Unlawful Hunting in England, 1500–1640

Abstract

Game poaching has its origins in that loveof hunting and fishing that is found in all rural societies.In medieval England, vasthunting reserves wereset aside for the king in the royal forests; woodstealing and offenses against the king's deerwere punished severely.' The harshness of the ForestLawwas mitigated during the thirteenthand fourteenth centuries, and poaching offensesthat occurred outsidethe royal forests came to betreated as trespasses in commonlawcourts. TheGreatPeasants' Revolt of 1381 provided the pretext for the first Game Law,enacted by Parliament in 1389-90 on the assumption that peasantsand laborers usedhunting partiesas a coverfor conspiracies to riseagainst their lords.' The English GameLaws,consisting of parliamentary statutesenactedduring the latefourteenth centurythrough the eighteenthcentury,graduallytransformed this most universal of sports into a crime. The GameCode further defined the takingof wild beasts and gameas an aristocratic privilege and declared deer parks, rabbit warrens, and fishponds to be privateproperty. Since theseenclosed gamereserves frequently encroached upon manorial wastes, woods, and commons and extinguished ancientrightsof usufruct, tenants and neighbors who had formerly exercised commonrightsor whose crops suffered damagefrom escaped deer and rabbits retaliated. Their variousforms of protest ranged from anti-enclosure riots to poaching.' The Game Lawsrestedupon two dubious assumptions. Thefirst assumption was that hunting, a common form of social intercourse and a persistent expression of culturein all societies,with its rites of passage and highly emotive bondsof fraternity, couldand ought; to be restricted to a privileged few. The second assumption was that deerand hare, which the English common law regarded as ferae naturaethings of pleasure rather than profit, and upon which no valuecould be placedin an indictmentat common law-scould bestolen. This legal absurdity was so apparent to lawyers that when they drafted statutesfor Parliament or framed indictments and informations in courts of law they understood that only the circumstances in which a deeror a hare was taken could be made a crime,not the act itself. Thus the GameLaws made crimes of huntingwithout a sufficient estate, huntingat nightor in disguise, breaking intoan enclosed park,or being in the possession of hunting weapons, nets,or hounds. In short, between the fourteenth centuryand the eighteenth century, Parliament made every conceivable circumstance in whichan unqualified person might hunta crime,"