Blacks

The Blacks were groups of local men in southern England who used blackened faces to conceal their identities while resisting encroachments on customary rights. Their nighttime raids were not simply criminal disorder: in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, they became a popular response to Whig elites’ efforts to enclose land and restrict common use. The government answered with the severe Black Act, but the attempt to enforce it also revealed that elites were subject to legal constraints they could not simply override.

Identity and Methods

The name referred to groups of local men who blackened their faces at night. Their actions included killing deer and other animals, burning haystacks and barns, and damaging fences and fish ponds. The range of targets could look like wanton destruction, but the book places it in a longer conflict over access to land and resources: illegal hunting in royal and aristocratic estates had long occurred, and the entire deer population at Windsor Castle had been killed during the Civil War in the 1640s. After the monarchy’s restoration in 1660, Charles II restocked the park. The later raids therefore belonged to a recurring struggle over who could use enclosed estates, rather than standing apart as isolated acts of lawlessness.

The Blacks’ resistance took place in a political order reshaped by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Parliament contained a plurality of interests, and merchants, industrialists, gentry, and aristocrats who supported William of Orange and the Hanoverian monarchs could not individually impose their will. Yet the new order did not guarantee that common people’s rights would be respected. The Whigs, who dominated Parliament from 1714 to 1760, gained power while remaining constrained by competing groups, including the Tory Party, and by the institutions established to prevent a return to absolutism. The Blacks represented a further pressure from outside formal parliamentary representation: their raids answered what they saw as the Whigs’ exploitation of power.

Enclosure and Resistance

The estate of William Cadogan illustrates the material stakes of the conflict. A successful general and influential member of the Regency Council of Lords Justices, Cadogan acquired about a thousand acres at Caversham, roughly twenty miles west of Windsor. He built a grand house and gardens and laid out a 240-acre deer park. The expansion came at the expense of people living nearby: residents were evicted, and customary rights to graze animals and gather peat and firewood were withdrawn.

The Blacks retaliated against Cadogan’s estate. Mounted and armed groups raided the park on January 1, 1722, and again in July; the first raid killed sixteen deer. Cadogan was not the only powerful landowner targeted. The attacks on estates belonging to other notable landowners and politicians show that the resistance addressed a wider pattern of encroachment, not merely a personal quarrel with one owner.

The same conflict reached Richmond Park, southwest of London. The park had been created from common land by Charles I, and local residents retained practices of grazing animals, hunting hares and rabbits, and collecting firewood, even though their rights had been curtailed. Enforcement was initially lax. That changed when Robert Walpole arranged for his son to become park ranger: the park was closed off, a new wall was built, and man traps were installed. Walpole, who liked deer hunting and had a lodge at Houghton within the park, thereby became another figure associated with the tightening of access and the resentment it provoked.

The Black Act and the Limits of Enforcement

In May 1723, Parliament responded to the raids with the Black Act, creating fifty new offenses punishable by hanging. The law criminalized carrying weapons and even appearing with a blackened face; it was soon amended so that blacking itself could be punished by hanging. The Whig government pursued enforcement energetically. Baptist Nunn established a network of informers in Windsor Forest, and several people were arrested. For the powerful figures affected by the raids, the act appeared to offer a direct means of suppressing resistance.

John Huntridge’s prosecution tested whether that apparent power could be exercised without constraint. On November 10, 1724, Huntridge, a local resident outside Richmond Park, was accused of helping deer stealers and aiding known Blacks, offenses carrying the threat of execution. The prosecution came from the Regency Council of Lords Justices, dominated by Walpole and Cadogan. Walpole himself obtained evidence of Huntridge’s guilt from an informant, Richard Blackburn. Despite the strength of the political forces behind the case, a trial lasting eight or nine hours ended in acquittal, partly because of irregularities in the collection of evidence.

Huntridge’s acquittal was remarkable not because repression stopped, but because the prosecution failed despite the alignment of law and powerful interests against him. The jury consisted of major landowners and members of the gentry, people expected to sympathize with Walpole, rather than Huntridge’s peers. Other defendants were acquitted or had their sentences commuted, but many were hanged or transported to North America. The Black Act remained on the statute books until 1824, so the legal response outlasted the immediate raids.

Political Significance

The conflict exposed the difference between rule by law and the rule of law. Parliament could pass a harsh statute aimed at obstacles to Whig interests, but the statute’s existence did not ensure that every prosecution would succeed. The procedural defects in Huntridge’s case mattered: the law could not simply be used at the government’s discretion when legal process was open to challenge. In this respect, the outcome differed from the earlier Stuart era, when the Court of Star Chamber could serve as an instrument of repression and monarchs could remove judges whose decisions displeased them.

The Blacks’ significance in the account is therefore political as well as social. Their raids arose from the loss of customary access to land and resources; the government’s answer sought to criminalize both their methods and their disguise. Yet the Black Act’s uneven enforcement and Huntridge’s acquittal showed that the political changes associated with the Glorious Revolution had created restraints extending beyond Parliament’s formal representatives. Common people’s resistance met coercive law, while the rule of law limited how far that law could be applied selectively or arbitrarily.