There seemed to be high tides occurring during the night when the sleep duration was short," says Avery. He initially dismissed his hunch as lunacy. Even if the man’s mood cycles were in synch with the Moon, he had no mechanism to explain it, nor any ideas about what to do about it. The patient was prescribed drugs and light therapy to stabilise his mood and sleep, and eventually discharged. Avery slipped the man’s notes into the proverbial file drawer and closed it. While pauper lunatics were dealt with locally, the ‘care’ of idiots and lunatics who owned significantamounts of property was administered by the Crown, which also took charge of their property and possessions. The responsibility for this fell to the Lord Chancellor (although the Court of Wards took this over from 1540 to 1646), and those concerned were subsequently sometimes known as ‘Chancery lunatics’. The king was entitled to administer the lands of an idiot until he or she died, but of the lunatic only during periods of insanity. However, such land and possessions were not generally held directly in Crown hands, but granted to ‘committees’ for the term of the lunacy or idiocy. Committees were made up of those to whose care the lunatic or their estate was committed – possibly the next of kin. Until the 19th century the custody of ‘idiots’ and ‘lunatics’, as well as the ownership of their land and property, fell to the Crown. Before the establishment of lunatic asylums in the mid-19th century, pauper lunatics were dealt with locally under poor law, vagrancy law or criminal law. They were therefore likely to end up in workhouses, houses of correction or prisons.

The Scottish Record Office was the name given to the NRS before 1993. Inventories of records, from c.1580 (SRO1); Register House building and housekeeping records, from 1765 (SRO4); correspondence, from 1790 (SRO8); National Register of Archives (Scotland), from 1946 (SRO26). Criminal indictments (AD2-4) and precognitions (AD14-15, AD21) from 1797 (closed for 100 years); papers relating to legislation legal opinions and general Scottish government business, from 1798 (AD54-64); registers of sudden deaths, fatal accidents inquiries and accidents in mines, 1848-1987 (AD12, AD27).

Reports on the treatment of naval lunatics, 1812-1832, are in ADM 105/28. The musters of sea-going hospital ships can be found with the other musters in ADM 36 and ADM 37. 9. Chancery records: determining lunacy and administering the property of lunatics and idiots

Smith, Leonard D. Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-century England: Leicester University Press, 1999 He is now planning to test this in the context of root growth, by studying plants with mutated water channels to see if they have altered growth cycles. Search archived data from the Hospital Records Database by name or place of the hospital. The results will list the type of record (for example, administrative or clinical) available, the date ranges and their location. The database had not been updated since the 1990s and information on location of records may not be current. Search in PL 5 for records from Lancashire.About 1,000 affidavits supporting petitions for a lunacy commission are in C 217/55, dating from 1719 to 1733. They are not yet listed individually or indexed. In the early 1890s, Robert Percy Smith, resident physician of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, began to refer to humanitarian reasons for new legislation, particularly criticising legal certification and its inhumane effects. Footnote 84 Smith believed legal certification produced a psychologically deteriorating effect on patients and their relatives based on his experience at Bethlem. According to Smith, patients’ relatives would feel as though they had been ‘sentenced to something’ and ‘made a pauper lunatic’ when visiting a magistrate to gain his signature on the application for admission to the hospital. Footnote 85 This psychological distress had ‘added to the patients’ misery’. Footnote 86

Genealogical Value

The Bosnian Serb seizure in May 1995 of more than 300 international peacekeepers, including 33 British soldiers in Goradze and Visograd, alarmed Downing Street. Search, by date, MH 94 for admission registers of asylums and psychiatric hospitals. This series also contains diaries which contain further details on patients. A covering note by Roderic Lyne, Major’s principal private secretary, informed the prime minister: “What this tells us speculatively is that the French may have done some sort of a deal but we don’t know for sure and they are denying it.” In turn, Major added a handwritten comment: “possible … but I doubt it was as firm as a deal”.