghostly happenings in our villages but also include bizarre real-life things like the Salisbury Siamese Twins, which I hadn’t heard of. I hope the Hindon Madhouse is little-known enough to interest people.
Anybody driving into Salisbury from Wilton will have seen on the right a white building with a turret, in different stages of demolition. This is the old Fisherton House Asylum which opened in 1813 and treated the mentally ill of Victorian and Edwardian Salisbury. But a century before Fisherton there was this phenomenon unique to C18th England of small private madhouses like Hindon, tucked away in villages.
A sample patient – Farmer Noggs and his wild ride
We even have a letter about one of the Hindon patients. In 1818 the vicar of Mere wrote to the vicar of Over Whallup near Salisbury warning him to be on the alert for a mad farmer called Noggins who had been committed to Hindon for causing trouble in the neighbourhood and ranting at the clergy. His latest escapade is to jump on a horse and ride like a maniac to Salisbury and back for no reason.
But not a mini Bedlam
Our hearts sink at what it must have been like to be locked in one of these places. And even though insane asylums have now largely been demolished or stand empty, replaced by care in the community, we can still imagine the horror of being carted off to one, perhaps protesting our sanity. Even the sanest of us recognise how thin the line is that separates us and them.
We remember stories of Bedlam and the way patients who had lost their reason were treated like animals, chained up and filthy because they were seen as less than human. Hindon wouldn’t have been as bad as this.. The Lunacy Act of 1774 ensured regular inspections and there would have been a doctor on hand to bleed patients by cupping and to give enemas. A doctor-historian I’ve consulted says they wouldn’t have been drugged by laudanum like the liquid cosh we give prisoners and mental patients today, although chains would be used to keep them docile.
Where in Hindon was it?
By a stroke of luck, the building still exists in the Dene but you can be fooled at first by thinking it’s the house called Dene House surrounded by white chalk walls which look as if they’re meant to keep people in. It’s very much how I picture St Remy Asylum in the south of France where Van Gogh was taken. But it’s NOT this place. It’s the simple stone cottage next to the Village Hall and from plans of 1832 it may even have included more cottages in the row.. This is typical of the ordinary homes, often cottages, that were co-opted for housing mad people, not purpose built.
Searchers haven’t just been confused by Dene House looking as if it ought to be the asylum but even more so by the fact that it was known as ‘Fonthill Gifford Asylum’, even though it stood in Hindon. This had me fooled until I checked old maps and saw that in the C18th Fonthill Gifford parish stretched as far as the little stream at the bottom of the High St called the Dene, which marked the boundary with Hindon. Its position on the far bank put it just inside Fonthill Gifford parish. It only later began to be referred to as Hindon Madhouse and sometimes it even went by both names.
Kindly Mr Watts with his cards and singing birds
It was in existence as early as 1713 under a proprietor called Edward Watts who appears to have run a kindly regime where patients were allowed amusements like playing cards, singing birds and ‘playing the hand-organ or hurdy gurdy.’ There were no religious services but prayer books were provided. It is described as having a walled enclosure behind it with ‘cottages’ and other buildings used as day and sleeping rooms. There is no sign of the wall or the enclosure today and it has been divided up into gardens. The point of the ‘cottages’ must have been to keep the patients separate from the proprietor and his family. The prospectus for Hindon under Mr Watts states – ‘Patients will be restored by moral treatment, gentle discipline and order.’ No mention of chains.
Not so kindly Mrs Spencer with her chains
In 1736 Edward Watts died and his daughter Jane took over and announced ‘The Business is now continued in the same House where great care shall be taken of Lunaticks and Distempered Persons sent there at a very moderate price.’
But the kindly regime of her father seems to have given way to a tougher one under Jane and her husband Arthur Spencer. A Select Committee on Madhouses mentions Hindon under the Spencers as having ‘very poor conditions, ill-treatment and excessive use of chains and leg irons.’ The next proprietor is Joseph Frowd Spencer (their son?) who is recorded running it from 1790. There were 23 inmates, 15 men and 8 women Thereafter, the inspectors note a dwindling number, ending up with six to eight, and finally two. It seems to have closed by 1844.
Mr Squeers or Doctor Willis and the insane as a cottage industry
The fact that Hindon is recorded as being in existence as early as 1713 is astonishing and this is the picture across the country with towns like Salisbury not yet funding treatment for their insane, leaving a gap for these private ‘carers’ in the countryside to step in. But it would be unfair to say ‘cashing in’. Although they were run as family businesses, sometimes by madhouse versions of Mr Squeers, most proprietors were decent and humane. Many were qualified doctors and as proof their therapies worked, a madhouse proprietor, Dr Willis, was called to Windsor to cure George III and he figures in the film ‘The Madness of King George’. People who showed lunatic behaviour in the countryside before the early 1700s were sent to prisons or almshouses.
Would Mad Jack have ended up at Hindon?
The mad farmer was a typical patient but patients could have included the gentry. If our own Mad Jack Bennet of Pyt House, known for his pranks in the area, had been born a hundred years earlier, he might well have ended up at Hindon. For going mad wasn’t confined to country folk. Aristocratic families often contained a lunatic and we can imagine them arriving at the madhouse by coach, rather than being kept at home in the attic of a stately home like the Monster of Glamis.
Paupers – six shillings. Private – a guinea
However, judging by the bad reports, Hindon was pretty low on the scale. Its private patients would have consisted of farmers and small tradesmen but the Madhouse business model also included paupers. Admission processes were different for each With private patients, a family
member just wrote to the proprietor with details, requesting admission. Whereas paupers came under the Vagrancy Act which ordered that the mad must be sent to a place of care with a medical certificate, saving many from being mocked as the village idiot. Paupers cost the parish six shillings a week; private patients were charged a guinea and they outnumber the paupers by a ratio of three to one. Reports of ill-treatment usually relate to the paupers.
Some went by coach, some with PC Plod
Private patients would have been taken to the asylum by an attendant in a horse and trap, paupers would have been escorted by the parish constable – no doubt a terrifying figure and straitjackets could be used in both cases. There was no distinction like we have between voluntary and sectioned patients. Some would have gone quietly, knowing they were ill but others probably only after a struggle. The rules were laxer at Hindon for private patients because Mr Noggins seems to have been able to pop in and out and go on his wild rides to the consternation of the locality.
Madness and Melancholia
How mad was he and what form did madness at Hindon take? Just as there was no distinction between voluntary and sectioned, neither had anybody tried to divide madness into different shades like we do. People saw just two kinds – Melancholia and Mania. And these were the names of two grotesque statues on the gateposts of Bedlam in London. Those with mania, which was also called ‘raving madness’ would be chained, while those with melancholia were unchained and left to sit, remote from their surroundings. What doctors didn’t understand – as we do – was that melancholy and mania were just the downside and upside of the same illness – what we call manic depression.
Clearly, Mr Noggins was galloping to Salisbury and back on the up-swing of manic depression. His family were worried that he was ‘going through his property fast’ (their inheritance) which must have been why they committed him. But there were more extreme cases. John Parsons ‘late of Potterne’ e.g ‘has been kept chained as a madman for the last ten years. He is a Lunatick who is often outrageous and raving mad. He throws away his food and tears his clothes and is quite incapable of conducting business.’ A third case, sadder than either, concerns a woman patient ‘a daughter of Mr Barrett of Stourpaine, aged 40 who is lately returned from Hindon Asylum, incurable, who left her home some time in the night unknown to her friends and after walking on the bank, drowned herself in the river.’ A case of melancholia.
‘Doctor – I’m sane!’
These three clearly needed to be contained but mention of how some patients had to be taken by force raises the question of whether madhouses were used to get rid of a ‘difficult’ family member who wasn’t actually mad. Victorian novels are full of husbands getting rid of unwanted wives like this. Were there, we wonder, any poor souls at Hindon grabbing Mr Frowd Spencer’s arm saying, ‘Doctor, I’m sane.’
The pretend world of the asylum – the mad dress up as huntsmen and go hunting!
At Fisherton House social distinctions were observed and people dressed to show their rank and men and women were kept apart. The 1832 plans show they were also kept apart at Hindon with separate little airing courts for male and female and for ‘gentlemen’ and ‘paupers’, divided by gravel paths.
Records of the bigger madhouses show something very weird which may or may not have been true of Hindon. To help patients get over the shock of being taken away so abruptly from their old life, the asylum tried to copy it and be that world in miniature. For example pauper patients worked in the grounds as gardeners, ploughmen, thatchers and kitchen-hands, wearing smocks and acting as servants to the private patients. The ‘cottages’ at Hindon were probably just cabins but some of the bigger madhouses had little dwellings dotted about so private patients could pretend they still had houses. One madhouse pushed its pretend world to the point of surrealism by keeping a pack of beagles so that rich patients could still enjoy the hunt!
‘Tranquil but not cured yet’. Patients’ notes from the 1830s
Records of Hindon may be thin but I have found patients’ notes from the 1830s in the Wiltshire
Archives at Chippenham. They give us a fascinating glimpse over the doctor’s shoulder as he wrote them and they make a sad first impression. Next to their names we read – still of unsound mind…tranquil but not cured yet…died of apoplexy…incurable…absconded… But then, more cheerfully – much better…perfectly recovered…discharged cured…cured…cured…cured. And we come to the end feeling that we haven’t been given a glimpse into bedlam but into a place which may have been a bit second-rate but which could actually heal people. And with their canaries and cards and hurdy-gurdy, maybe patients weren’t always stuck in their private worlds but rubbed along together after a fashion.
Stand in the Dene in Hindon and listen
Strong emotion in the past is said to leave some imprint on the present and there can’t have been anywhere in a village likelier to do this than its madhouse. Perhaps even to produce some of Emma’s ghosts.
If we walked down Hindon High Street and stood in the Dene and listened in 1740, what would we have heard? Would there have been a continuous racket of people talking to themselves and shouting or a grim silence? Or against all the odds, even a normal-sounding noise like the buzz from a pub. We’ll never know. I’ve stood in the Dene in 2025 and listened and can’t pick up any vibes. But I do half-hear the occasional clink of a chain.
David Aneurin Morgan
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