Living by Rapine & Plunder

Abstract

The Game Laws protecting landowners’ sporting quarry from poachers were strictly enforced by armies of gamekeepers. Two poaching incidents involving the same family on the Earl of Ailesbury’s Wiltshire estate are described on the basis of unusual evidence, one in the 1780s and the other in the 1810s. In the first case, the Earl’s corrupt agent used circumstantial reports to secure a conviction against a small farmer but this was overturned when another man confessed. The laws were savage but judges still paid attention to legal form when giving judgement. In the second case, a gang of unemployed young men (the same farmer’s sons) were transported to Australia, less because of the verdict against them than because members of the local elite wished to rid the district of them.