Deer

In early eighteenth-century England, Deer stood at the center of a political conflict over who could use land and who could make the rules. Protected as royal and aristocratic game, they were hunted by local people whose customary access to forests and commons was increasingly restricted. The raids against deer parks helped trigger the Black Act of 1723, a sweeping law that made numerous offenses punishable by hanging; the subsequent prosecution of John Huntridge showed that even powerful Whigs could not always impose that law at will.

Deer in the royal forest

Windsor Castle, west of London, was once surrounded by a great forest full of Deer. In 1722, Baptist Nunn, a keeper of the forest, recorded that men known as the Blacks had come at night and fired at his chamber window; he noted an agreement to pay them five guineas at Crowthorne. A separate diary entry described a fresh surprise involving a disguised visitor and a message of destruction. Deer were not the only targets of the Blacks, but their presence in the forest helps explain why the animals became part of a wider campaign against restrictions on local people.

The forest had already experienced a sharp reversal in its treatment of Deer. During the English Civil War of the 1640s, its entire population of Deer was killed. After the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came to the throne, the park was restocked. The return of the animals restored a prized feature of royal land, but it also renewed the stakes of protecting game in places where local residents had long hunted and gathered resources.

Game, customary rights, and resistance

Poaching Deer on land belonging to the king or aristocracy had been occurring for a long time. The Blacks, whose name referred to local men blackening their faces to conceal themselves at night, went further than hunting for food: their raids also involved damage to property and other animals. The account frames that destruction not as lawlessness without purpose but as a response to perceived Whig encroachment on common people’s rights. Deer became one conspicuous part of a struggle over access to land, rather than merely the object of a dispute about hunting.

William Cadogan’s estate at Caversham illustrates the conflict. A successful general who had been elevated to the peerage by George I, Cadogan acquired about a thousand acres roughly twenty miles west of Windsor, built a grand house and gardens, and laid out a 240-acre Deer park. Consolidating the property had displaced people and ended their traditional rights to graze animals and collect peat and firewood. The Blacks raided the park on January 1, 1722, and again in July; the first raid killed sixteen Deer. Attacks on other prominent landowners’ estates show that Cadogan’s case belonged to a wider pattern.

Deer parks and political power

The same tension appeared at Richmond Park, where Robert Walpole had an interest. The park had been created from common land by Charles I, and its establishment had encroached on residents’ customary rights to graze animals, hunt hares and rabbits, and gather firewood. Those activities continued while enforcement was lax. The balance shifted after Walpole arranged for his son to become ranger: the park was closed, a new wall built, and man traps installed. Walpole’s interest in hunting Deer and his lodge at Houghton connected the management of the park directly to elite use of land and game.

The Whig response to resistance was legislative as well as physical. In May 1723, Parliament passed the Black Act, which created fifty new capital offenses. Carrying weapons and blackening one’s face became crimes, and the law was soon amended to make blacking punishable by hanging. Nunn organized informers in Windsor Forest, and several people were arrested. The government’s response was forceful because the raids challenged estates and interests held by powerful Whigs, including Cadogan and Walpole; the fate of Deer was bound up with the effort to enforce those interests.

The limits of enforcement

In November 1724, John Huntridge, a resident outside Richmond Park, was accused of aiding Deer stealers and helping known Blacks. His prosecution was initiated by the Regency Council of Lords Justices, dominated by Walpole and Cadogan, and Walpole personally sought evidence from an informant. Yet after a trial lasting eight or nine hours, a jury acquitted Huntridge, in part because of irregularities in the collection of evidence. The case demonstrated that the Black Act’s existence did not guarantee that every prosecution would succeed.

Huntridge’s acquittal was unusual against a broader record in which many Blacks or their sympathizers were hanged or transported to North America, though some others were acquitted or had their convictions commuted. The Black Act remained on the statute books until its repeal in 1824. Its long life and harsh penalties show the severity of the conflict; the failed prosecution, meanwhile, revealed a constraint on the Whig government. The book treats the episode as evidence that the rule of law could require elites as well as nonelites to abide by legal process. Deer, prized as game and protected within enclosed estates, thus became a focal point in a larger contest over property, customary rights, and the limits of political power.