Enclosure and the Game
Laws
Squatters and cottages
with their curls of smoke
Drifting from a new roof
before dawn’s first light
('Door shut, hearth lit
and smoke coming from the chimney)',
Were hated by 18th
century agricultural 'improvers',
Just as the common lands
were hated by them too:
'Nests of sloth, idleness
... Hovels ...
Materials purloined from adjacent woods...
Idle, useless and
disorderly people',
As Charles Vancouver so
succinctly put it.
Be that as it may, for
many of the labouring class
The choice was whether to
remain a low paid pauper,
Or augment a poor family
diet as a poacher,
As enclosure and the game
laws pauperised,
And criminalised the
agricultural working class.
Even Arthur Young, such
an enthusiast of enclosure,
Thought 'that by nineteen
in twenty enclosure bills,
they are injured, in some
grossly'.
No wonder John Clare's
pen wrote that
'Enclosure came and
trampled on the grave
Of labour's rights, and
left the poor a slave.'
Thomas Hood wrote of Home
Counties’ poachers,
And their errant, but successful, ways,
But our local version runs thus:
‘Each
field is wandered inch by inch,
But when the keepers were
near Stroud,
He poached and trespassed
up near Minch -
His footfall never loud,
And when he went to
Stroud, alas!
They often came to
Horsley;
And even Avening used to
wish
That
he would leave quite shortly.’
So what of Stroudwater
and its hills and valleys?
Did the collectivism of
an industrial workforce
Mean that individual acts of
poaching were the norm?
A sort of rural anachronism?
Or did the traditions of
food and wage riots by weavers
Mean that our locality
saw organised, collective acts of poaching?
There is no reason not to
think so, a priori.
The Berkeley Vale is only
just down the road,
And we have seen what
happened there in 1815 and 1816;
The Captain Swing riots
kicked off in the county, too,
So Gloucestershire
doesn't appear to be that deferential -
Were there poaching wars
here?
'Pheasant versus
Peasant?'
We just don’t
know.
There is research needed.
Collective research.
This is an unwritten
story.
William Cobbett, 1823: ' The ill-blood created
by these game laws is beyond the power of description. There are no bounds to
it. The heart-burning is incessant ...' 'The sight of so many hundreds of Englishmen
dragged to prison, and so many thousands of women and children reduced to
pauperism ... The transporting or hanging of their husbands, sons, brothers and
friends ... '
Lord Byron, 1823: '
For what were all these country patriots born?
To hunt, and vote, and
raise the price of corn.'
The Annals of Sporting, 1828,
reporting about Gloucestershire and other nearby counties: 'a man who is even suspected of being a poacher is
treated as an outlaw... '
John Bright: ' tens of thousands of
the peasantry have been sent to gaol, and hundreds of them have been
transported ... and scores have been sacrificed that game might thrive…’
The
first three verses of Robert Burns’ ‘Westlin Winds’
Now westlin winds and slaughtering
guns
Bring autumn's pleasant weather,
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather,
Now waving grain, wild o'er the plain
Delights the weary farmer,
And the moon shines bright as I rove at night
To muse upon my charmer.
The partridge loves the fruitful fells,
The plover loves the mountains,
The woodcock haunts the lonely dells,
The soaring hern the fountains,
Through lofty groves the cushat roves,
The path of man to shun it,
The hazel bush o'erhangs the thrush,
The spreading thorn the linnet.
Thus every kind their pleasure find,
The savage and the tender,
Some social join and leagues combine,
Some solitary wander,
Avaunt away! The cruel sway,
Tyrannic man's dominion,
The sportsman's joy, the murdering cry,
The fluttering gory pinion.
