Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:27:31.877Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Property Rights in Pheasants: Landlords, Farmers and the Game Laws, 1860–80

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

John Fisher
John Fisher
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The deference shown by English tenant farmers to their landlords was the despair of English radicals in the nineteenth century. This was especially the case for Cobden and Bright, the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League. As firm believers in Ricardo's theory of rent, according to which only landowners gained from the Corn Laws, they felt that tenant-farmers should have been the natural allies of the League. Unfortunately, they proved unable to convince farmers of this logic. Their attempts to drive a wedge between landlord and tenant remained unavailing – until 1845, when John Bright raised the question of the game laws in the Commons. The select committee that followed tapped a rich vein of farmer resentment and hostility, one that led nowhere at the time but remained to be exploited for the next forty years.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , October 2000 , pp. 165 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Munsche, P. B., Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 13Google Scholar; see also Kirby, C., ‘The English Game Law System’, American Historical Review, XXXVIII (1932), 240–42.Google Scholar

2. Trench, C. Chenevix, A History of Marksmanship (London, 1972), pp. 126–91Google Scholar; Ruffer, J.G., The Big Shots - Edwardian Shooting Parties (London, 1977).Google Scholar

3. Munsche, , Gentlemen and Poachers, pp. 113–15Google Scholar; McLynn, F., Crime and Punishment, in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 202–47Google Scholar; Jones, David, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1982), pp. 70–72.Google Scholar

4. Munsche, , Gentlemen and Poachers, p. 87Google Scholar; see also Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1846, IX, Select Committee on the Game Laws, Evidence, Qs.2473–689.

5. Hopkins, Harry, The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars 1760–1914 (London, 1985), passim.Google Scholar

6. Turner, E.S., Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform (London, 1950), p. 29.Google Scholar

7. Munsche, , Gentlemen and Poachers, p. 156Google Scholar. See also Howkins, Alun, ‘Economic Crime and Class Law: Poaching and the Game Laws, 1840–1880’, in Burman, S.B. and Harrell-Bond, B.E., eds., The Imposition of Law (London, 1979), pp. 276–7.Google Scholar

8. Hardcastle, J.A., ‘Game and the Game Laws’, Edinburgh Review, 134 (10, 1871), 402.Google Scholar

9. Hopkins, , Long Affray, p. 198.Google Scholar

10. ibid., pp. 234–7.

11. Field, 23rd March, 1861.

12. ibid., 14th April, 1860 and 6th April, 1861.

13. Rose, R.N., The Field 1853–1953 (London, 1953), pp. 11–15Google Scholar; Trench, C. Chevenix, The Poacher and the Squire: A History of Poaching and Game Preservation in England (London, 1967), pp. 156–9Google Scholar; Lever, Christopher, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Societies (London, 1992), pp. 53–4, 64–5.Google Scholar

14. Field, 17th, 24th and 31st March, 1860.

15. The Times, 2nd January, 1862.

16. See, for example, Hansard, CXLI (10th March, 1856), cc.2169–94; also Critchley, T.A., A History of Police in England and Wales (London, 1967), pp. 78–80, 117–18.Google Scholar

17. Hansard, CLXVII (24th June, 1862), cc. 975–80.

18. ibid., CLXVII (30th June, 1862), cc.1205–13; CLXVII1 (16th, 23rd and 28th July, 1862), cc. 376–99, 705–26 and 965–72.

19. Twenty years later, for example, Walter had substantially modified his views on landlord rights to game, as had The Times. See The Times, 29th May 1880 and Hansard, CCLIV (29th July, 1880), cc. 1802–06.

20. Itzkowitz, D.C., Peculiar Privilege — A Social History of English Foxhunting 1753–1885 (London, 1977), pp. 146–50.Google Scholar

21. Arch, Joseph, The Story of His Life, As Told by Himself (London, 1897), p. 198Google Scholar; see also his evidence to the Select Committee on the Game Laws, II, Qs.8384–93, in PP 1873; XIII; Hopkins, , Long Affray, pp. 214, 232–46.Google Scholar

22. Morton, J.C., Morton's Cyclopedia of Agriculture (London, 1855), Vol. I, p. 379.Google Scholar

23. Census of Great Britain 1851: Population Tables II, pp. lxxviii–lxxxi, in PP, 1852–3.

24. See, for example, Obelkevich, James, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 46–61Google Scholar, Mills, D.R., English Rural Communities (London, 1980)Google Scholar, and Davidoff, L. and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London, 1987), pp. 46–51 and 253–60.Google Scholar

25. See, for example, Archer, John, ‘Poaching Gangs and Violence: The Urban-Rural Divide in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999), 25–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Kirby, C., ‘The Attack on the English Game Laws in the Forties’, Journal of Modern History, IV (03, 1932), 30–33.Google Scholar

27. Mechi, J.J., Profitable Farming, being the Second Series of the Sayings and Doings of John Joseph Mechi (London, 1872), pp. 231–2Google Scholar. Mechi, a successful businessman turned owner-farmer, was attempting to reconcile his love of shooting with his advocacy of ‘high farming’. He went bankrupt in 1880.

28. ‘Lady Farmer’ [MrsCresswell, G.], Eighteen Years on a Sandringham Estate (London, 1887)Google Scholar and Watson, A.E.T., King Edward VII as a Sportsman (London, 1911).Google Scholar

29. SC on the Game Laws, 1846, Qs. 1665–78. Houghton farmed over 3,000 acres and was the agent on another 200,000 acres.

30. A recent Ministry of Agriculture study found that a single rabbit could destroy 1% of crop values over a hectare; Economist, 23rd May, 1998.

31. Thompson, M.L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), pp. 139–42Google Scholar and ‘Landowners and the Rural Community’, in Mingay, G.E. (ed.), The Victorian Countryside (London, 1981), pp. 459–65.Google Scholar

32. Field, 8th December, 1860.

33. SC on the Game Laws, 1846, Evidence, Qs. 7724–45; see also Kebbel, T.E., ‘Game and the Game Laws in England’, Quarterly Review, 160 (07, 1885), 221–22.Google Scholar

34. The same was true in North America. See Bellesiles, Michael, ‘The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760–1865’, The Journal of American History, 83 (09 1996), 438–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Jefferies, , The Amateur Poacher (London, 1879), pp. 111–12, 120–23, 143 and 156Google Scholar; Trench, , Poacher and the Squire, pp. 167–82Google Scholar; Kirby, , ‘Game Law System’, 245–6Google Scholar; Hopkins, , Long Affray, p. 235.Google Scholar

36. Thompson, , English Landed Society, pp. 139–42Google Scholar; Brander, M., Hunting and Shooting (London, 1971), pp. 117–19Google Scholar; Hopkins, , Long Affray, pp. 214, 248–50.Google Scholar

37. Mark Lane Express (MLE), 14th and 28th February, 1859; 16th and 23rd April 1860; Agricultural Gazette, 1st, 15th and 22nd August, 1859; Farmers' Magazine, 15 (February and March, 1859), 136–9, 246–7.

38. Hope, C., The Life of George Hope of Fenton Barns (Edinburgh, 1881), pp. 191–2.Google Scholar

39. Farmers' Magazine, 17 (April, 1860), 336–47.

40. MLE, 3rd and 17th February, 14th, 21st and 28th July, 20th and 27th October, 10th November, 1862.

41. The Retford Poor Law Board of Guardians attempted to mount a petition in mid-July but it was too late to be recorded; see Newark Advertiser, 23rd July, 1862.

42. MLE, 28th July, 1862.

43. MLE, 13th and 20th October, 17th November, 1862.

44. Field, 11th and 25th October, 15th November, 1862.

45. SC on the Game Laws, I, Evidence, 1873, Q5.6736–39.

46. See Fisher, J.R., Clare Sewell Read 1826–1905; A Farmers' Spokesman of the Late Nineteenth Century (Hull, 1975), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

47. Cowling, M., Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 225–33Google Scholar; Moore, D.C., The Politics of Deference (New York, 1977), pp. 383–9.Google Scholar

48. Hall, Sherwin, ‘The Great Cattle Plague of 1865’, British Veterinary Journal, 122 (1966), 259–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, for the reaction of farmers, see Fisher, John, ‘Professor Gamgee and the Farmers’, Veterinary History, NS, 1 (1979–1980), 47–63.Google ScholarPubMed

49. Matthews, A.H.H., Fifty Years of Agricultural Politics: A History of the Central Chamber of Agriculture (1915), pp. 1–9.Google Scholar

50. Carter, Ian, Farm Life in Northeast Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 68–9Google Scholar; SC on the Game Laws, 1873, Evidence, Qs. 6030–84; Field, 28th May, 4th and 25th June, 1870.

51. MLE, 17th May, 7th, 14th and 28th June, 8th, 15th and 29th November, 1869, and 31st January, 4th April, 2nd, 9th and 30th May 1870.

52. MLE, 14th June, 1869, 16th April, 1870.

53. Bell's Weekly Messenger, 10th April, 1871.

54. Report of the S.C. on the Game Laws, II, 1873, p. x.

55. For a seminal contribution, see John Stuart Mill's review of Leslie's, T.E. CliffeLand Systems and Industrial Economies of Ireland, England and Continental Countries (London, 1870)Google Scholar, in ‘Professor Leslie on the land question’, Fortnightly Review, VII (June, 1870), 641–154.

56. Hopkins, , Long Affray, pp. 254–7Google Scholar; Field, 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th June, 1871.

57. Hansard, CCV (19th April, 1871), cc. 1370–73; Read to Disraeli, 20th November, 1872, Hughenden Mss. BXX1IR/47.

58. Fisher, JR., ‘The Farmers' Alliance: An Agricultural Protest Movement of the 1880's’, Agricultural History Review, 26 (1978), 17.Google Scholar

59. Annual Register, 1880, 28.

60. Hansard, CCLI (2nd March, 1880), c.209.

61. The Times, 20th March, 1880.

62. Fisher, , ‘Farmers' Alliance’, 17–19Google Scholar; see also Lloyd, T., The Election of 1880 (Oxford, 1968), pp. 150–51.Google Scholar

63. Fletcher, Allan, ‘Game Laws in the 19th Century: A case study from Clwyd’, Local Historian, 26 (08 1996).Google Scholar

64. Fisher, , ‘Farmers' Alliance’, 22.Google Scholar

65. Gladstone, Herbert, After Thirty Years (London, 1928), p. 176.Google Scholar

66. Southgate, D., The Passing of the Whigs (London, 1962), pp. 368–9.Google Scholar

67. Ruffer, , Big ShotsGoogle Scholar; Sutherland, D., The Mad Hatters: Great Sporting Eccentrics of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1987), pp. 198–9Google Scholar; Tranter, N., Sport, Economy and Society in Britain 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68. Shooting Times, 7th December 1895.

69. Jones, D., Crime, Protest, p. 62Google Scholar; Trench, , Poacher and Squire, pp. 163–71Google Scholar; also Watson, John (ed.), Confessions of a Poacher (London, 1890)Google Scholar, and Haggard, Lilian, ed., I Walked By Night: Being the Life and History of the King of the Norfolk Poachers. Written by Himself (London, 1935).Google Scholar

70. Field, 25th June, 1870, 25th February, 15th and 22nd April, 1871 26th July and 18th October, 1873.

71. Sheail, J., Rabbits and their History (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 144–52, 171–73.Google Scholar

72. Parker, J. Oxley, The Oxley Parker Papers: from the Letters and Diaries of an Essex Family of Land Agents in the Nineteenth Century (Colchester, 1964), pp. 40–43.Google Scholar