We are close to Christmas, a time when we’d like to think that there was goodwill to all men, women and children. It wasn’t always so. Back in Victorian times poverty was just about a crime. Such help as was given was, just about a punishment of inprisonment, away from friends and family, with inadequate food and a tiny cell as a room. This was space in ‘The Workhouse’.

At one time Market Lavington had a workhouse of its own, run by the parish. Such older workhouses may have been bad but they were not the forbidding institutions that were the union workhouses.  From 1834 parishes were grouped into unions and an imposing building was erected to serve all of the parishes in the union. For Market Lavington, the union workhouse was in Devizes.

Pregnancy, particularly unplanned, out of wedlock pregnancy was often a cause of poverty. If a pregnant woman was unable to work and had nobody else to support her, then her only option for survival was to go to the workhouse. This was often a life sentence – a short life sentence – for undernourished women expecting a child often failed to survive. But some did and babies were born at the workhouse. Sadly these innocent babes often failed to survive as well.

Here we see a list of Market Lavington mothers – or rather of their children, born in the Devizes Union Workhouse.

Just to get an idea of scale at any one time, here are the Market Lavington born inmates on census day, 1881.

That’s 19 people from the Market Lavingrton area. That represents almost 2% of the population.

Here’s hoping our readers will enjoy a happy Christmas, not shut away due to poverty.