Abstract
Landlords divided society into themselves — qualified sportsmen — and everybody else — poachers to a man, or woman. Most English people were thus inclined not to regard poaching as a crime. Except for the organized, heavily armed poaching gangs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who poached exclusively for the blackmarket, poachers were not even thought to be ‘unmannerly’. The greatest field naturalists were often poachers. Poaching was a national pastime.
And I give you my word
That a sensitive bird —
A point for our foolish reproachers —
Prefers its career
To be stopped by a peer
And not by unmannerly poachers.
The Earl of Tantivy, in A. P. Herbert, Tantivy Towers: A Light Opera in Three Acts (1931)
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Notes
Teresa Michals, ‘“That Sole and Despotic Dominion”: Slaves, Wives, and Game in Blackstone’s Commentaries’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 27: 2 (Winter 1993–94), pp. 195–216; this passage p. 215, n. 34. Douglas Hay has uncovered in the parishes he studied as many as 15 times the number of ‘prosecutions in those parishes at Quarter Sessions and assizes, by all prosecutors, for all other thefts in the same years’ being brought by a single landowner for poaching; ‘Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase’, in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 189–253; this passage p. 251.
Rabbit skins had long been an important English export in the Levant trade. In the late sixteenth century, the ‘main exports to the Levant were kerseys, coloured cloths, tin and coney-skins, while the principal imports into England were spices, silks, drugs, cotton-wool and currants’; Sir Percival Griffiths, A Licence to Trade: The History of English Chartered Companies (London and Tonbridge: Ernest Benn, 1974), p. 46.
John Allen Stevenson, ‘Black George and the Black Act’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8: 3 (April 1996), pp. 355–82; this passage p. 360.
Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 206, 199–206.
Rosenthal, British Landscape Painting (Ithaca, NY and Oxford: Cornell University Press/Phaidon Press, 1982), p. 42.
Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 28–9.
Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993), p. 12.
Hayes, Gainsborough Paintings and Drawings (London: Phaidon, 1975), p. 203, n. 12.
Cormack, The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 46.
Buxton, A Botanical Guide to the Flowering Plants, Ferns, Mosses, and Algae, found indigenous Within Sixteen Miles Of Manchester, with some information as to their Agricultural, Medicinal, And Other Uses. Together with A Sketch Of The Author’s Life; And Remarks On The Geology Of The District (London: Longman and Co. and Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1849); James Cash, Where There’s a Will There’s a Way! or, Science in the Cottage: an account of the Labours Of Naturalists In Humble Life (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1873), pp. 77–89, 94–107;
Tom Stephenson, Forbidden Land (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 62–3.
Ian Niall, The Poacher’s Handbook (London and Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1950), Note.
Sir Francis Hill, in Georgian Lincoln (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 152, quotes Robert Bell as reporting that the oldest copy of this ballad he had seen was dated ‘about 1776’ and printed at York;
Bell, ed., Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (1862), p. 216. See also Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers, p. 63.
Landry, Muses of Resistance, pp. 273–80. For constraints on the production and reception of working-class autobiographies, see Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 41–54, 138–70.
Clare, Letter to [? Richard Newcomb], [early 1819] and Letter to Isaiah Knowles Holland [October? 1819] in Mark Storey, ed., The Letters of John Clare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 4, 15.
John E. Archer, By a Flash and a Scare: Incendiarism, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 255.
In a letter to James Augustus Hessey (Tuesday, 4 July 1820), Clare reported that he had been given ‘3 vols calld “Percys Relics”’, and ‘there is some sweet Poetry in them & I think it the most pleasing book I ever happend on’, Storey, ed., Letters, p. 82. On Percy’s influence, see Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
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© 2001 Donna Landry
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Landry, D. (2001). Game and the Poacher. In: The Invention of the Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_4
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