SOME time in 1838, the family of a young York man applied to the York Poor Law Union for help.

Thomas Hughes was 28, his wife Frances 26. They had three children: William, aged five, John, aged two, and baby Thomas, aged just five weeks.

No occupation is given for the elder Thomas in the York Union’s large register of those who had asked for poor relief.

But his address is listed as “House of Correction” – which gives you probably all the clues you need. A terse entry by a clerk in another column of the register confirms it. “The Husband in the House of Correction (gaol) and the wife not able to support the family,” it reads.

We don’t know why Thomas was in prison. But we do know that his wife and young family, who lived in Palmer Lane, Hungate, were trying to survive on the two shillings a week Frances was able to earn sewing gloves.

It wasn’t enough. In their generosity, the Board of Guardians of the York Poor Law Union saw fit to award the family the sum of six shillings a week in poor relief – the money to be paid for one month only.

We can only try to imagine what life was like for young Mrs Hughes. She’d no doubt been wearing her fingers to the bone sewing gloves for the rich in an attempt to make ends meet. We can imagine the squalid room in Hungate where she lived with her three children; the shame she felt at having to apply for poor relief; the mixture of relief and anxiety when she received the small amount of money awarded to her. As to what happened to her and her family afterwards ... the records don’t say.

Slum children in a Victorian alley in York in the 1890s

You only have to look at surviving photos showing the children of the old York slums to know what terrible poverty once existed in York. More than 60 years after Mrs Hughes turned to the York Poor Law Union for help, the Quaker philanthropist Seebohm Rowntree found that more than a quarter of the city’s people were still living below the poverty line – which he effectively defined as having enough income to feed a family without family members’ “physical efficiency” being sacrificed.

Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study of City Life published in 1901 makes for powerful reading.

Nothing, however, brings home the extent of poverty and desperation in York in Victorian times quite as much as a trawl through the York Poor Law Union archives, kept at York Explore central library.

In 1838, the same year that Thomas Hughes applied for help, a young woman from Clifton named Elizabeth Rogers sought relief for herself and her one-week-old baby son John. Elizabeth was 27, and her occupation was given as “servant”. A clerk had written a note in the register explaining why she had applied for relief. “Wholly disabled in childbed”, the note said. “Not able to support her bastard child.”

Elizabeth was a servant, so it doesn’t require much imagination to guess how she might have come to be pregnant, says Julie-Ann Vickers, the archivist who was recently appointed to bring order to York’s poor law archives. Elizabeth was awarded 4s and 6d, payable for a month, in relief.

The courtyard of St William's College in the 1880s. The college was used as tenements for York's poor

Then there was Ann Nevison. She was just two years old, and described in the register only as a “bastard” – ie illegitimate. She was described as living with her mother, who wasn’t even named. It is hard to make out in the register how much she was awarded, because the handwriting isn’t clear – but it looks as though it could have been 1s 6d.

So much misery and hardship. And if anything, for York’s poor, things were about to get even worse.

In 1834, a new act was passed – the Poor Law Amendment Act. Until then, poor relief had been administered at parish level, using money that came from ratepayers who were eligible to pay “poor rates”. It was an idiosyncratic system, but it meant that most of the Victorian poor were given “out-relief” and allowed to remain in their own homes.

York did have a workhouse, in Marygate – but it was small and overcrowded and many of York’s poor were given out-relief instead.

The Poor Law Amendment Act sought to change all that. It aimed to ensure that poor people were housed in workhouses, where they would be clothed and fed but would have to work to support themselves.

Work began on building a new workhouse in York, in Huntington Road. And it wasn’t intended to be a pleasant place.

“The workhouse was supposed to be a deterrent,” says Julie-Ann. “It was supposed to stop the ‘undeserving poor’ applying for relief.”

Archivist Julie-Ann Vickers examining the poor law and workhouse records at York Explore

York’s new workhouse, which was administered by the York Poor Law Union, was completed in 1849. It wasn’t a place that anyone wanted to end up in, says Julie-Ann. Families were separated, women from men, parents from children. Residents were given a bath and a medical examination when they first arrived, and a uniform to wear, which must have been like a badge of shame.

They were housed in large wards – and their lives would have been bleak and hard. The food was basic – even 50 years later, when workhouse conditions had improved considerably, it consisted of bread, butter and tea for breakfast and supper, with a meal of bread, vegetables or potatoes and a bit of boiled beef or mutton (or fish on Fridays) at midday. And it would have been the same day in, day out, says Julie-Ann.

The day began early, and the able-bodied were put to work: the men breaking stone perhaps, the women picking oakum (untwisting old rope, so that the fibres could be used for caulking ships).

Living under such a regime, people quickly became institutionalised.

But at least there was an infirmary. And gradually, over the years, the workhouse evolved into a slightly more humane institution.

It employed a trained nurse to look after residents’ health and by the end of the 19th century it was an institution that took in these who were unable to look after themselves: the old, the sick and the disabled who had no family to support them, as well as unmarried mothers and those unable to find work.

In those later years, the workhouse actually did some good, Julie-Ann says. “It really saved a lot of people from complete destitution.”

Even so, it must have been a pretty grim place. The register of deaths at the York workhouse for 1897 reads like a roll-call of the dispossessed and hopeless. Three-year-old Walter Dixon died in the workhouse on July 7 that year from “tubercular disease”. A month later, Charles Henry Dixon passed away there aged just two months, from what a clerk described as “deficient vitality”. We don’t know whether Charles and Walter were brothers – but they were both from St Margaret’s parish, so it seems quite probable.

Cirrhosis of the liver – presumably caused by drinking too much cheap alcohol – was a common cause of death, as were conditions such as “softening of the brain” and “effusion of the brain”. In the case of 87-year-old Hannah Flint from St Wilfrid’s parish, meanwhile, the cause of death was given simply as “lunacy”.

What might have been meant by that? “Probably dementia or Alzheimer’s,” says Julie-Ann.

To have ended up in the workhouse, Hannah must have had no living relatives – or at least, none who wanted to take responsibility for her. “There’s a strong possibility that she would have outlived the rest of the family,” Julie-Ann says.

Hannah’s final days scarcely bear thinking about: alone, confused, frightened and possibly straitjacketed, in an institution in which everyone would have seemed a stranger.

Seebohm Rowntree’s pioneering work on poverty a few years later is often said to have led to the eventual development of the welfare state and the NHS. York’s poor law union and workhouse records remind us of what life was like without them.

65 yards of files to be preserved

Julie-Ann Vickers has been appointed by Explore York on a two-year contract to catalogue the city’s health and poor law archives, with the help of a £156,560 grant from global health charity Wellcome.

Her job will involve cataloguing, assessing and preserving the city’s extensive archive of poor law, workhouse, housing and health archives. More than 1,400 volumes of registers and 65 yards of files will be assessed and preserved.

Many of the workhouse and poor law records, which were once stored in poor conditions at the workhouse itself, have suffered from mould, damp and insects. Because they are in such poor condition, only small parts of this archive are ever used. The ultimate aim of the project is to make them more accessible.

That’s important, says city archivist Victoria Hoyle. “These archives are among the most valuable 19th and 20th century documents in the city’s collection. “They contain information about many thousands of individual people who lived, worked and died here. Together with the archives of York’s hospitals ... they represent one of the richest case studies of the development of health and social care in England.”

They also shed light on the lives of the ancestors of many people living in York to this day. They were people who, in their own time, had no voice at all, says Julie-Ann Vickers. But at least, through these archives, their stories live on.