Windsor Castle, west of London, was not only a royal residence but also the center of a forest that became a site of conflict in the early eighteenth century. The attacks associated with the Blacks—local men who concealed their faces and resisted the management of aristocratic lands—made the surrounding landscape a stage for challenges to property and authority.

The Castle and Its Forest

In 1722 Windsor Castle stood within a great forest, then full of deer. Much of that woodland had disappeared by the time the account was written, but in the period described the forest was a royal resource and a place where access to game was contested. The keeper Baptist Nunn was responsible for the forest amid this conflict.

The history of the deer park had already been shaped by political upheaval. During the English Civil War in the 1640s, the entire deer population at Windsor Castle was killed. After the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II returned to the throne, the park was restocked. The renewed deer population thus represented not simply wildlife but the reassertion of royal and aristocratic control over the land.

The Blacks and the Forest Conflict

On June 27, 1722, Nunn recorded that men called Blacks had come at night, fired three times at him, and sent two bullets through his chamber window. He agreed to pay them five guineas at Crowthorne on June 30. Another diary entry described a fresh surprise: a disguised visitor had appeared with a message of destruction. These entries present the threat as organized intimidation, directed at the keeper personally and reinforced by demands for money.

The Blacks were groups of local men who blackened their faces to conceal their identities at night. They appeared widely across southern England, killing or maiming deer and other animals and damaging haystacks, barns, fences, and fish ponds. Poaching deer on royal or aristocratic land was longstanding, but the wider destruction went beyond taking game for food. The episode at Windsor therefore connected the immediate dispute over the forest to a broader pattern of resistance against elite control of land and its resources.

Political Context and Significance

The account places the forest conflict against a political settlement whose durability remained uncertain. The pluralistic distribution of interests represented in Parliament after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 meant that no single group of merchants, industrialists, gentry, or aristocrats could impose its will alone. The political order depended on an alliance among interests rather than the unchallenged command of one faction.

That settlement remained contested by supporters of the Stuart monarchy. After James II died in 1701, his son James Francis Edward Stuart, known as the Old Pretender, was recognized as the lawful heir by France, Spain, the pope, and English and Scottish Jacobites. His attempt to reclaim the throne with French support failed in 1708; major Jacobite revolts followed in 1715 and 1719, and his son Charles Edward Stuart led another failed attempt in 1745–46. The account does not identify the Blacks as Jacobites or establish a direct link between their actions and those revolts. Instead, Windsor’s forest conflict sits within a wider period in which royal authority, elite property, and the political settlement remained subject to challenge.