poaching

poaching. The punishment for poaching in the king's forest in Norman times was severe: Richard I's assize of 1198 threatened deer-stealers with blinding and castration. Though the royal forests were exceptional, and savage punishments were relaxed, poaching, in its various forms, continued as a major irritant until rural society gave way to town life in the later 19th cent. G. M. Trevelyan wrote that ‘there never was a truce in the poaching war’. One of the earliest poems, The Parlement of the Thre Ages (c.1350), begins with a magnificent account of the shooting of a hart with a crossbow at night. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was one of the first insurrections in which demands for the relaxation or abolition of the game laws were made. In the jittery period that followed, Parliament complained (1389) that servants and labourers absented themselves from church to go hunting with dogs in ‘parks, warrens and coneyries’, and enacted that the right to hunt should be restricted to owners of property worth at least 40 shillings a year. Although in popular mythology the poacher is a solitary operator, organized gangs made an early appearance. Having just won the battle of Bosworth (1485) Henry VII was called upon by his Parliament to tackle the problem of malefactors in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex who ‘in great number, some with painted faces, some with visors’ roamed the woods at night. Such behaviour was declared a felony. During the civil wars of the 17th cent., the relaxation of law and order gave poachers much freedom and after the Restoration, in 1671, there was an effort to tighten up. Game was reserved for freeholders of property worth £100 p.a., copyholders worth £150, and the son and heir of esquires and above: these persons could hunt over other people's land and appoint gamekeepers with right to search. In a desperate attempt to reduce poaching, an Act of 1755 totally forbade the sale of game, which led to a thriving black market. At the same time, improvements in guns prompted landowners to breed game in greater numbers. Poaching was then no longer a question of pinching rabbits from a common or trout from a stream but organized attacks upon private property. The poaching war of the later 18th and early 19th cents. saw bloody affrays, with the landowners defending their game with spring-guns and man-traps. Blackwood's Magazine wrote in 1827 that there was ‘a war raging against the aristocracy’, and poaching was an important element in the Swing riots of 1830. Even in the midst of the reform crisis, Parliament found time to legislate. The Game Reform Act of 1831 repealed 27 previous acts, declared a close season for hunting, allowed tenants to hunt and shoot on their own land, and introduced a system of certificates which gave permission to kill game, subject to the law of trespass. But any improvement in relations was temporary, for further improvements in guns led to vast battues, in which 1,000 birds might be shot in one day. Breeding enough birds became a large industry and the crops consumed by the birds caused bitter resentment. Confrontation between gamekeepers and poachers continued. But after the Great War the ruling class was less keen on mass slaughter and poaching became incidental rather than endemic.

J. A. Cannon