The Private Licensed Houses At Hook Norton And Witney

Oxfordshire provides a particularly good region in which to study the history of institutions for the insane in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because representive examples of all the various types of institution were contained within the county. There were the private licensed houses, at Hook Norton (c. 1725–1854) and at Witney (1823–57); a public subscription asylum, the Oxford Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1826; and, a county asylum, which was opened at Littlemore, near Oxford, in 1846. In addition, as was the practice throughout the country, lunatics were confined in workhouses, houses of correction and singly in their own homes or boarded out and, occasionally, criminal lunatics were confined in the gaols.