The seasonality of nineteenth-century poaching

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Historians have generally explained the pronounced seasonal pattern of nineteenth-century poaching in economic terms, emphasising the apparent correlation between annual peaks in offending and cyclical periods of unemployment and poverty. There has been little acknowledgement of the role nature played in determining that most poaching activity occurred in the autumn and winter months. This paper will use evidence from case studies of salmon and game poaching in Victorian Cumberland, Westmorland and Suffolk to suggest that ecological and environmental factors played a fundamental part in shaping the annual pattern of offending. Poaching was a crime often linked to poverty, but its seasonal timing usually owed more to practical considerations concerning both the suitability of the natural environment for hunting and the availability, maturity and marketability of the quarry. Recent studies by Neeson and Freeman have used an interdisciplinary approach to bring nature into the foreground of rural social history in a fashion rarely encountered outside the texts of American environmental historiography. In Neeson's case the result is an essentially symbiotic portrait of the relationship which eighteenth and nineteenth century commoners had with the natural environment, while in Freeman's work this same group are cast as both victims and predators in a case study of the social consequences of long term ecological change in a woodland environment.1 Both studies demonstrate the relevance of White's dictum that 'physical nature does, at any given time, set limits on what is humanly possible', whether in terms of determining the viability of certain forms of social organisation as is Freeman's concern, or, as Neeson illustrates, by dictating the availability of natural resources throughout the seasons.2 The interplay between human activity and the natural world has, of course, long been recognized by historians examining seasonal patterns of marriage, work and leisure.3 But a proper understanding of how far nature determines the possible has been largely lacking from explanations of the periodicity of offences like poaching which involved the 'theft' of living natural resources. Indeed, as Freeman has argued, citing work on eighteenth-century forest This article stems from research funded by the ESRC and is an amended version of a paper given to the Social History Society's 1996 Winter Conference. I have benefited from comments made on that occasion and from the assistance of Mr S. R. Douglas of the Environmental Agency and of Mr M. D. Harrison of the Suffolk Record Office. I would also like to thank Dr J. E. Archer, Prof. J. K. Walton and Dr M. J. Winstanley for their consistently pertinent and constructive criticism. 1 J. M. Neeson, Commoners. Common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700-1820 (1993) and M. Freeman, 'Whichwood Forest, Oxfordshire. An episode in its recent environmental history', AgHR 45 (i997)> PP. 137-149. 2 R. White, 'American environmental history. The development of a new historical field', Pacific History Rev., 54 (1985)» P. 335AgHR 48, I, pp. 27-41 27 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.132 on Thu, 15 Sep 2016 05:53:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW communities by Thompson and others, all too often studies of poaching and other forms of rural crime appear to assume that the natural environments for offending were 'ecological constraints against which human agency operates'.4 There has certainly been little acknowledgement of the way in which nature may have determined the availability of those creatures which were the poachers' quarry and thus helped shape the pattern of offending. This discussion of the seasonal pattern of nineteenth-century poaching will suggest, however, that natural cycles often had a fundamental role in determining the times of the year at which this crime could occur. Poachers themselves may have had particular economic and social motivations to offend during certain periods, but an examination of poaching prosecutions from Cumberland, Westmorland and Suffolk suggests that factors relating to the availability, maturity and marketability of the quarry were often the key determinants of why offending exhibited such a marked seasonal pattern. Nature shaped the seasonal round of offending in different ways according to the fish, animal or game bird concerned, but in some way regulated the activity of all poachers, whether those who made all or a substantial part of their living from the crime, or casual offenders poaching occasionally for the pot. Traditional explanations of poaching's distinct seasonal character do of course acknowledge the role of natural cycles, but only in so much as they had an obvious impact on human economic activity. In the rural and arable south and east of England especially, where most of those prosecuted were agricultural labourers, historians have always considered it particularly significant that the majority of offences were committed between October and March, a period when outdoor labour was most prone to interruption, demand for farm labour was slackest and therefore poverty most acute.5 This marked seasonal pattern is seen as affirmation of the widely accepted link between poaching and the periodically acute underemployment and poverty that often characterized labouring life in the agrarian counties. Indeed seasonal peaks in poaching prosecutions largely mirror those Snell has identified in rural poor relief applications and have led historians to assume that the periodicity of the crime throughout the year was closely 'connected with the seasonal nature of employment'.6

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