Kavercham

Caversham matters in the account as the setting of William Cadogan’s estate, where the consolidation of elite property came at the expense of local customary rights. Raids on its deer park in 1722 made that conflict visible and contributed to a political response that criminalized resistance.

Cadogan’s estate

William Cadogan, a successful general in the War of the Spanish Succession and in the suppression of Jacobite revolts, acquired a property of about a thousand acres at Caversham, roughly twenty miles west of Windsor. He built a grand house and ornate gardens and established a 240-acre deer park. The estate’s scale and design signaled Cadogan’s standing, but its consolidation also altered the lives of people living around it.

Customary rights and dispossession

The expansion of Cadogan’s property involved evicting local people and abrogating their traditional rights to graze animals and collect peat and firewood. The conflict was therefore not simply over the park’s boundaries: it concerned access to resources and practices on which nearby residents had relied. The account places this loss within a wider pattern in which powerful landowners and politicians extended their estates at the expense of common rights.

Raids and political response

On January 1, 1722, and again in July, mounted and armed members of the group known as the Blacks raided Cadogan’s park. The first attack killed sixteen deer. Cadogan was not the only landowner targeted; estates belonging to other prominent politicians and landowners were also raided. These incidents connected the local dispute at Caversham to a broader protest against the encroachment of elite estates.

In May 1723, Parliament passed the Black Act, creating fifty new offenses punishable by hanging. Among its provisions, the Act criminalized carrying weapons and blackening one’s face; it was soon amended to make blacking punishable by hanging. The account presents the measure as the Whig government’s response to raids and to popular resistance against the curtailment of customary rights. Caversham thus anchors a larger tension: the government’s defense of property and political authority, and the claims of people whose established access to land and resources had been taken away.