Baptist Nunn

Baptist Nunn was a keeper of Windsor Forest who became a target of the Blacks, local men who concealed their faces and resisted the loss of customary rights around aristocratic estates. His diary records their threats and his agreement to pay them; later, he organized informers to identify them. Nunn’s role connects a specific conflict in the forest to the Whig government’s broader attempt to suppress blacking through the Black Act.

Keeper in Windsor Forest

In 1722, Windsor Castle stood amid a great forest, once full of deer. Nunn was one of its keepers. The forest’s deer and the rights exercised by people living around aristocratic estates were both at the center of conflict: poaching had a long history, but the Blacks also damaged property, and landowners’ efforts to control their estates curtailed local people’s traditional uses of the land.

Threats and a payment

Nunn’s diary entry for June 27 records that men known as the Blacks came at night, shot at his chamber window, and that he agreed to pay them five guineas at Crowthorne on June 30. Another entry describes a fresh surprise involving someone disguised with a message of destruction. The diary presents Nunn not simply as an observer of the disorder but as someone directly threatened and drawn into its demands.

Informers and the Black Act

In May 1723, Parliament passed the Black Act, creating fifty new offenses punishable by hanging. Among them were carrying weapons and having a blackened face; the law was soon amended so that blacking itself could be punished by hanging. The Whig authorities pursued the law forcefully, and Nunn set up a network of informers in Windsor Forest to discover the Blacks’ identities. Several men were soon arrested. His intelligence-gathering placed him on the enforcement side of a conflict in which the government sought to defend powerful landowners’ interests against local resistance.

A conflict over rights

The Blacks’ actions arose in a landscape where access to customary resources was being restricted. At Windsor, the conflict was part of a wider pattern: estates and parks were reshaped to serve elite landowners, while residents lost established rights. Nunn’s account gives the confrontation an immediate, personal dimension, while his later work with informers shows how the state’s response turned local resistance into a matter for severe criminal law. The evidence records Nunn’s involvement in identifying suspects, but does not specify what ultimately happened to him or to the men arrested through his network.