Black hunters’ fight in Whig forests

Press, 21 August 1976, Page 15

Black hunters’ fight in Whig forests

Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. By E. P. Thompson. Allen Lane. 313 pp. N.Z. price $18.45. (Reviewed by John Wilson) England’s “Black Act” of 1723 did not acquire its nickname because of its savagery, although an act which prescribed the death penalty for many new offences, like stealing deer at night in disguise or draining fish ponds, could well be described as “black” for this reason. The act was so called because the people against whom it was directed were known at the time as "Blacks.” In this exhaustive study of the act, its origins and enforcement, the British social historian, E. P. Thompson, describes "blacking” as “attacks on deer by groups of men, mounted, armed and in disguise” in

forests in southern England where kings, nobles and court-favoured gentry had exclusive hunting rights.

The Blacks broke the surface of political history only with the Black Act itself. It has taken skilful historical research, using patchy and deficient sources, to establish who the Blacks were, what exactly they did, and why they did it. They turn out not to have been disorganised criminals of the lowest social orders or Jacobite conspirators but often substantial people who lived in or near the various forests and who enjoyed customary rights to cut turf, take timber, gravel and sand, graze their animals and secure certain amounts of timber and firing from the forests. They were people whose livelihood depended on access to these varied products of the forest. Their various “criminal” actions —

continuing to exercise their customary rights, taking deer in disguise and sb on — were directed against the owners of great estates on the borders of or embracing the forests, and their lackeys, the various sorts of keeper, who were attempting to abridge these customary rights. “Blacking” was a “response to the attempted reactivation of a relaxed forest authority,” made by minor gentry yeoman, artisans and labourers. The aim was to defend customary rights and privileges against encroachments (particularly the extension of exclusive hunting parks) which threatened their crops and their economy.

“Blacking” was at a peak in the early 17205, but He passing of the Black Act in 1723 did not bring peace to the forests, and the skirmishes appear to have continued throughout the eighteenth century. The act was repealed in 1823, but even by then it had not fallen into desuetude, and its repeal was resisted.

In his work, Mr Thompson also deals with the “Whigs” — those in the ascendant who were tightening the economic screw on the foresters — and with their activities not only at the forest level but also at Westminster, and in the various courts in which the provisions of the Black Act were enforced. Those familiar with Mr Thompson's earlier major work. “The Making of the English Working Class” will recognise similar themes. Just as traditional craftsmen and artisans were “squeezed” down into the working class by new capitalist industrialists, so the foresters in “Whigs and Hunters” are found to be in a squeeze created by those who want to supersede a complicated system of use

rights with the absolute control of property which is a distinguishing feature of capitalism. Mr Thompson is a self-admitted Marxist and his book is underpinned by assumptions which are hostile to capitalism in this early guise of great Whig landowners. But he is too good a historian to make the facts subservient to the ideology, and “Whigs and Hunters” cannot be dismissed as a Marxist polemic. He makes a powerful case, by discovering and marshalling indisputable facts, that capitalism in this guise was a brutal, unsympathetic thing.

"Whigs and Hunters” is a convincing demonstration that much historical research has yet to be done before a complete picture of the past has been painted. The murky substratum in which the lives of common men are led is hard to penetrate, but Mr Thompson has managed to do so, in part because his Marxist convictions gave him a knife with which to cut into the surviving records.

Such work requires, too, a reexamination of the received account of "national political" history. When Mr Thompson climbs back out of the depths of the forests to the heights of national politics, the “Whigs” of Walpole's age appear a decidedly more unsavoury lot than they do in many historical works.

Early eighteenth century society appears to be much less secure, and much less firmly bound by conservatism and deference than some historians have led us to believe. Class insubordination was much more frequent and spirited than the calm appearance of English life, seen from the great houses and from London, suggests.