Cultural Practices

Fox-hunting
• A coveted preserve of the aristocracy.
• Punishment for the poaching of deer,
pheasants, partridges, rabbits and fishes.
• In 1723 the draconian Black Act made
poaching a capital offense: death penalty
or penal transportation.
• A struggle between an absolute right to
property insisted on by the aristocracy and
the landed gentry, on the one hand, and
the custormary rights to game, timber and
turf claimed by the forest-dwelling
peasantry on the other (Beirne, Piers
(2015) Hogarth’s Art of Animal Cruelty.
UK: Palgrave Macmillan)
Social historians highlighted the harsh
punishment of innocuous crimes such as
poaching—a perfect symbol of rural inequality in
the age of enclosure, which deprived the poor of
access to common land for pasture and fuel.
They created an image of vicious class conflict,
aggravated by rising capitalism: “The
commercial expansion, the enclosure
movement, the early years of the Industrial
Revolution—all took place within the shadow of
the gallows.”63 (Tombs:
Poaching
• Until the 20th century most poaching was
subsistence poaching—i.e., the taking of
game or fish by impoverished peasants to
augment a scanty diet. In medieval Europe
feudal landowners from the king
downward stringently enforced their
exclusive rights to hunt and fish on the
lands they owned, and poaching was a
serious crime (Encyclopaedia Britannica)