Bonny Moor Hen

Abstract

Chapter 2 looks at poor men’s hunting. Poor men went hunting too, only their masters call it poaching and, under the game laws, they could transport you for it. This chapter starts with events in the northern Pennines between 1797 and 1822 when poachers went toe to toe with game keepers over the right to take ‘The Bonny Moor Hen’. The Bishop of Durham and a conglomerate of landowners claimed the red grouse for themselves and built up an army of keepers to defend their right. Local people saw it the other way. Up on the moors, opinions seemed not to apply either way. It was more a question of what you could take and who you could defy. Chapter 2 includes the so-called ‘Battle of Stanhope’ recorded in song and story. There were two such battles in Weardale, one in October 1818 and the other in the December, when leadminers rescued comrades after a gun battles with the constables. The whole of the county magistracy were up in arms over these humiliations, literally so, and called in the Hussars. Leadminers thought they lived in a land of liberty and took game accordingly. Landowners thought the same. The chapter considers how eighteenth-century sporting art featured horses and hounds and parkland not simply as ‘pictures of record’ but ideal expression of the landed class’ right to possess and command.