SK \ 
 
 505 
 
 B455p 
 
 BERKELEY
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 A PAMPHLET 
 
 DEFENCE 
 
 THE GAME LAWS, 
 
 In Ifoplg to tfje 
 
 THEIR EFFECTS UPON THE MORALS 
 OF THE POOR. 
 
 THE HONOURABLE 
 
 GRANTLEY FITZHARDINGE BERKELEY, M.P. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, 
 
 TATEKNOSTEE-BOW. 
 
 1845.
 
 LONDON : 
 
 Printed by A. SPOTTISWOODE, 
 New-Street- Square.
 
 IN these days it seems to have become the pecu- 
 liar province of some Members of Parliament, 
 and of men desirous to obtain a little brief noto- 
 riety, to seize upon one individual law, no matter 
 how good it may be, at which to run a tilt. It 
 is, then, the duty of less Quixotic people, and 
 of those free from this species of monomania, to 
 lift up their hand and voice against so dangerous 
 and prevalent a sin, and to endeavour to uphold 
 all institutions which " work well," against such 
 mischievous infraction. 
 
 I have frequently found it my duty to cry out 
 against attempted oppressions of the poor, whe- 
 ther those oppressions sought their reign, either 
 cloaked by a false desire for an undue character of 
 sanctity, as in the attempted refusal of a warm 
 dinner to the hungry labourer on the Sunday - 
 the only day he had the chance of eating it ; or, 
 on the other hand, by the refusal of fresh air by 
 steam conveyance, to the stifled and consumptive 
 mechanic and manufacturer. A little while ago 
 the Quixotes of a surface-founded sanctity broke 
 their erring and really uncharitable lances in a 
 
 A 2 
 
 3074867
 
 tilt against the harnessing of dogs ; risking, in 
 their shallow attempt to improve the public 
 morals, the addition to the Statute Book of one 
 of the most cruelly oppressive laws upon the un- 
 offending poor, and the most sanguinary upon 
 their useful and harmless dogs, that could by 
 any possibility be imagined. 
 
 On all former occasions I have advocated the 
 interests of the poor, and endeavoured, not un- 
 successfully, to uphold them in their rights, their 
 sports, and recreations. It seemed in those in- 
 stances that it mattered not to the self-sufficient 
 Quixote, whether the right to be run down and 
 trampled on was one of amusement, of food, or 
 healthful locomotion, all all was to be restricted 
 according to the whim of a false and domineering 
 sanctity. Now, I have to maintain the interests 
 of the rich and the poor; for, in the attaint 
 against the Game Laws at present in agitation, 
 the Lord, the Labourer, the Yeoman, and the 
 Squire are alike assailed. 
 
 The public have before them the motion of 
 Mr. Bright in the Commons' House of Parlia- 
 ment, and the returns he obtained of the number 
 of convictions under the Game Laws in a given 
 series of years. 
 
 On those returns in the forthcoming session 
 we may expect a further motion indeed we are 
 threatened with one. Now the Honourable 
 Member, who did not hesitate to denounce the
 
 yeomanry of England as cowards during the last 
 session, with a like " buttonless" argument, may 
 perhaps endeavour to show that, under the exist- 
 ing law, there is a visible increase of poaching ; 
 that the severity of punishment in particular 
 cases leads to murder ; that the people are for the 
 most part induced to this crime by the pressure 
 of distress, and that the maintenance of large 
 heads of game has a demoralising tendency. 
 
 I know these are the words in the mouth of 
 the assailant ; they are the only arguments of the 
 agitators which the reasoner can drive into a 
 corner and render tangible to his grasp, and as 
 such I lay hold upon them. 
 
 Now, as far as regarded the past motion of 
 Mr. Bright, I might very well content myself, for 
 an answer, with an addition to his measure, and 
 move for a return of convictions for other crimes ; 
 and, by such a step, prove that there was an in- 
 crease in all offences, but that it did not arise from 
 the impropriety or insufficiency of the peculiar 
 statutes intended for the suppression of delin- 
 quency, but by reason of the increase of popu- 
 lation ! The crime of poaching has not increased 
 in any greater extent than other crimes, and not 
 nearly so much as many others. 
 
 I am also prepared to show that, so far from 
 having a demoralising tendency, or of being inju- 
 rious to the welfare of the lower classes, the Game 
 Laws are founded on sound and rational prin- 
 
 A 3
 
 ciples, and have a beneficial effect in regard to the 
 Proprietor, the Tenant, the Yeoman, and the Poor ! 
 
 It is not my purpose to deal in theoretical dis- 
 cussion, or to assert conclusions on the truth of 
 which a disputant may raise a doubt ; that which 
 I herein state will be mere matter of fact, gathered 
 not from report or superficial observation, but 
 from the personal experience of a number of years 
 spent in the country, in the exercise of the law as 
 a game-preserver on my own lands, and in the 
 administration of the law, as a county magistrate, 
 over the estates of others. Having denied that 
 poaching has increased from any other cause than 
 the natural one of the increase of population I 
 have to deal with the affirmation, that the severity 
 of punishment awarded to a number of persons 
 found together and armed in the night-time for 
 the destruction of game, leads to the crime of 
 murder. 
 
 I may be permitted here to turn to other sta- 
 tutes, and invite the public attention as to how 
 far the mitigation of punishment has led to the 
 prevention of crime, where the experiment has 
 been tried. Has the abolition of the punishment 
 of death lessened the crime of forgery ? No. 
 Forgery has increased to a frightful extent. Has 
 the reluctance to visit murder with that unflinch- 
 ing severity, so honestly and religiously demanded 
 at the hands of man, lessened its perpetration ? 
 No. We have the fearful fact from the lips of a
 
 culprit who murdered his sergeant on parade, 
 when he found that death was to be awarded to 
 his crime, that had it not been from the obser- 
 vation he had made as to the rarity of the fact 
 and reluctance in government to carry out the 
 capital punishment, and the hope he therefore 
 imbibed that he should but be transported for 
 life, he would never have murdered his non-com- 
 missioned officer. 
 
 Has the misplaced humanity shown by govern- 
 ments of late, in regard to the most deliberate 
 murders, and attempts at murder, lessened the 
 deceitful adoption of the garb of monomania ? 
 No. If the crime of murder and attempt at 
 murder had been met, as it ever should be met, 
 with the heaviest sentence of the law, our streets 
 and thoroughfares would not have been made 
 the arena of attempts of that description, and 
 the tears of society would not have fallen for 
 Mr. Drummond. 
 
 The severity of punishment on persons banded 
 and armed at night for the destruction of game 
 does not produce murder rather than submission : 
 let us proceed to review the more probable, and 
 indeed in nine cases out of ten, the cause of its 
 origin. In almost all cases of poaching by night, 
 the inclination to murder arises from that curse 
 upon the morals of the lower orders, the beer 
 shop. Watch as I have watched, wade through 
 as I have waded through the evidence and occur- 
 
 A 4
 
 8 
 
 fences of years, and the conclusion will be, that 
 in cases when the rencontre with keepers has led 
 to a fatal result, the poachers had previously met 
 together in a beer shop or public house. Men 
 of the worst character, their brutal passions in- 
 flamed with drink, sally forth with the half in- 
 toxicated exclamation in their mouths of " Death 
 or glory ! " At the time of their going forth, de- 
 tection was uncertain, and the chance of capture 
 and consequent punishment was far from enter- 
 ing their elated minds. Inflamed with the beastly 
 drugs of the pothouse, and in the hope of being 
 shielded from observation by the obscurity of 
 night, the cowardly and brutal ruffian fires his 
 gun, without any very clear reason in his brain 
 as to the cause of his doing so, save in the hope 
 of injuring some honest man. The severity of 
 punishment consequent on capture no more 
 hastens the murderous grasp on the trigger than 
 it hastens the next year's snow ; the ruffian steals 
 forth in the dark, prompt and primed for any 
 violence^ murder stalking by his side a helpmate 
 to the pettiest theft, as well as to the serious 
 crime. 
 
 " What is the reason, then," asks the surface 
 observer, " why there are more murders in 
 poaching cases by night than there are by day ? 
 Does it not arise from the difference in the grade 
 of punishment ? " 
 
 It does not arise from the difference in the punish-
 
 ment by which the heavier and the lighter crimes 
 are met ; it arises as well from the beer shop, as 
 the obvious facts that fire-arms are far less fre- 
 quently used in poaching in the day, by the lower 
 order of depredators, than they are by night, and 
 if they are used, it is in the light of day, and no 
 hope from midnight security : the poachers, in 
 this instance, can be seen not only by the watch- 
 ful eyes of men employed to detect them, but 
 their passage to and fro with guns must also be 
 more or less known to the public. If they con- 
 ceal their fire-arms beneath a coat or smock-frock, 
 still, a sunlit chain of evidence is likely to lead 
 to the guilty man, and darkness at least seems 
 to the coward ruffian to be no longer an assist- 
 ant to the chances of escape. There are a thou- 
 sand obvious reasons why the night should be 
 the more probable time for murder than the day. 
 Wires and snares for game are the daily imple- 
 ments of the lower orders of poachers : with these 
 there is no smoke, no alarm by noise, and they 
 can carry enough snares in the lining of their 
 hat to set across the runs of three hundred yards 
 of cover. They go forth by day with their brains 
 unclouded by the fumes and drugs of the tap- 
 room ; they do not band together ; they are not 
 frightened at their own shadows by day, and 
 they do not desire to borrow false courage from 
 drink and company. They are aware that by 
 day it is more difficult to discover one man
 
 10 
 
 than three or four : there is nothing to excite to 
 brutal daring, not a cheer, not a deep draught of 
 gin or beer to the drunken boast of " death or 
 glory," and the man, bad as he is, creeps forth in 
 the natural and debased state of his nature. 
 Where one gun is in use by day, there are hun- 
 dreds in the hands of poachers by night; the 
 chances of a fatal crime are therefore greatly in 
 favour of the night. 
 
 I now come to the empty and most erroneous 
 assertions, that poaching is induced by the hard- 
 ship of the times, by inability to procure honest 
 labour, and that it is mainly attributable to dis- 
 tress. These are arguments utterly without 
 foundation. 
 
 The only way to arrive at the fair and tangible 
 truth is, by strict reference to cases, in all of 
 which, if the assertion has been made, that the 
 fault originated in distress, the veracity or other- 
 wise of that assertion has been inquired into. For 
 the delinquent to say that he has been driven to 
 poach by distress will not suffice : he is aware that 
 it is a popular excuse, and one likely to move the 
 sympathies of such as deal in lip-deep liberality, 
 and surface sanctity, and therefore the man, how- 
 ever illiterate or stupid he may be, is cunning 
 enough to use it. There are so many people in 
 this world who 
 
 " Compound for sins they are inclin'd to, 
 By damning those they have no mind to,"
 
 11 
 
 that a host of surface seekers, even on the ques- 
 tionable authority of a rogue and vagabond, who 
 have no love for country sports, and no means, 
 or, if they had the means, no wish to employ the 
 poor, would at once be found on the alert, to 
 attack any law, however good, if they thought 
 they could earn for themselves a character to 
 which they have no real pretension. To say 
 that the Game Laws are the remains of a feudal 
 and overbearing system, is to mount in these 
 days a right good stalking-horse on which to 
 scare the unthinking into agitation. Then, as 
 to parties being driven into offences against the 
 Game Laws by distress : among the million facts 
 to the contrary that have come under my own 
 immediate observation, I will take the very first 
 upon the Parliamentary Returns moved for and 
 obtained by Mr. Bright the murder of the 
 gamekeeper, Charles Coles, in the Harrold 
 Woods, in Bedfordshire, at the time the servant 
 of the Rev. J. B. Magenis. 
 
 Having commenced with the assurance that I 
 would in this pamphlet state nothing that I did 
 not know to be the fact, I adhere strictly to that 
 resolution in dealing with the instance before me. 
 The murder of this gamekeeper was perpetrated 
 near Harrold Hall, at that time my residence, 
 and the most minute facts connected with it are 
 distinctly in my recollection. There were four 
 active able young men concerned in this crime.
 
 12 
 
 Three of them farmer's labourers, in the constant 
 receipt of fair remunerative wages, and the fourth 
 was a respectable farmer's son. Not one of these 
 individuals knew the meaning of the term, dis- 
 tress. They used to meet at a public house, in 
 the village of Carleton, hard by, kept by a man 
 who was also a tinker by trade, and a poacher 
 from habit. The labourers were all three of in- 
 different characters, two of very bad character : 
 one of these two the man who fired the fatal 
 shot was possessed by a very sullen and morose 
 temper, while the other, who was armed with a 
 bludgeon, and gave the word to " shoot him," 
 had not a single reclaiming quality in the prac- 
 tice of his life or mental disposition. He had 
 already previously resisted the village constable, 
 and the magisterial authority, with impunity, 
 and I had had my eye upon him for some time. 
 
 The narration of facts which the consideration 
 of this case embraces, necessarily leads me into 
 some notice of the good or injury occasioned by 
 large heads of game on well preserved manors, 
 or by the existence of a little unprotected game 
 on neglected lands ; but as I intend, before I 
 conclude, to deal minutely with that inquiry, I 
 shall touch on it but slightly for the present. 
 The Harrold Woods, though I occupied Harrold 
 Hall while my hounds were in Bedfordshire, did 
 not belong to my tenancy. A great portion of 
 the Odell Woods were mine, as also the Manor of
 
 13 
 
 Stevington. In the Odell Woods I had a consi- 
 derable head of well-protected game; in the 
 Harrold Woods, where the murder was perpe- 
 trated, there was a little game, very ill watched : 
 these woods were only severed from mine by a 
 high road. To the little, and almost unpro- 
 tected game, the poachers confined their depre- 
 dations. 
 
 It so happened, however, that on the night of 
 the murder, the keeper Coles, with two or three 
 assistants, was out upon his duty. The report 
 of a gun, in one of the quarters of the cover, 
 being heard, the keeper, accompanied by one in- 
 dividual, miscalled a man, proceeded along one 
 ride, while his other assistants went down another, 
 an act of severance never advisable, where numbers 
 are few, by night. The keeper came alone upon 
 the poachers, his companion having slunk from 
 his side into the bushes, and absconded. Instead 
 of remembering that there is always safety in 
 action, and very often success there can be no 
 success without it the keeper commenced a wordy 
 parley with the poachers, and gave them time 
 to get together, and to observe that they were 
 opposed but by one man. Now if, instead of this, 
 the keeper had rushed upon and knocked down 
 the nearest poacher, vociferating to his assistants 
 to " come up," ten to one but the remainder of 
 the gang would have run away. A company 
 will carry a camp by surprise at night ; and one
 
 14 
 
 unhesitating arm, backed by the right cause, is 
 worth a dozen undetermined and faltering hands, 
 bewildered by their own terrors. I have, by my- 
 self, in four different instances, encountered the 
 several odds of two to one, three to one, and four 
 to one, neglecting, too, to call out on any phan- 
 tom for assistance, and, on every occasion, with 
 the most complete success. I never spake till I 
 had struck, and then every body else but two 
 ran away, simply because they did not know how 
 many more there were behind me to play at the 
 same rough game. However, talk to them as 
 you will, teach them as you may, keepers never 
 can be made to adopt this simple and humane 
 plan, and that is the reason they get hurt. Had 
 Coles adopted it, from the knowledge I have of 
 his assailants, he would have been alive to this 
 day, instead of being the victim of a cold-blooded 
 murder. He would have been saved from death, 
 and the souls of his murderers would not have 
 had to answer for an overwhelming crime. 
 
 At the time of this occurrence there was a 
 little snow on the ground, and a clouded moon, 
 but still there was a steady light, in which all 
 objects were discernible. The keeper continued 
 to advance slowly, and to talk. One of the 
 poachers raised his gun three times, with threats 
 upon the keeper's life, and, at last, at the word 
 of command, as before stated, the murderer fired, 
 and his victim fell. The poachers then ran away.
 
 15 
 
 One of the gang, shortly after, turned evidence 
 against the rest. The village constable being, 
 as was customary in those days, the oldest, most 
 inefficient, and most decrepid mule bird in the 
 parish, at my request I was sworn in special con- 
 stable, and the warrant placed in my hands for 
 execution. I repaired, in company with Mr. 
 Magenis, to a lonely barn in the fields, near 
 Carleton, and, leaving Mr. Magenis to watch the 
 purlieus, entered the barn where the oifender 
 was said to be thrashing. The barn was empty, 
 but the jacket of the man lay on the floor, and I 
 therefore called out to Mr. Magenis to look sharp. 
 In a moment after he called to me, and, on join- 
 ing him, I found the murderer in his grasp. I 
 then took possession of the prisoner, and con- 
 veyed him to my house, Mr. Magenis going on 
 to see that the man who had turned evidence 
 was properly cared for. The farmer's son im- 
 plicated in this transaction, I am told, went to 
 America. I never could find him ; and the worst 
 of the criminals, the wretch who gave the word 
 to fire on a single and defenceless man, whom 
 the four might have quelled with a blow, instead 
 of with death, ran from the county, and worked 
 on distant railways, till taken, within the last 
 two or three years, by the newly-established and 
 effective police. He was tried, or, rather, he had 
 a mock trial, for his share in the murder, and, 
 by the most awful prevarication and blunders,
 
 16 
 
 he was acquitted. The actual murderer was 
 seized with the small-pox and unable to be 
 brought into court at the assize wherein his 
 trial was due. He was tried, however, at the 
 following assize, and, by some mistaken cle- 
 mency and remarkable stretch of prerogative, 
 he received as his sentence, for as cold-blooded a 
 murder as ever stained the annals of crime, 
 transportation for life, instead of meeting with 
 the full punishment the deliberate and merciless 
 nature of his offence so thoroughly deserved. 
 The horror on men's minds had certainly, by the 
 delay in this savage's trial, had time to cool ; but 
 man, in his justice to man, ought not to be 
 swayed by momentary and passing impulse. 
 For blood there should be blood ; and if not be- 
 cause blood has been shed, blood should follow 
 blood that blood may cease to flow. The cold 
 and calculating severity of Law should not be 
 slave to man's desires. Justice should set a 
 mourning seal on crimes alike condemned by 
 God and man. 
 
 I am here again forced, as it were, into the 
 consideration of the good or harm occasioned by 
 large heads of well-protected game, and small 
 lots of unprotected game on neglected lands. 
 Closely adjoining to the village of Carleton, 
 whence these poachers came, and adjoining or 
 within my manor, there were some unprotected 
 fields, the property of Earl de Grey and others,
 
 17 
 
 and of the parson of the parish, abandoned to the 
 evil propensities of every vagabond who chose to 
 carry a gun : these fields became a nursery for 
 poachers. On these lands there were only a few 
 scattered heads of game, and there was no en- 
 forcement of the law for their protection. An 
 occasional hare, partridge, or rabbit, with a wild 
 duck or snipe, as the fields adjoined the river 
 Ouse, were all that offered to the poacher's gun. 
 It was on these neglected lands that the man 
 who kept the public house, where the poachers 
 were in the habit of meeting, first imbibed a love 
 for shooting. It was here, too, that the hitherto 
 honest labourer learned, after his hour of toil, to 
 congregate with bad characters, and to watch at 
 flight-time, or by moonlight, for ducks, with a 
 gun in his hand. Association with bad charac- 
 ters led to an initiation with crime. Watching 
 in the cold drove him to drink with the evil 
 companions of his sport, and at last, when the 
 little game and wild-fowl were killed or scared 
 away, the heretofore inoffensive man was easily 
 induced by his companions to look for sport else- 
 where. Nightly vigils and carouses unfitted the 
 labourer for his daily toil : that which was first 
 his whim or pleasure became his settled trade ; 
 and step by step, he, as well as thousands of 
 others before and since, was ruined ; not by a large 
 head of well protected game, but by a little game 
 indigenous to the soil, neglected and abandoned
 
 18 
 
 to the public. So artful in his illegal traffic did 
 the man who kept the public house become, that 
 he even invented and put together, for the use of 
 himself and the gang, little guns of very small 
 bore, calculated to kill at a short distance, with a 
 light charge, and very few shot. These small 
 guns had the treble advantage of being easily 
 concealed, of making scarce any report, and of 
 killing a pheasant in high copse wood close upon 
 their muzzles, without blowing the bird to pieces 
 and rendering it unfit for use. Two of these 
 guns, which I afterwards took from four men, 
 are in my possession now. The report made by 
 them is so light, that in a high wind, a time 
 when pheasants roost low, amidst the roar of 
 the trees, it would scarce be distinguished at 
 the distance o*f a hundred yards. The publican 
 and sinner was in some way mixed up with the 
 murder; for on the keeper's death he fled his 
 house and the country, or at least that part of 
 the country. There was a good deal of curious 
 and interesting detail in my search for the two 
 remaining offenders ; but though it might be 
 amusing to my readers, I have neither time nor 
 space to narrate it here. 1 deal as shortly as 
 possible, and simply with facts which I conceive 
 to bear on the false statements of the enemy. 
 
 In this, the first instance of murder and con- 
 viction named in the Parliamentary Returns, dis- 
 tress was not the motive for the crime, nor was the 
 assassin's wretched hand trained to the trigger
 
 19 
 
 by the existence and temptation of a large head of 
 game. Instead of the dread of the severity of 
 punishment consequent on capture, leading to 
 the deadly aim, the eye that glanced along the 
 barrel of that gun was bleared by the baneful 
 fumes and libations of the beer-shop. I can safely 
 affirm, that in the whole experience of my life, as 
 a game-preserver and a magistrate, I never knew 
 a poacher induced to the infraction of the law by 
 distress. 
 
 In a letter from the Duke of Beaufort, bear- 
 ing date the eighteenth of November, 1844, 
 and in reply to the question asked him by me, 
 his Grace proceeds as follows : "I can say 
 most positively that I have been in the constant 
 habit, for upwards of twenty-five years, of acting 
 as a magistrate ; that I have convicted hundreds 
 of poachers, and that in my experience no such 
 case " (a poacher being driven to poach by dis- 
 tress) " ever came before me, nor did I ever hear 
 it even made an excuse by the parties convicted, 
 that they were in want. It is notorious to every 
 magistrate who resides in the country, that regular 
 poachers do not ask for work they prefer to live 
 by poaching. I happened to receive your letter 
 as I was going to our sessions at the Crosshands, 
 and read it to the magistrates there, and they 
 were unanimous in stating (and they were men 
 of considerable experience) that no case of poach- 
 ing arising from want had ever come before 
 
 B 2
 
 20 
 
 them." In this view of the case the Earl of 
 Malmsbury, Earl Fitzhardinge, Mr. Robert Berke- 
 ley of Spetchley and numberless others of whom I 
 have asked the question, entirely concur. In my 
 own experience I have heard poachers twice de- 
 clare that they were driven to the crime by distress, 
 but upon inquiry their statements did not possess 
 the shadow of truth. I do not mean to say that 
 men have never been induced to poach through 
 want, but I assert that it is very rarely the case. 
 Men have thrust their hands through windows 
 in the street, that they might be sent to prison 
 instead of starve, and the occurrence of one fact 
 is about equal to the other. 
 
 I will here give another instance which came 
 under my own observation touching the matter 
 immediately in view. I detected a man in the 
 grounds at Cranford stealing acorns. He re- 
 fused to surrender to me the sack containing 
 them, or to give his name. We were alike un- 
 armed, and a mere personal encounter with fists 
 was the consequence. It ended in my securing 
 the man and sack. The thief, however, an ex- 
 cavator, having received some punishment, and 
 as he looked unhappy, I forgave him his fault 
 upon the spot; and on his distressful tale and 
 asserted inability to procure work, thenceforth 
 employed him at fair daily wages, to gather acorns 
 for the deer. He worked for me half a day, and 
 then deserted from his honest occupation. This
 
 21 
 
 man, who would not work, was afterwards twice 
 taken in the act of poaching the game by my 
 brother, Mr. Moreton Berkeley, and sent to gaol. 
 Theft and crime of every description were the life 
 and breath of this man's nostrils ; yet on his lying 
 lip was the ready and plausible tale for the surface 
 observer, that distress stood father to the crime. 
 
 What, then, is the state of circumstances that 
 does in real truth foster and increase the crime of 
 poaching, and tend to the demoralisation of the 
 lower orders ? 
 
 Not the large and well-protected head of 
 game, as has so often been stated by anonymous 
 writers in the daily papers, most of whom, if 
 not all, have, in all probability, suffered from 
 punishment rightly inflicted by the laws, they 
 are, for that reason, so sedulous to condemn ! 
 I repeat not the large and well-protected head 
 of game; but instead of that, poaching and all 
 sorts of crime have been bred and fostered to 
 maturity on the abandoned manor, in the neg- 
 lected wood, where game is unprotected and 
 scarce, and the powers of the law for its pro- 
 tection unenforced and forgotten. I have at 
 the moment on which I am writing this pamphlet, 
 a glaring proof of this allegation on the farm 
 adjoining my garden, the property of Sir George 
 Rose. Within the commencement of this present 
 month of December, 1844, I have seen upon that 
 land seven men of the worst possible characters 
 
 B 3
 
 22 
 
 banded together, professing to be in the pursuit 
 of rabbits, but in reality destroying every living 
 thing that came within their reach. One of 
 these men was a suspected housebreaker, another 
 a punished convict for killing game out of season, 
 a third the brother of a lad four or five times 
 punished for theft and housebreaking, a fourth a 
 known poacher, and suspected of wilful and re- 
 vengeful damage to garden trees, and a fifth a 
 discharged servant on account of theft. Upon 
 this abandoned land such characters as these are 
 permitted to congregate, and one of them armed 
 with a gun; and yet the ignorant surface ob- 
 server asks " Where exists the hot-bed of 
 crime and where the obvious source of de- 
 moralisation ! " 
 
 On lands thus abandoned the confirmed 
 poacher pursues his trade, and lures the unprac- 
 tised hand to follow in his steps. The honest 
 and hard-working labourer views this improper 
 state of things, and thinks that he may as well 
 kill the scattered, unprotected rabbits and game 
 as the systematic vagabond and poacher; his 
 local pursuit of it offends not his superiors, and 
 originally he intends no harm. On any of the 
 six days of his honest labour he finds that he has 
 no time to do this till evening comes, or till the 
 moon is up ; and he further discovers that late 
 hours and nightly vigils, in addition to his daily 
 toil, unfit him for his usual occupation. He 
 finds he cannot poach by night and work on the
 
 23 
 
 farm by day. What follows then ? Why, step 
 by step the man becomes a Sabbath-breaker a 
 fault declared by criminals in Newgate to be the 
 origin of all their crimes. Instead of going to 
 church, he takes his gun or snare, forgets his 
 moral duties, and becomes a rogue. I speak 
 from observation ; I speak alike of the faults of 
 rich and poor; I assert no vain theory; I de- 
 clare the honest fact poaching and demorali- 
 sation exist in tenfold force on lands where game is 
 unpreserved ; and in many instances the first 
 step in the course of error lies at the rich man's 
 door. If he values virtue it is his place to give 
 
 r o 
 
 no scope to vice. 
 
 No man has had greater experience of the 
 truth of the position herein taken than myself. 
 I have not only been the proprietor of the game, 
 but for my pleasure, and in order to observe 
 more closely both causes and effects, I have 
 amused myself by watching night and day, and 
 setting an example to my servants. I assisted 
 in the preservation of game for years at Cran- 
 ford; I have been conversant with the mainte- 
 nance of it at Berkeley Castle. At each of these 
 places there has ever been a large head of game, 
 and a wholesome administration of the law for 
 its preservation. 
 
 There the people are well to do ; they follow 
 their honest occupations, and, of course, with the 
 exception of some incorrigibly bad characters, 
 
 B 4
 
 24 
 
 who are generally under punishment, they find it 
 to be their interest, and they make it their pleasure, 
 to obey the laws, and please the resident pro- 
 prietor. On the other hand, I have rented Har- 
 rold Hall, in Bedfordshire, for seven years, Teffont 
 Manor House, in Wiltshire, for two years, and 
 my present residence, Beacon Lodge, in Hamp- 
 shire, for six years : at these three places, when 
 I came to them, there was no head of game ; no 
 preservation, but merely a little game indigenous 
 to the soil, and abandoned to the public. When 
 I say abandoned to the public, I mean that there 
 was no appointed person to look after the game, 
 and that (whatever the wishes of the proprietors 
 might be) each of these estates were the free ex- 
 ercising grounds for all the poachers who desired 
 to frequent them. In two instances out of the 
 three at Harrold and at Beacon the tenants 
 were permitted to shoot, and, as it was called, 
 preserve the game ; consequently, they shot all 
 they could for themselves, a very little for their 
 landlords, and abandoned the few that could 
 find the means of escaping the certificate, to the 
 illegal poacher. Man, boy, and even woman, 
 were accustomed, on these three estates, to exter- 
 minate the game in the fur, the feather, and the 
 egg. In Wiltshire, my keeper caught a woman in 
 the act o setting traps for game, her husband 
 thinking that she would attract less suspicion 
 than himself, and that we should deem her as
 
 25 
 
 simply employed in gathering sticks for fuel. In 
 each of these places I had the rights of sporting, 
 and set about a speedy reformation. In each of 
 these places some of the tenantry were the first 
 whom I caught poaching ; and in each place I 
 had personally to establish a character for deter- 
 mination of purpose and aptness of hand, before I 
 could enforce obedience. In addition to the re- 
 bellious spirit of the lower orders, consequent on 
 long neglect of the laws and habitual demorali- 
 sation which ever attends their slightest infringe- 
 ment, I was hampered with the weak and prosy 
 decisions of timid ^justice, for I seldom attained 
 justice. In one instance, in Bedfordshire, a ma- 
 gistrate fairly told me he feared to inflict the full 
 penalty, however richly deserved, lest he should 
 have his rick fired, as the offender against the 
 game laws was a notoriously bad and incorrigible 
 character. Also, in the same county, I summoned 
 a poaching farmer, and he being likewise con- 
 stable of the village wherein he resided, the sum- 
 mons for himself was delivered into his own 
 hands, in the double capacity of officer and of- 
 fender. He actually, with a serious face, charged 
 half-a-crown for the trouble he had in serving 
 the summons on himself and more he received 
 it by order of the magistrate ! 
 
 At Teffont the dispensation of justice was bad 
 enough, but here (at Beacon Lodge) it has, in 
 some instances, been ten thousand times worse.
 
 Poachers inveterate old offenders have been 
 given a week or otherwise in which to pay their 
 fines, the amount of any given fine being more 
 than double that which they had been earn- 
 ing per week "by constant work. None of the 
 poachers were in distress. Months and years of 
 continuous employment had failed to put them 
 in possession of either two or five pounds ; and it 
 being therefore manifest that the renewed and 
 honest labour of one week or more could not give 
 them that which months had failed to bestow, 
 money being spent in the beer-shop as fast as it 
 was earned; still, in the face of this glaring 
 fact, the sagacity of justice determined it other- 
 wise. The natural and consequent event upon 
 this decision was, that the poacher returned, not 
 to honest labour, for he well knew that could not 
 find him in the required funds, but for the time 
 given he resorted to a li fe of poaching and theft ; 
 if lucky, he obtained the fine ; if otherwise, he 
 sat down quietly and waited for the warrant, or 
 lurked about the vicinity of his cottage, and gave 
 as much trouble to the constable as possible. 
 Some magistrates seem to consider the honest 
 and good charactered gamekeeper as a sort 
 of mechanical structure, made to exist without 
 sleep or food, for the purpose of detecting vil- 
 lains. When a magistrate gives a poacher a 
 certain time in which he must collect a fine or go 
 to gaol, he does not appear for an instant to con-
 
 27 
 
 sider the probable way in which the offender 
 will try to get the money, or that if the keeper 
 is a good servant and honest to his employer, that 
 keeper must rest neither night nor day till the 
 punishment of the poacher is disposed of. 
 
 In further proof of the weak administration of 
 justice, and the demoralisation and mischief 
 caused by a few heads of unprotected game in the 
 vicinity of Beacon Lodge, when I first came to 
 reside there, I found a notorious poacher and bad- 
 charactered man resident in the village, at his 
 known cottage, in open defiance of a magistrate's 
 summons and warrant. His offence was poaching 
 rabbits ; and when interfered with by the son of 
 the proprietor of the land, he resisted capture, 
 and, I believe, took a hedge -stake and threatened 
 the life of the gentleman who interrupted him. 
 
 Having treated a summons for this fault with 
 contempt, when the constable came with a war- 
 rant for his apprehension, he seized his loaded 
 gun, and at its muzzle, with threats on the con- 
 stable's life, drove that inefficient functionary and 
 his assistant from the premises. After such a fact 
 as this, the poacher still continued to reside in his 
 known habitation for many months, and close 
 under the nose of the magistrate, unapprehended 
 and untouched. He was, of course, applauded, and 
 looked up to by every badly-disposed person in his 
 vicinity as one of power and hardihood sufficient 
 to bring the law into contempt and set it at de-
 
 28 
 
 fiance. Having already earned some notoriety for 
 the prevention of poaching, this man singled me 
 out, and made it his boast, that he would not be 
 restrained, but would poach in spite of me. To 
 keep up his character for determined rebellion to 
 the laws, while I was shooting on a common where 
 all game belonged to the lord of the manor, but 
 where I had permission to shoot, and to preserve 
 game, from my friend, the late Sir George Gervis, 
 this man actually, with gun and dog, came out 
 to share my beat with me, having drawn the 
 eyes of the village to the fact of his resolution. 
 It seemed, however, that though he was anxious 
 to make the public think he had braved me, he 
 had some doubts of the safety of his endeavour, 
 for after he had shot a snipe, on my attempting 
 to approach him (we were nearly half a mile 
 asunder), he retreated and concealed himself in a 
 cottage. The door was closed ; I had no right 
 to enter ; but I went to the cottage, called him 
 by name, and told him, if he would come forth, 
 I would take his gun. He remained in the 
 cottage, and I repaired to the nearest justice ; and 
 from the statement made by me of the circum- 
 stances of the case, he granted a warrant against 
 the offender, and swore in a special constable to 
 execute it, who was one of my servants. The 
 brother of this man was living with him, also 
 out in the face of summons and warrant ; and 
 having reported this fact to the magistrate, I
 
 29 
 
 offered to apprehend both, but the justice con- 
 fined me to the immediate affair of poaching. 
 We repaired at once to the offender's cottage, 
 and after a desperate resistance, in which he de- 
 fended himself with a long dinner knife, the 
 thrusts of which were wholesomely quelled by a 
 broken head, we secured him, and lodged him in 
 the cage, whence he was sent to prison. 
 
 Here let me make a passing remark on a very 
 great error into which magistrates, as well as the 
 public, are apt to fall. They are quick to blame 
 gamekeepers and policemen if a prisoner shows 
 any marks of punishment, there being no cor- 
 responding appearance of blows on the persons 
 of the captors. They are also (more particularly 
 the public) sure to cry down as an unnecessary 
 cruelty the use of the handcuffs. Now, to speak 
 in homely downright old English phrase, there 
 is nothing which banishes an inclination to 
 commit murder, or to be dangerous, from a brutal 
 mind, half so much as a simple, well-directed 
 " punch on the head." All, or nearly all, mur- 
 derers are cowards : the sight of their own blood 
 will prevent their shedding the blood of others. 
 A gamekeeper or a constable need not wait until 
 he is struck : if he sees that a blow is thought of, 
 he is justified in striking, to prevent his being 
 struck ; for if he stands still to receive a blow, 
 the force of it may prevent his fulfilling his 
 bounden duty. Let me ask the public, which is
 
 30 
 
 the truly humane man, he who, by a timely, but 
 not a serious blow, prevents an offender, whose 
 custody the law demands, from committing 
 murder, or the man who, from a false feeling, or 
 from timidity in any sense of the word, refrains 
 from stepping in to thwart malevolence, and so 
 permits the larger crime to be committed? A 
 little sharp and necessary severity does infinite 
 service ; it protects the servant of the law, and 
 often saves an offender from plunging body and 
 soul into deeper guilt. I am convinced that if 
 there was more fighting and fewer words on the 
 part of those legally assailing armed men, there 
 would be infinitely fewer murders on the face of 
 the criminal returns. 
 
 Again, in the case of the handcuffs. I was 
 myself once asked by a magistrate " why hand- 
 cuffs were put on the poor man, if he came 
 quietly." I replied that it was done on the score 
 of humanity, to insure his coming quietly, and 
 to render it impossible for his malevolence to 
 hurry him into any attempt which might lead to 
 the necessity for a broken head. He was due to 
 justice, if possible, unharmed, and without a 
 scratch. The handcuffs were on, not because I 
 feared that he would hurt me, but simply because 
 he should not induce me to hurt him. As a magis- 
 trate I always recommend the adoption of re- 
 straint as a precautionary and a humane measure. 
 
 The administrators to the law, whether police-
 
 31 
 
 man or gamekeeper, are always unpopular ; whilst 
 around the offenders with whom they have to 
 deal is thrown a false character of previously 
 good conduct, and a meed of unmerited pity. It 
 is strange, but nevertheless true, that every 
 thing lawful is to an extent unpopular with the 
 majority: if you look closely into the great 
 events of the world you will find it so, and the 
 same fate pertains to all minor passages. I once 
 saw a policeman on Ascot race-course hit a man 
 who was very rebellious in crossing the course, a 
 noisy innocent blow over the hat ; the man was 
 not the least hurt, but the lookers-on vociferated 
 " Shame ! " as if the offender had been crippled 
 for life. The next policeman seemed to have 
 observed this ; he was also perhaps a more ex- 
 perienced truncheon-man, for, on a troublesome 
 customer endeavouring to force his beat, after a 
 short struggle, he refrained from the noisy inno- 
 cent blow, and swinging up his opponent's left 
 arm with his left hand, he gave point with his 
 staff on a particularly unprotected part of the 
 ribs, which doubled up the refractory transgressor 
 as if he had been shot. It was quickly done, 
 with a lightning-like pass, and no noise : the 
 public were not aware of what had taken place 
 though I was, and this policeman escaped without 
 any blame. 
 
 This proves, again, on what slight grounds the 
 praise or blame of the surface observer is founded.
 
 32 
 
 Gentlemen choose their gamekeepers for being 
 men of sober, and industrious, and hardy habits : 
 they ought to be trustworthy, and must be 
 confidential servants, honest they should be in 
 the extreme, as they have faith reposed in them 
 to a very great extent. They should take as 
 much care of the tenant farmer's sheep, cattle, 
 and fences, as if they belonged entirely to their 
 master. I know that I, as well as my ser- 
 vants, have saved the life of many a sheep 
 and lamb that would have been lost while the 
 shepherd and farmer were warm in bed, but 
 for our attention. Against sheep-stealers they 
 are a constant guard : an instance of this has 
 lately come to my knowledge. A gamekeeper 
 named Langdon, in Worcestershire, detected 
 four men in the act of stealing a sheep. He 
 hesitated not, but, as I always would do, and 
 wish others to do, he rushed upon them single- 
 handed in the dark, secured one of them, and, as 
 is ever the case where there are blows and no 
 talking, the three other offenders ran away. 
 
 To recur again to the proofs within my know- 
 ledge, that it is not the weight of punishment in 
 night poaching that induces murder rather than 
 submission, my brother, Mr. Moreton Berkeley, 
 detected a man in the act of beating for game with 
 a lurcher on a Sunday, during the time of divine 
 worship : this was on outlying land, where there 
 was very little game. The man was an old of-
 
 33 
 
 fender ; the punishment would, under the cir- 
 cumstances, and according to some magisterial 
 opinions, probably have been light ; but never- 
 theless the man drew a clasp knife, and with it, 
 dagger fashion, he resisted capture in the most 
 deadly manner. The knife was met by the 
 common policeman's staff, which my brother 
 carried in his pocket ; there was no wide dif- 
 ference in the length of the weapons, but 
 much in their deadly nature. A well-applied 
 blow, however, over the arm, deprived the vil- 
 lain of his knife ; and on his rushing in to close, 
 one or two more blows on the head stretched 
 him on the ground. The poacher on this occa- 
 sion received punishment from my brother, given 
 in defence of his life : he was a man of the worst 
 character and an incorrigible ruffian, but still, in 
 the face of these facts, he found a person of the 
 persuasion of the mover for the Parliamentary 
 returns before-mentioned, who took up the case as 
 one of extreme hardship, and declared his inten- 
 tion of seeking, for this scoundrel, the redress of 
 one injured in a righteous cause. 
 
 It was thought better of, however, and the of- 
 fender was sent to gaol. Again and again, I 
 repeat, that the severity of punishment for being 
 found armed together in the night-time for the de- 
 struction of game does not induce murder rather 
 than surrender. The severity of punishment, on 
 the other hand, deters from crime ; and the fact of 
 
 c
 
 34 
 
 greater resistance being offered to capture during 
 the night than in the day, should solely be attri- 
 buted to the combined circumstances that there 
 are a hundred-fold more guns used by night 
 than there are by day ; that poachers by night are 
 more frequently in gangs urging each other on 
 to resistance, and that in almost all cases by 
 night they are "fresh " from the abominations 
 of the beer-shop. 
 
 We will now proceed to inquire into the good 
 or harm which large establishments for the pre- 
 servation of game are calculated to effect in the 
 locality where they are, at a vast outlay of money, 
 maintained. 
 
 I have observed in each of the places I have 
 rented a great improvement in the conduct and 
 habits of the labouring population when the 
 Game Laws came to be enforced, and idle poach- 
 ing inclinations restrained ; the wholesome fact 
 also having been placed before their eyes, that it 
 would be their interest as well as their duty to 
 cease from the pursuit of game both by night 
 and day. The hitherto systematic Sabbath- 
 breaker returned to his church ; and I have had 
 it from his pastor's lips, that " he had never seen 
 the man so frequently an attendant on divine 
 worship, as he had since my arrival at 'the 
 House.'" And what was the cause of this ? 
 Why, the woods and manor, the fields and the 
 river, were no longer free to be made the exer-
 
 35 
 
 cising grounds of the idle and disorderly, or of 
 the man of six days' labour who was tempted to 
 desecrate the Sabbath; but the lands and the 
 commons were protected from demoralising 
 abuses, and the outbreakings of a certain class in 
 society necessitated to return by just restric- 
 tions into their proper channel. 
 
 In the two first years of my residence at 
 Beacon Lodge, and in additional proof of my 
 assertion, that the district where the little un- 
 protected game is abandoned to the public, is in 
 real truth the nursery of the poacher and Sab- 
 bath-breaker, I give the following facts. Where 
 I had a hundred acres to preserve, my neigh- 
 bour, Lord Malmsbury, had thousands. His 
 residence, Heron Court, is the same distance 
 from the town of Christchurch as Beacon 
 Lodge : we are each about three miles from it 
 on either side. Where I had one head of game, 
 he had four or five hundred, or in greater 
 proportion still. Yet for all this, in those two 
 first years, where he caught one poacher I de- 
 tected eight. At Heron Court there had always 
 been a large and well-protected head of game, 
 at Beacon Lodge there was no head of game 
 except such as in rare instances could escape the 
 general destruction consequent on the shooting 
 taing given to the tenant farmer. These are 
 truths which speak for themselves. 
 
 You cannot rob me of such facts as these, 
 
 c 2
 
 36 
 
 gathered from personal experience ; and as long 
 as I can speak or write they shall not be cried 
 down and stifled by false, unjust, and selfish 
 agitation, injurious to the rich as to the poor. 
 
 When the game under my preservation had 
 increased, if a man of good character, however 
 poor, applied to me for any, wishing perhaps 
 to make a little present to some one who had 
 shown him kindness, it was always placed at his 
 disposal. Indeed, one poor man told me that 
 the hare and pheasant I had given was as good 
 as five pounds to him in some way or other ; that 
 it had pleased a distant relation of his wife who 
 lived in London. If any man of any character, 
 good, bad, or indifferent, happened to get within 
 his power an egg, a leveret, or young bird, and 
 brought it safely to my hand, however useless to 
 me from age or circumstance, it was a part of 
 my plan to reward him far beyond that which 
 he could have procured for such a commodity in 
 the market. In short, while exercising sporting 
 rights with the greatest strictness, it was my 
 wont to couple with the maintenance of those 
 laws as much pecuniary benefit to the deserving 
 poor, as my limited means enabled me to bestow. 
 A labourer in the harvest field never marked a 
 bird for me while shooting but that I gave him 
 in his hour of toil wherewith to slake his thirst. 
 The farming men are an observant and a think- 
 ing class ; they soon discover that they can take
 
 37 
 
 an honest as well as a dishonest interest in the 
 game, and become aware that that which keeps 
 a resident gentleman among them must be for 
 their good. His hall is ever open to those who 
 do his pleasure ; while at the same time if any 
 labourer desires to better himself, and enter the 
 service of the game, there are places always open 
 to him, not only of trust and responsibility, but 
 of far better wages than can be afforded by 
 agricultural employment. 
 
 A labourer, with a large family, at Harrold, en- 
 tered my service ; he is now a head-keeper in Glou- 
 cestershire. From the little villages of Teffont 
 and Chicksgrove and their vicinity, in Wiltshire, 
 though I was at the Manor House but two years, 
 I first employed and then removed and promoted 
 no less than ten men : some of them of course 
 with families ; and when I first knew them they 
 were earning a hard subsistence at from six to 
 seven shillings a week. I recur to this fact with 
 heartfelt satisfaction; for I feel that in following 
 my sports and pleasures I have not done so with 
 a selfish desire that led to no one's benefit but 
 my own ; and, besides, it gives me an opportu- 
 nity of proving that the Game Laws are bene- 
 ficial. In those two years of my residence at 
 Teffont the two worst characters of the village, 
 whose presence and habits corrupted others, were 
 obliged to fly the country, and the fathers of 
 several large families with their sons have been 
 
 c 3
 
 38 
 
 advanced from poverty to comparative affluence 
 for their lives; and this solely and entirely 
 arising under the laws for the preservation of 
 game. 
 
 One of these men is the present head-keeper 
 under Mr. Bailey, the member for Worcester ; 
 another, his father, was lately one of the head- 
 keepers at Charborough Park; another son is 
 under-keeper at Sir Edward Butler's, near South- 
 ampton ; another son is under-keeper at Mr. 
 Frogley's, in Surrey; and a fourth son is at 
 present in my service. The head-keeper at Mr. 
 Frogley's came from Teffont. The head-keeper 
 at Holnest House, in Dorsetshire, came from the 
 vicinity of Teffont, and the head-keeper and the 
 footman at present in my service came from the 
 same place. 
 
 Now here is a practical result, and that, too, 
 arising from very small means: let us proceed 
 with it. Here, in the vicinity of Beacon Lodge, 
 much the same circumstances have been enacted 
 over again, with this difference, that from the 
 lamentable state of demoralisation to which I 
 have before alluded, from the non-enforcement of 
 the Game Laws, in which I found the labouring 
 population ; though my residence here has been 
 about six years, instead of two, the promotions 
 I have been able to effect from this vicinity have 
 been far less. Since I have been here, I have placed 
 out three men : one of them is the head-keeper
 
 ,59 
 
 at Sir Edward Butler's, the other is one of the 
 head-keepers at Berkeley Castle, and the other an 
 under-keeper at Charborough Park. I have still 
 one or two active young men that are learning their 
 duties well, and who will soon be fit for other situ- 
 ations. There are no lack of offers of service, and 
 many a hardy young fellow wiU watch and work 
 for me, at hours when not employed in the herring 
 or other fishery, or in agricultural labour, for the 
 chance of some day having it in their power to 
 obtain a more certain subsistence. I repeat, it is 
 the non-enforcement of the law which demoralises 
 the poor ; it is the neglected manor and the little 
 unprotected game which make the poacher. You 
 ever find the poor ill to do and of idle habits, 
 demoralised, and bad in and upon the precincts 
 of a royal forest: and why? not on account of 
 the Forest Laws, but because the forest is in 
 fact, as regards the game and other subjects, a 
 neglected land. There are on it a few heads of 
 game and deer, half starved, easily killed, and no 
 one to make the only thing that fattens on the 
 forest the keeper do his duty, or to mark 
 Avith a discriminating but a liberal hand, the 
 difference between the deserving and the unde- 
 serving poor, the poacher and the honest man. 
 There is no resident proprietor on these forests, 
 apart, of course, from Windsor Castle, and no 
 superior of sufficient importance, knowledge, and 
 method, to represent the proprietor, uphold the 
 
 c 4
 
 40 
 
 royal rights, preserve the game and deer, and 
 to see and know whether the keepers do their 
 duty or not, and by his immediate presence 
 and influence to keep the people in order. 
 There ought to be to each of the royal forests 
 a resident ranger or keeper of the royal chase 
 (such an officer now only exists by name), 
 active, vigilant, and responsible, and with certain 
 powers (limited of course) to reward when neces- 
 sary, the deserving poor. There is no distinction 
 now between the good and bad : poaching, deer- 
 stealing, common rights and their abuse, and 
 here, in this vicinity of the New Forest, a little 
 smuggling, enable the poor to drag on a degraded 
 existence, in colonial phrase, a sort of "squatting" 
 population, of little benefit to themselves, of none 
 to the community, and an absolute bane to sur- 
 rounding districts. Within the last year a man 
 commenced poaching in the Forest, upon the little 
 neglected head of game, instead of upon the pri- 
 vate property in the purlieus where there was a 
 great deal. The pheasant and hare becoming 
 scarcer still, the man killed the deer, the deer 
 became wilder, and when killed, scarce worth 
 having, and the man took to killing sheep. He 
 concluded with killing an ox, which I believe 
 led to his detection. Nothing far short of an 
 animal of that size would have engaged the at- 
 tention of the keepers. 
 
 I made it my plan, as I said before, ever to 
 show the labouring classes that it was their in-
 
 41 
 
 terest and duty to keep within the law, and to 
 please the resident gentleman who was spending 
 among them the little or the much that he had. 
 Here let me then remark, that I have observed a 
 great many people who, in their over-zeal to ob- 
 tain a character for charity, and what they term 
 of being " good to the poor," from their want of 
 discrimination, do an infinity of harm. Not that 
 they give too much I would accuse no one of 
 that but they give without drawing a wide line 
 between the good and bad. Their gifts are in 
 many instances insulting to virtue and premiums 
 on vice. For example, at Christmas there is a 
 very poor family, who in all their actions through 
 life are dishonest and vicious. By their side, in 
 the next cottage, there is likewise a very poor 
 family without reproach or blame. Each family 
 are in rags, and each come under the denomina- 
 tion of "the poor." One personates deserving 
 virtue, the other disgusting vice, yet in very 
 many instances have I seen the surface-seeker of 
 a character for charity, make no difference between 
 the two, but reward them alike with Christmas 
 benefactions, thus placing them on an equal foot- 
 ing, to the manifest exaltation of the sinner. It 
 has never been within my power to give much, 
 yet still at Christmas I give what I can to the 
 really deserving poor. From such gifts, by me, 
 are systematically excluded all those who habi- 
 tually transgress the game or any other law, and
 
 42 
 
 if in a hunting country I am aware of a man who 
 has stolen or injured a fox, I exclude him like- 
 wise. At Harrold there were many deserving of 
 charity ; at Teffont the same ; but had I copied 
 the example of a great many of my acquaintance, 
 and, by publication in the " Morning Post," 
 boasted to the world that "my left hand did 
 know what my right was doing," my Christmas 
 donations from Beacon Lodge would have ap- 
 peared under the very singular announcement 
 that Mr. and Mrs. Berkeley were dispensing their 
 usual bounty in a wholesome dinner of good old 
 English beef and plum-pudding to one old man 
 and woman! With the exception of this old 
 couple, there was not a family in the vicinity, 
 within -that which I conceived to be my immediate 
 range, that had not in some way or other grossly 
 misconducted themselves. Circumstances have 
 of late mended; the worst characters, chiefly 
 relatives of the poacher whom I found at large 
 in open defiance of the magistrate's authority, 
 have burned down their mud cottages, in one 
 instance to defraud the insurance, and left my 
 immediate neighbourhood. Some men that 
 used to poach are reclaimed, and have become 
 much better farming servants. I have given 
 one of these men employment myself, and mean 
 still to be his friend. Indeed the generality 
 of the labouring people have discovered that it is 
 for their own good to conduct themselves pro-
 
 perly, and it has been the administration of the 
 Game Laws alone that has brought about this 
 decided improvement. 
 
 Further to show the lamentable state in which 
 the people were during the first part of my re- 
 sidence here, I will give three more facts. One 
 of the known poachers previously mentioned, 
 went by night into the flower-garden of a magis- 
 trate, and fired his double gun, which I knew 
 to be remarkable for its small bore, through the 
 large panes of his drawing-room window, simply 
 because he had interfered, or threatened to inter- 
 fere, with the inroads of this man upon some land 
 in his vicinity. In another instance, one or more 
 of the same fraternity either watched or suspected 
 that my head gamekeeper (the one at present 
 with Mr. Frogley) was in his cottage ; and to 
 bring him forth unarmed and defenceless, his 
 wife having a few flowers in the little garden, 
 which she kept neat and clean, they turned in a 
 neighbour's cows, well knowing that if the keeper 
 was at home, the noise made by the cattle in the 
 destruction of the garden would bring him forth. 
 Their infernal and cowardly purpose was to some 
 extent answered, but happily not entirely so. 
 The keeper did come forth, unarmed and almost 
 naked, and expelled the cows, when, on his return 
 into his cottage, they fired at him through the 
 window, missed him, but lodged the contents of 
 the gun in the opposite wall. This attempt
 
 44 
 
 at murder by a poacher, was not made for 
 the purpose of escaping any conviction, it arose 
 from no undue severity of the law, but from 
 the malevolent passions of a confirmed and 
 hardened villain, who, if there had been no 
 game, would never have led an honest life, or 
 have been other than a burglar or an assassin. 
 The third instance was, that on a fifth of No- 
 vember, in my absence, every lawless vaga- 
 bond, deer-stealer, house-breaker, and poacher, 
 assembled together, to the amount of thirty or 
 forty, or more, disguised and with blackened 
 faces, took possession of the high road and village, 
 so as to render for a time the former impassable, 
 and burned figures on large bonfires, supposed 
 to represent me and my men, because I had 
 enforced the Game Laws. I was from home at 
 the time, or a different result had been told. 
 Not a magistrate, not a constable interfered in 
 this riot and infringement of the Highway Act ; 
 nor could I, on my return', though the parties 
 were known and sworn to by my servants, obtain 
 a conviction. It is such maudlin supineness as 
 this in regard to the enforcement of any law, and 
 the tacit permission to a set of the worst cha- 
 racters to range at liberty over lands, with guns 
 in their hands, that demoralises the poor, and 
 leads to mischief; and the sin of it lies with the 
 proprietor who abandons each wholesome re- 
 straint, and permits bad-charactered men to earn 
 a precarious, and after all, a miserable existence,
 
 45 
 
 though an idle one, upon his lands and property. 
 I repeat again, that the proprietor of the aban- 
 doned land in regard to game, is the breeder of 
 crime and the abetter of murder; and not the 
 resident gentleman who enforces the law and 
 keeps up a large head of well-protected game. 
 
 As yet I have only argued upon the plan in 
 the preservation of game adopted by me; we 
 will now refer to larger establishments of far 
 more importance. I will adhere to facts, and 
 speak only of some of those with which I am 
 completely conversant, and commence with 
 Berkeley Castle. 
 
 At Berkeley there are eight head-keepers, 
 twenty under-keepers, and thirty additional 
 night- watchers ; to speak in round numbers, 
 there are sixty men employed in nothing else 
 than the care of the game and deer. Almost 
 all these men, certainly all the keepers, have 
 families dependent upon them for support. In 
 addition to these, during the winter, there are a 
 number of men employed at the shooting parties 
 as beaters for game. These poor people all re- 
 gard themselves as a regular part of the esta- 
 blishment ; and they even make a newly-enlisted 
 beater " pay his footing " on coming among them. 
 To be admitted into any of these subordinate 
 places, the men must have conducted themselves 
 properly ; and into the better situations, of course 
 men must have proved themselves well worthy
 
 46 
 
 of trust before they could be therein established. 
 Now in addition to the employment and comfort- 
 able subsistence thus afforded to so many men 
 and their families by the preservation of a large 
 head of game alone, if you add the immense 
 number of grooms and helpers, a huntsman, 
 whippers-in, and kennel men, necessary to the 
 care and condition of from fifty to sixty hunters, 
 besides other horses, and from eighty to a hun- 
 dred couples of foxhounds, besides other dogs, 
 let any man imagine the amount of wages ex- 
 pended on such species of labour, and then reflect 
 on the misery which would arise if all these men 
 and their families were deprived of their employ- 
 ment and subsistence. There are other men 
 attached to establishments of this sort, such as 
 men for the decoys of wild-fowl, for the fisheries, 
 in the gardens, and on the lands reserved for the 
 use of the Castle ; and, I repeat again, let the 
 caviller pause and consider the mischief if all 
 these people were cast out of employment, and 
 added to the present numbers of the poor. By 
 the talked of abolition of the Game Laws, you 
 risk all this ; for it is not his hounds alone 
 that will keep a proprietor in the country: his 
 personal residence is retained upon his acres by 
 a combination of country pursuits and pleasures, 
 good for himself, good for his tenantry, and of 
 immeasurable benefit, morally and temporally, 
 to the surrounding poor ! The game, the kennel
 
 47 
 
 and stable, the decoy and the river, afford to 
 the rich man recreation for every leisure hour, 
 with the graceful fact before him, that in his 
 enjoyment of every one of those good old En- 
 glish recreations, he has it in his power, and, 
 indeed, he must contribute to the comfort and 
 happiness of the poor, by finding them employ- 
 ment. The man who loves his country, and 
 truly desires the happiness of the people, will 
 do nothing, he will agitate nothing, that will or 
 may tend to induce absenteeism among our 
 landed gentry. Absenteeism has been the curse 
 of Ireland, and Heaven prevent that the baneful 
 example set us there, should, through the pes- 
 tilential breath of the selfish surface-seeker, creep 
 into the healthful system of this country ! 
 
 Let any man untrammelled by the selfish 
 knowledge that such enjoyments are out of his 
 reach by sect, through personal inability to pursue 
 them, or from fortune, visit the castle, abbey, or 
 hall, in the country, where all old English sports 
 are cherished, and then seek the mansion in a 
 town, or the splendid villa near it, of the equally 
 rich man who does not keep them up, and then 
 judge between the two. Who gives most employ- 
 ment to the poor ? Who does the most for the sur- 
 rounding neighbourhood ? Who is the greatest, 
 the most general benefactor ? and in which locality 
 does the widest demoralisation exist? Why, in 
 those places where large heads of game were
 
 48 
 
 never known, where a conviction under the Game 
 Laws was never heard of, where the middling 
 and lower classes have never any opportunity of 
 associating with the higher classes in one joyous 
 and common field of sport and recreation ; there, 
 there, I repeat, is the greater demoralisation. I 
 hold the man, or set of men, who would stir a 
 step to prevent or risk the residence of the 
 country gentleman on his lands and they 
 would go far to prevent it who would abolish 
 the Game Laws to be the declared and bitter 
 foe to the interests of the poor. 
 
 Do not let it be said that the amusements 
 which keep us, the country and the landed gen- 
 tlemen, in the rural districts of our residence, 
 preventing absenteeism and affording a large 
 proportion of labour, as well as inducing the es- 
 tablishments of other gentlemen to be maintained 
 in our vicinity, are useless, and worse than use- 
 less, to the poor, for it is not the fact. So far 
 as I am concerned, the enemy's assertion shall 
 not go forth uncontradicted. What would the 
 castle or the abbey be without its lord ? or the 
 hall or manor-house without its squire ? Why, 
 the first would be a " remnant of feudal ages," 
 if not inhabited by a heart and hand of liberal 
 and enlightened times, and the other but the 
 empty shell of the good old English gentleman. 
 If by untimely and ruinous interference Avith 
 their amusements (for rich men will have their
 
 49 
 
 pleasures), you drive them to seek the joys of 
 life at Paris, or in foreign lands, who remains to 
 stand up for the liberty of conscience ? who to 
 countenance the teacher of religion, whether 
 Protestant, Catholic, or Dissenter ? and who to 
 give effect to the local administration of the 
 laws ? 
 
 I love to see the blood of the acres circulate 
 through domestic veins, and return again to the 
 full furrows whence it commenced its flow. I 
 may be forgiven an honest pride in witnessing 
 this at Berkeley Castle. I love to see the yeo- 
 man, whose forefathers have been tenants for 
 more than a century of the same land, out in the 
 field with the hounds of his landlord ; and I de- 
 light in seeing the poor running with happy faces 
 by my side, and trying with me who shall be 
 first over the hedge after my greyhounds. It is 
 good to see the people enjoying themselves side 
 by side with the gentleman it is beneficial to 
 each ; and I think now, as I have thought before, 
 that the amusements of the lower classes are in- 
 terfered with too much. A stalking horse from 
 the same mischievous stable as the one at pre- 
 sent ridden against the Game Laws has been 
 urged at several of their recreations far better 
 left unmolested. The capitalist and the large 
 manufacturer often lose sight of the good done 
 by the extensive sporting establishments of the 
 aristocracy; and between them and the great
 
 50 
 
 landed proprietor, as between trade and agricul- 
 ture, there are often jealousies. There ought to 
 be none, for the interests of each are really in- 
 separable. 
 
 Does the man of " the buttonless" argument, 
 or the man or men who have a monomania 
 against a particular law or laws does he, or 
 do they mean to declare that there ought to be 
 no Game Laws, and that the code should be 
 abolished ? 
 
 Is the old and long-boasted adage of " the 
 Englishman's house being his castle " to become 
 a by gone saying of a good old time, no longer 
 available in these days of cant and morbid re- 
 formation ? 
 
 Does the collective wisdom and feverish anxiety 
 of the self-dubbed reformers of the morals of the 
 poor, mean to throw open the private estates and 
 manors of individuals to the incursion of a law- 
 less rabble of bad-charactered men, who are to 
 have free ingress to the lands for the purpose of 
 killing game ? Although even in the headlong 
 and thoughtless absurdity of their folly, we can- 
 not suppose that they seriously intend this : what 
 then is to prevent it if the Game Laws are abo- 
 lished ? The obvious reply to this is, that the 
 law of trespass must be made ten times more 
 stringent than it is at present, and the liberty 
 of the subject in proportion more summarily in- 
 terfered with, or the privacy of landed possession
 
 51 
 
 will not be sufficiently protected. I am not 
 reasoning for any particular class, I am reason- 
 ing generally; but if I were to say whose in- 
 terests were most at stake in having the large 
 establishments maintained in the country, I 
 should declare that it more deeply concerned the 
 poor than the rich ; for in the first instance the 
 bread of life is at stake, in the last, principally 
 pleasure. The poor man has no hope of obtain- 
 ing a subsistence in a foreign land, but, if you 
 unjustly molest him, the rich man can change the 
 scene of his enjoyments, and with it the expendi- 
 ture of his money. 
 
 Again ; suppose you abolish the Game Laws, 
 like the fable of the frogs in their application 
 for a new king, you give to the tenant farmers a 
 severer and a more active monarch than they had 
 before ; for is it possible that any set of men can 
 be blind enough to suppose that the lord of 
 thousands of acres will not legislate for himself, 
 upon his own territory, which is as much his own 
 as the poor man's plot of garden-ground, and intro- 
 duce clauses into his agreements with his tenantry 
 a hundred-fold more binding and severe than any 
 laws framed in public legislation and debate ? 
 Ay, and under such closely-drawn agreements, 
 there will be no lack of tenants. You may ruin 
 the sports of the small proprietor and of the ma- 
 jority, and destroy the good done by the present
 
 52 
 
 Game Laws, without getting rid of one jot of evil. 
 You may mar the pleasures of the small pro- 
 prietor, and injure the public and the poor ; 
 but you can no more debar the owner of the 
 giant estate from the fair pleasures of land, and 
 which it is just that land should have, as a 
 set-off against its peculiar burdens, than you 
 can call for a division of property, and give each 
 man the same. All you would effect by the abo- 
 lition of the Game Laws would be this injustice 
 to the small proprietor, injury, I repeat it again, 
 injury to the tenant farmer on the great estates, 
 ruin to the local poor, and an introduction 
 of a hundred offenders against the law instead 
 of one, with the difference, that there being no 
 Game Laws, the word poacher would be lost in 
 an increased class of marauders under another 
 name ! 
 
 If the Game Laws existed no longer, observe 
 the consequence in every maris hand is placed 
 a gun. If he trespasses and refuses to desist, 
 you may proceed against his liberty by the 
 capture of his person as you may do now, for 
 of course there will still be a law for the pro- 
 tection of the privacy of property. Where there 
 is one conflict now, between men with fire arms, 
 there will be thousands, and in the same ratio so 
 many increased chances of the result in murder. 
 Every old firelock and field-keeping musket will 
 be brought into play, while, at the same time,
 
 53 
 
 the small proprietor and the hitherto certificated 
 public, will be giving up the amusement of 
 shooting; the game on places of their access 
 being reduced to the small head indigenous to the 
 soil not worth their seeking, but still just enough 
 to induce the pursuit of the idle and demoralised. 
 The gunsmith's trade is then affected: the de- 
 mand for the expensive material being diminished, 
 thousands of hands at Birmingham and other 
 places lose their bread, and all for what ? Sim- 
 ply because a cry has been raised against an old 
 established law, founded as that law is on just 
 and reasonable principles, by men who seek 
 some public stalking-horse on which to ride into 
 notice ; by men whose sect or personal inabilities 
 do not lead them to enjoy the useful pleasures 
 protected by that law, and by men who, having 
 suffered from just restrictions, have imbibed a 
 hatred to any similar restraint. 
 
 In the shallow policy, which professes to 
 have the good and the morals of the people at 
 heart, take care that for a just state of things you 
 do not introduce an unjust one. The landed pro- 
 prietor is worthy all the attention that can be 
 shown him. The privacy of his acres, and the crea- 
 tures upon them, it is just he should have secured 
 to him by the means least calculated to induce 
 infractions of the peace ; and I maintain that if 
 there is to be any privacy or sporting rights in 
 
 D 3
 
 54 
 
 landed property, it must and ought to be con- 
 tinued through the Game Laws, and not by any 
 new and increased severity of other codes, still 
 more severe upon the liberty of the subject. 
 
 Already has been conceded to the cry of the 
 unthinking, or, at least, to the ill-judging, the 
 alteration in the law making game private pro- 
 perty. That was a bad concession; and it is 
 admitted, I believe, to have been so by Lord 
 Wharncliffe himself. When this was done, you put 
 a hundred guns in the hands of men where there 
 were but a few before, and consequently increased 
 the chances of murder. By your present agita- 
 tion you actually propose to double and treble 
 the number of fire-arms in the hands of the mul- 
 titude, and thus carry out your system of the mul- 
 tiplication of chances of evil ! 
 
 Some of the enemies of the Game Laws say, 
 " that there should be an enactment passed to 
 prevent proprietors of land keeping such large 
 quantities of game." This is mere folly, for you 
 have no more right to dictate to the owner of 
 the great estate as to the amount of game he 
 shall keep, than you have to command the cot- 
 tager in the number of his chickens. Anti- 
 Game Law men have declared to me, " that 
 poulterers have told them that there is not a 
 sufficient supply of game in the market for the 
 public demand." I always knew there never 
 could be. What then do these surface seekers
 
 55 
 
 mean, when, in the face of this, they propose to 
 lessen the quantity of game, and by so doing in- 
 crease its public value ? Do they mean to assert 
 that, if the supply in the possession of the legal 
 vender is reduced, the premium on poaching or 
 theft will not be increased tenfold ? It is ob- 
 vious that it must be so. But to revert to the 
 abuse of the gun. 
 
 I once saw two countrymen returning home in 
 the middle of the night, fresh from " a jollifica- 
 tion : " they had not been poaching, but one of 
 them carried a loaded gun. They were out of 
 the public path, when they came suddenly on the 
 watch-box of a shepherd that had been lately 
 moved, and left standing at the corner of a hedge. 
 
 Men are apt to be frightened at their own 
 shadows in the dark, more particularly if they are 
 abroad on evil ; and even in this instance the novel 
 appearance of the black bulk of the watch-box 
 brought the two men I am speaking of to a dead 
 halt.* "D n me, I an't frit," exclaimed the 
 man with the gun ; " but whatever's that ? " 
 
 " Eh ! " replied his companion, peering for a 
 
 * I have been personally engaged with poachers in 
 twenty-six instances, by night and day, and always with suc- 
 cess, having made it a rule to be the first to play at the 
 roughest game. The old adage "that one sword drawn 
 keeps others in their scabbards," would apply well on all 
 these occasions. 
 
 i) 4
 
 56 
 
 moment through the obscurity of the hour ; and 
 both remained staring at the unconscious object 
 of their terror. If the door of the watch-box had 
 only flapped together, these men would have 
 taken to their heels and run away. At last the 
 one without the gun stammered forth, " Lord ! 
 it's only the old shepherd's box. D n me, shute 
 'un ! " Bang went the contents of the gun into 
 the wooden hut. " That's glory ! " one of them 
 exclaimed, and on they went in the bravery of 
 beer. The same spur in the head, which caused 
 these men to fire on the shepherd's box, would 
 have made them fire on a keeper. 
 
 There are different classes of poachers, the 
 same as there are of other thieves. You may 
 liken them thus. 
 
 There is the common and lowest class of poach- 
 ing robber, who steals from the mushroom and 
 the stick upon the land, to a certain quantity of 
 the milk from the udders of the farmers' cows * ; 
 handfuls of wheat from the shocks unhoused, to 
 the tame pigeon, pheasant, fowl, hare, and sheep. 
 You may place him by the side of the thief who 
 filches from the apple stall in London, up to a 
 horse at a country fair. 
 
 There is the poaching farmer, who trains his 
 
 * I have detected a man of this description, stealing a 
 small portion of milk from each cow, so that when the cows 
 were milked in the morning, the quantity taken could not be 
 missed.
 
 57 
 
 sheep-dog to lurch the game, carries a gun osten- 
 sibly for the purpose of scaring rooks, but with 
 which he shoots a hare in her form, and who 
 picks up the eggs of game when he wishes it to 
 be thought that he is pulling weeds. 
 
 You may class him with the smartly-dressed 
 man of the swell mob, who picks your pocket, or 
 denudes your table of its silver neither of these 
 men are " distressed," but it is the innate temper 
 of their minds their calling. 
 
 I speak from personal observation, and / have 
 seen all I describe. 
 
 There is the swindling blackleg on the turf, 
 who bets because he thinks the best horse is 
 poisoned, or " made safe," as he terms it, by 
 villany. You may place him by the side of the 
 landless, but certificated poacher, who takes out 
 a license without an acre of land over which he 
 has permission or a right to shoot, except on 
 sufferance, or by stealth, when he thinks the 
 keeper is "made safe." 
 
 None of these men are driven to the perpetra- 
 tion of their different rascalities " by distress ; " 
 nor would they desist, from their respective 
 peculations, were apples or game, handkerchiefs 
 or money, to become scarcer than they are at 
 present. There must be laws to preserve pro- 
 perty, to keep sacred the Englishman's house 
 and grounds, and to maintain men in the posses- 
 sion of their watch and pocket-handkerchief, as
 
 58 
 
 well as to prevent the poisoning of a horse ; and 
 there ought to be laws to put down the crime of 
 poaching, and there will be, whether the crime 
 assumes another name or not, though the law 
 may be made more unconstitutional and op- 
 pressive. The unthinking and surface observer 
 always invests the poacher with a false cha- 
 racter, and is apt to say, when he hears of an 
 offender, " Oh, the poor man only took a hare." 
 But if that hare or pheasant was the source of 
 pleasure to the owner of the estate whereon they 
 were bred, if for their maintenance he had been 
 at vast outlay for artificial food, and the watch- 
 fulness of servants, besides having underlet his 
 lands to his tenantry, that they might not have 
 an excuse for saying that the game did them 
 injury, why, independent of any forest law, 
 the taking of that hare, or pheasant, or rabbit, 
 would be as absolute an act of robbery as ab- 
 stracting the watch from a man's pocket. The 
 surface and unthinking observer does not speak 
 in the same tone of sympathy when " the poor 
 man " steals a watch, a joint of meat, or a loaf of 
 bread, and yet one deserves as much sympathy 
 as the other, only the hare and pheasant, on 
 account of the outlay of its proprietor, are the 
 more valuable commodity. 
 
 In further reply to the alleged sin of the 
 maintenance of a large head of game being an 
 encouragement to poaching, I would appeal to
 
 59 
 
 any man of common sense as to who is the 
 more likely to induce theft, the man with a large 
 sum of money in the bank, a gold repeater in 
 a pocket, to which he has added the precaution 
 of giving it a twist, independent also of a strong 
 guard-chain round his neck, or, the man with a 
 few loose halfpence in an open drawer, where 
 all can see the laxity of vigilance, and with a 
 common metal watch in his pocket, easy of ex- 
 traction by a pendent slip of dirty blue ribbon ? 
 Why, the man with the least, but unprotected 
 property. 
 
 If you keep twenty sovereigns in your desk, 
 and leave one on a public table, which is more 
 likely to tend to the establishment of theft ? 
 Why, the single neglected sovereign. 
 You do not condemn the butcher who, with a 
 cruel ostentation, displays before the longing eyes 
 of vagrant famine, a tempting store of the fattest 
 food ; nor the silversmith, who garnishes his lavish 
 board with wealth enough to find half a million 
 of mouths their necessary sustenance ; and yet if 
 temptation on account of quantity were a crime 
 each of these tradesmen are to blame. Game 
 has become absolute property in the letting of 
 an estate and manor house of a non-resident 
 proprietor, the stock of game largely increasing 
 or lessening the yearly rental which that class of 
 tenant pays. What would become of the culture- 
 less acres of many a Scotch proprietor, were it not
 
 60 
 
 for the game and deer upon their moors and 
 forests? On sporting considerations alone, such 
 places are let from three to six, and as high or 
 higher than twelve hundred a year. Would it 
 be wise or just to deprive those Scotch pro- 
 prietors of the only source of real income afforded 
 by the peculiarity of their domains ? 
 
 There is an error into which many gentlemen 
 fall when they are raising game, which cannot be 
 too much deprecated, and that is, in purchasing 
 live game and eggs of poulterers in London or 
 elsewhere. For myself, I have never done so; 
 but I have applied for the gift of some from other 
 gentlemen, preferring to ask them a favour, 
 which I would, under similar circumstances, 
 grant to another, rather than patronise the 
 poacher through the poulterer. The following 
 facts are worthy of notice. A man came into 
 Buckinghamshire, and employed the labourers on 
 several farms of the great estates to procure for 
 him live game and eggs, for the supply of persons 
 in London. This man contrived to lurk in safety, 
 while his dupes, who poached for him, were 
 caught and punished. I myself detected two 
 men stealing pheasants' eggs at Cranford, one of 
 whom I secured, the other ran away. They 
 were also employed by persons in London. This 
 species of ruinous depredation is carried on every 
 spring and summer to a vast extent ; and it has 
 and will spread into all the counties now, how-
 
 61 
 
 ever distant from London, on account of the 
 quick and easy access afforded by the railways. 
 Last year pheasants' eggs were exposed in the 
 London shops for sale, boiled hard like plover's 
 eggs, the price varying according to the supply. 
 Gentlemen should combine, and set their faces 
 against this state of things, as well as against the 
 sale of unseasonable game in London. There is 
 law for the prevention of the latter ; and a com- 
 mittee might be arranged, and a public informer 
 established, to put down the illegal traffic. Every 
 head of game so sold must be purchased of a 
 poacher. 
 
 There appears to be, among the very odd 
 notions entertained by some gentlemen on the 
 Bench, a very erroneous one in regard to the 
 interference of policemen with offenders against 
 the Game Laws. In Worcestershire, a constable 
 having searched a man who had previously been 
 in gaol for stealing fowls, suspecting that he had 
 some evidence about him of additional illegality, 
 discovered, concealed on his person, in the month 
 of September, 1844, before daybreak, a gun and 
 three pheasants. The offender was punished 
 under the Game Laws, but the policeman was 
 cautioned by a magistrate never to interfere 
 with a poacher again. The flagrant impropriety 
 of such a caution is evident, for it is the bounden 
 duty of a policeman to protect every species of 
 private property, and to prevent all sorts of crime,
 
 62 
 
 and I hold that magistrate ignorant of the obli- 
 gations of his office, who advises a constable to 
 be remiss in any part of his duty, whether that 
 duty chances to coincide with the peculiar pre- 
 judices of the Justice or not. We have here 
 another instance of " a fancy magistrate." 
 
 I am of opinion that it is as much the duty of 
 the London Police, to lay informations against 
 the poulterers for selling game out of season, as 
 it is for them to suppress gambling, or any other 
 crime. 
 
 I am told it is very amusing, though shameful 
 in the extreme, to see some civic functionaries at 
 dinner. In eating game, when one of the party 
 suddenly ceases from mastication, and in painful 
 indignation pauses, then, like a certain " Master 
 Homer," putting in his thumb, and, instead of a 
 plum, pulling out a shot. All the rest of the 
 guests shudder in indignation and prospective 
 indigestion. The trembling caterer of the game 
 is sent for, and the battered bit of lead held up to 
 his horror-stricken eyes, with the further assur- 
 ance that " it will not be paid for." I am credibly 
 informed that it is a city practice to deal with 
 a poulterer expressly for snared or netted game. 
 The poulterer, of course, under such a state of 
 things, deals with the poacher, at higher prices 
 than those of the legalised vender. There is a 
 vast deal of this, that is most improper ; and I 
 hold the people who are guilty of patronising
 
 63 
 
 such evil practices to be really and in truth those 
 at whose door should lie at least the greater part 
 of the charge of spreading demoralisation and 
 crime among the lower orders. 
 
 I have previously stated that demoralisation 
 exists in the Royal Forests to a great extent, 
 from the fact of the deer and game being neg- 
 lected, the laws for their preservation not half 
 enforced, and from the poor not receiving that 
 attention in reproof and reward, for good and 
 bad conduct, so necessary to their well-being. 
 Of course I allude to the detached forests at a 
 distance from Windsor Castle, and herein more 
 particularly to the Forest of Dean and the New 
 Forest. I know many a mud hut that stands 
 amidst the heather or fern of these Forests, 
 where reproof or praise to the inmates of it 
 never falls from a superior's lips, and where in 
 time of sickness, sorrow, and suffering, the voice 
 of pity, or the hand of succour, is seldom, if 
 ever, heard or seen. In the Forest of Dean, 
 particularly, I know that the hand of poverty has 
 fallen on the working classes, without discrimina- 
 tion as to character : this state of things should be 
 amended. We hear of " rangers " now, we 
 hear of lords and gentlemen as " head keepers " 
 of different " walks," the apparent obligations of 
 some of whom seem to consist in the eating of a 
 Forest buck in summer, and who have no more
 
 64 
 
 to do with the real custody of the royal chase 
 than they have to do with the man in the moon. 
 This is an abuse of that which in the good old 
 merry days of woodcraft was a most useful office, 
 not only as regarded the pleasures of the crown, 
 but as it affected the prosperity of the poor. 
 There was then a " keeper of the royal game," 
 to commend the good and restrain and amend 
 the bad, and to be the representative of the 
 crown in each local act of remuneration and 
 charity. There ought to be an officer of this 
 description now, through whom the poor, on the 
 domains of the Crown, might be cared for, as we 
 care for them on our respective manors. 
 
 The keeping and preservation of the Royal 
 Chase is now a farce, regarding it as a general 
 system; whereas if properly done by, in the 
 New Forest, the Crown might always have it at 
 its disposal to afford nearly as wild and beauti- 
 ful a ground for the stalking of the stag and 
 fallow buck, within an easy distance of London, 
 as in any part of Scotland. It seems to me that 
 the male deer herein are only objects of attention 
 to the keepers in summer, in the double sense of 
 preservation and killing. Whereas male deer 
 will take very good care of themselves when they 
 are fat, from that wondrous instinct in the 
 animal kingdom which is so nearly allied to 
 reason. They are aware when man has an in-
 
 65 
 
 creased desire for their death, and become more 
 wary in proportion. At other seasons, and in 
 hard weather, they will approach the door of 
 a cottage, and, from being very ill provided 
 either with natural or artificial food, they be- 
 come almost accessible with a stick. The country 
 people will then kill them for their skins and 
 horns and " the fry." There is another very 
 extensive abuse in this forest, and that is as 
 regards the license given to certain individuals 
 in its precincts to shoot on the open heaths, and 
 every where except within the fenced enclosures 
 for young timber. I regret to say that this 
 license affords an infinity of demoralising ex- 
 ample to the lower classes, thus : persons being 
 possessed of this license are supposed, and in fact 
 ordered, not to kill hen pheasants or greyhens ; 
 but this I will say, that if the pheasants and 
 black game that many of these shooters kill are 
 the males of their species, I have been in error 
 all my life as to which was the bird that laid the 
 eggs, or, wherever I have been, the cocks must 
 assuredly have taken to sitting ! 
 
 Some men obtain licenses thus to shoot, who, in 
 the whole course of their lives, do not pay one six- 
 pence to the preservation of ahead of game, on their 
 own lands or on the lands of any one else. They 
 give five pounds for their license in the first year, 
 and a sovereign annually thereafter. A bad plan 
 for there are some minds that then fancy they 
 
 E
 
 66 
 
 have paid for it, and have a sort of right to their 
 money's worth, which, in the present state of the 
 game in the New Forest, they would not get, if 
 they shot fairly. What can be expected to come 
 of it, when the man or men who can obtain leave 
 or sufferance over a few acres of neglected land, 
 and who will cut in, to cut off, the tame game 
 reared by another gentleman close under his 
 windows, get possession of a Forest license ; is it 
 likely that they will abstain from killing hens, 
 with nothing but their own conscience to reprove 
 them? I speak seriously of it, and use the word 
 conscience, because a man who obtains a restricted 
 leave ought to keep within it on any subject. If 
 he breaks faith in light matters, I should be very 
 sorry to trust him in heavier ones. Such men 
 as these will often have the abuse of the Game 
 Laws in their mouths, glossed over by all sorts of 
 surface charity and " humbug," as to their strong 
 desire for the morality of the poor ; but I can as- 
 sure them (and those who think the cap fits may 
 wear it), that the poor must receive a benefit 
 from a clean hand to do them any good, for all 
 the remuneration in the world will not blot out the 
 ill effects of bad example. I have a Forest license, 
 I have besides plenty of game of my own, but I 
 procured the license for the sake of snipe-shooting, 
 and not to make the beautiful chase a scene of 
 " pot-hunting labour." In six years or thereabouts 
 I have killed one blackcock ; I could have killed
 
 67 
 
 several grey hens and a few hen pheasants, but 
 would not do so ; and I shall not easily forget 
 the astonishment of a forest beater, who had been 
 out with other people, when I refrained from 
 firing. For the last two years I have not thought 
 it worth while to take my gun, and I have never 
 taken my rod, within the Forest bounds. Every 
 trout-stream is "dammed up" and "laved" by 
 the poachers. This I have observed in my chase 
 of the solitary otter ; and if you go snipe- shooting 
 ten to one but the "pot-hunter" is on the ground 
 before you, having commenced when most men 
 breakfast. The common rights also are shamefully 
 abused : they must be so by the heads of cattle I 
 have seen in that poor and thinly populated dis- 
 trict. Were these to be well examined and reform- 
 ed, I very much mistake if it would not be found 
 that Londoners were exercising rights in regard to 
 brood mares which ought only to belong to local 
 individuals and the poorer classes. I have taken the 
 trouble to count the creatures at pasture on the 
 open lawns, and sweet interstices of turf by the 
 sides of the little streams, on which almost alone 
 should feed the deer. The amount has generally 
 been upwards of a hundred head of cattle and 
 horses, to every eight or ten head of deer. For 
 the additional destruction of the lesser game, the 
 Forest is overrun with vermin, from the falcon to 
 the weasel. The present rangers and head- 
 keepers of forests and their walks, are of no use in 
 
 E 2
 
 68 
 
 the preservation of the deer and game, and how is 
 it possible that they can know if the keepers do their 
 duty ? Their hearts, their heads, and their limbs 
 are either employed with their own affairs, or 
 they are men who would as soon think of flying 
 as going out by night. In many instances they 
 remind me of a friend of mine, who had a little 
 game on a small estate around and under his 
 windows. It was a good deal poached by a man 
 of noted bad character. My friend complained 
 of this ; and on being asked why he did not 
 catch the poacher, he replied, " Egad, I should 
 have caught him the other night, if I had not 
 lost one of my clogs in stepping over a wet 
 place, and while I stopped to look for it, the 
 rascal got off! " 
 
 I will now make some remarks on the alleged 
 injury done to tenant farmers by the preserva- 
 tion of game. 
 
 Upon this subject there has appeared in the 
 public papers a vast deal of anonymous non- 
 sense, purporting to be from tenants suffering 
 from the alleged grievance, which is scarce worth 
 the trouble of reply; however, as I have the 
 Salisbury Journal before me, of the 30th of 
 November, 1844, in which there appears no less 
 than three attacks on the Game Laws, for once 
 I will notice the effusions of anonymous writers. 
 To commence, then, I take a transcription in 
 that paper from the Aylesbury News, under the
 
 69 
 
 head of " An Example to Landlords." After an 
 attack upon the Duke of Buckingham and the 
 Earl of Buckinghamshire, as preservers of game, 
 the article proceeds to say, " Dr. Lee has for 
 years repudiated the Game Laws altogether, 
 refused to act upon them, and has lent his best 
 efforts to bringing about a total repeal." Now 
 to my own knowledge Dr. Lee repudiates fox- 
 hunting, or he did do so, as well as the preserv- 
 ation of game : he has no pleasure in field sports 
 of any sort, and does not keep an establishment 
 for them ; he may, for all 1 know, for other pur- 
 poses, employ a hundred or two of servants, as 
 some of the game preservers do, and make 
 honesty, sobriety, good conduct, and morality a 
 stepping-stone for the poor to rise into affluence. 
 I hope he does do so ; but I deny that he is an 
 example by which other proprietors should be 
 guided. I know something of Dr. Lee's opinions 
 on sporting matters, from having hunted the 
 covers at Colworth, and, when he has no mind 
 to the sin, he would, in the case of fox-hunting, 
 side with the one against the many, with the 
 few against the public ; the instance as regards 
 this " landlord," therefore, will go for as much 
 as it is worth, and no more. When I hunted 
 these covers, fortunately for my hounds, the 
 sporting rights were let to as good a gentleman 
 as ever sat a horse. 
 
 If the writer in the Aylesbury News he is 
 
 B 3
 
 70 
 
 not very clear intends to convey to the public, 
 by the further information, that " Dr. Lee has 
 refused to act upon the Game Laws" that 
 as a justice of peace he has made such a selec- 
 tion all I can say is, that nothing can be 
 half so mischievous or improper, and that if 
 such an example was to be followed as the 
 one, of a member of the Bench selecting par- 
 ticular statutes on which only he would ad- 
 minister the law, and we were to have " fancy " 
 magistrates as well as " fancy " members of par- 
 liament, and " fancy " men, there would be an 
 end to the local administration of the statutes 
 altogether. The sooner the House and the Bench 
 were rid of such monomaniacs the better, for 
 neither the one nor the other can be of any 
 public service or general utility. I perceive by 
 the papers that one or two other proprietors are 
 mentioned as having given up their sporting 
 rights to the tenantry, and that the sporting 
 rights so surrendered are placed to the fact of 
 the proprietor being convinced that he was 
 acting for the good of society and well-being of 
 the morals of the poor. Now there are two 
 ways of ceasing to preserve game, either the one 
 just stated, or because the proprietor, from some 
 personal consideration, does not feel inclined to 
 be at the great expense necessary for its mainte- 
 nance. The example of proprietors in such 
 cases as these are worth much or they are worth
 
 71 
 
 nothing. I suspect the latter. Again ; a man 
 may make a virtue of necessity, and, thinking 
 that he may as well keep the praise of one party 
 at least, for doing an act which, after all, he was 
 obliged to do ; there is nothing to hinder him, 
 were he so inclined, from giving a false colour to 
 the transaction. I do not accuse any one of 
 this unworthiness, but it is a ground that comes 
 within the sdope of my inquiry. 
 
 The other attack, in the same paper, which I 
 shall mention, is from some person styling him- 
 self " A Tenant Farmer." After descanting 
 foolishly, and proving an assertion which I have 
 heard tenant-farmers doubt, and even deny, 
 namely, that if upon their farms there were nei- 
 ther rabbits, hares, nor pheasants, that tenants 
 would be found factious enough to complain of 
 the partridges, he proceeds to say, that in his 
 opinion " a farmer may keep a hundred sheep 
 with less expense than a hundred hares." Now, 
 in reply to this " Tenant Farmer," I would beg 
 the public to ascertain, at least before they give 
 the complainant any pity, the amount at which 
 that " Tenant Farmer" holds his lands, and whe- 
 ther or not he has not received them underlet on 
 account of the game ; or, if he did not take his 
 farm with his eyes open, and under the know- 
 ledge that game has been, and would be preserved 
 upon it. This and the foregoing fact of under- 
 letting are often lost sight of by the surface 
 
 E 4
 
 72 
 
 arguer for particular positions, but they are 
 weighty circumstances, which give the true colour 
 to the whole transaction. Would the " Tenant 
 Farmer" be prepared upon his own farm, if he 
 has one, to increase his rent according to his own 
 estimation of the capabilities of his land, if there 
 were no hares ; and would he pay for the acres in 
 proportion to the given number of sheep he de- 
 clares could be kept, with advantage too, in place 
 of the same number of hares not permitted to 
 exist? I think not. I never heard, upon the 
 fact of game being destroyed, or on any other, of 
 tenants coming forward with an increased offer of 
 rent, and yet if all was true that this " Tenant 
 Farmer" asserts, as conscientious men they 
 might do so, and still keep some advantage to 
 themselves. 
 
 The desire of legislating between the landlord 
 and tenant is like the attempt to legislate for the 
 poor in factories, between the mother or the 
 father and their child. The best and proper 
 guardian of his tenant is the proprietor, as the 
 natural and only effective guardian of the infant, 
 is the parent. Landlords for their own sake will 
 keep down the rabbits, and hares too, where the 
 facilities for the breeding of the latter admit of 
 there being too many. It is not on all soils and 
 in all places that such an event will occur in re- 
 gard to hares ; rabbits will breed any where, and, 
 from their always feeding in one spot, they, if
 
 73 
 
 they are not reduced, will do an infinity of mis- 
 chief. The rabbit comes forth and dwells by the 
 cover side, the hare canters on through field and 
 field, and stops in no particular situation, as any 
 observer may of an evening prove. 
 
 There are no soils that I have ever been ac- 
 quainted with (I have never been in Norfolk or 
 Suffolk), where it is possible to overrun the 
 tenant to any considerable damage, more than an 
 easy rent will repay, with pheasants. Nature seems 
 to have drawn an insurmountable barrier, and 
 when the feathered game is as much as the ground 
 will bear, or the insect tribes feed, it will of itself 
 die away. There are some soils that will carry 
 very few pheasants indeed ; I repeat again, none 
 that I know of that will bear them in amount suf- 
 ficient to hurt the tenant-farmer at his highest 
 rent, and certainly none to injure him in any de- 
 gree when purposely under-rented. People igno- 
 rant in these matters speak as if the pheasants 
 lived solely at the expense of the farmer, whereas 
 the pheasant is often the best customer the farmer 
 has ; for the landlord purchases at the best price 
 whole ricks of barley, beans, and buckwheat, be- 
 sides potatoes and Swede turnips, with which to 
 stack his woods and feed his game. The damage 
 effected by partridges is really if any so trifling 
 that it is not worth alluding to. 
 
 One more instance, while on this topic, of the 
 little foundation often existing for the complaints
 
 74 
 
 made by tenants against the game. Shortly be- 
 fore the death of a man who had rented under 
 my family all his life, and amassed a very large 
 fortune, that man declared that, though he had 
 been in the constant habit of making complaints 
 against the game, on account of the allowances 
 made him, he held himself a considerable gamer 
 instead of loser by the hare and pheasant. 
 
 I know places where the sporting rights are 
 given to the tenantry by reason of the fact that 
 there is a non-resident proprietor, or that the pro- 
 prietor cannot make use of them himself, and in 
 all these places there is so little game that after 
 the first week in September it is almost useless to 
 carry a gun, while at the same time the estate 
 has become a grand nursery for poachers. I 
 have heard people say, <u My tenants preserve for 
 me." But tenants do not and will not preserve 
 the game. I do not mean to say that if they saw 
 a poacher taking game that they would not stop 
 him, but they will not watch by day and night, 
 and pay gamekeepers, and there is no real pre- 
 servation of game without it. When tenants 
 have the sporting rights the labouring population 
 become poachers, precisely as I have described in 
 other neglected lands or manors. Though I have 
 lived in the country all my life, and shared in 
 many a happy day with the farmer my sole com- 
 panion, nevertheless, from firm conviction of the 
 mischief it occasions to the farmer himself, to his
 
 75 
 
 sons, and to the poor, if I had a hundred estates 
 I would never give, from my own exclusive pos- 
 session, the right to the different kinds of game. 
 My tenantry should enjoy my sport with me, but 
 if they used a gun or a greyhound, by special in- 
 vitation only. They might accompany me to 
 share the sport that my hounds or dogs of any 
 sort afforded whenever they pleased, and the 
 more that could afford to come the merrier I 
 would be. 
 
 In the one case the tenant becomes half farmer, 
 half sportsman, and half poacher: if he is an 
 old man, or incapable or disinclined to kill the 
 game himself, his sons throw off all attention to 
 farming occupations, no longer assist their pa- 
 rent, but become altogether idle in pursuit of 
 their unnecessary and ill-placed amusement. In 
 the other case it is far better. The landlord 
 retains the rights which in sound sense and on 
 reasonable principles, should be his alone. He 
 can give if he pleases to his tenantry days of 
 sport and pleasure : his doing so is accepted by 
 them as a graceful civility, and valued accord- 
 ingly, and he has it in his power to reward and 
 patronise the poor. I have no hesitation, then, 
 in declaring, that all rights to the game being 
 vested in the landlord, it is better for the farmer, 
 ten thousand times more advantageous to the 
 poor, and greatly beneficial to the welfare of 
 every class of persons in his vicinity.
 
 76 
 
 " Live, and let live," are favourite words in 
 the public speeches of agriculturists, both on the 
 side of landlord and tenant. I hold the pro- 
 prietor who does not " let " his tenants " live," 
 to be blind to his own interests ; and I hold the 
 tenant farmer, who would in any way conspire 
 for an interference with the living of his land- 
 lord, to be little short of a madman. Their in- 
 terests are inseparable ; the one a protection to 
 the other : they are like the fable of the mem- 
 bers and the belly ; if the limbs fail, the stomach 
 famishes, and the whole fabric dies. Then let 
 the tenant farmer beware how he resigns himself 
 into the hands of a man or men who have shown 
 that they would blindly rush into alterations of 
 the corn laws. Every grain in the formation of 
 which should be well considered and reconsidered, 
 lest the displacement of a single corn should 
 bring a narrowed difficulty, instead of a wide 
 and general improvement, on the barn as on the 
 factory, on agriculture and on trade. 
 
 I say again, that I love to see many a well- 
 known face, many a yeoman and farmer, many a 
 hearty friend from the neighbouring town or 
 city, and many a labouring man, riding or run- 
 ning by my side, when I am out with hounds or 
 greyhounds. There is something rich and racy 
 to me in the open-heartedness, good fellowship, 
 and joy, of woodcraft, where man may meet his 
 fellow man in active emulation, without the re-
 
 77 
 
 straints imposed by the calmer and more studied 
 rules of society. If you destroy the scene of those 
 pleasures which bring the landlord and tenant, 
 the rich and poor together, or weaken them so 
 that you keep the aristocracy away ; if you take 
 from society such opportunities of making its 
 classes more intimately known to each other ; if 
 you make still wider the ruinous severance which 
 too often exists between the well- wrapped owner 
 of the soil and the shivering hands that plough 
 its furrows I say that you achieve a monstrous 
 injury for all classes of her Majesty's subjects, 
 which cannot be too utterly condemned. 
 
 Upon the general review, then, of these facts, 
 let me enjoin the landlord, the tenant, the yeo- 
 man, and the lower classes, not to listen to, or be 
 led away by, the false doctrines of the surface- 
 reason ers, who, for their own ends and purposes, 
 do not care to risk the still further impoverish- 
 ment of the poor, but let me honestly advise all 
 those who read this pamphlet to abstain from 
 lending the strength of numbers to the adoption 
 of a system most injurious and unsound. 
 
 The Game Laws are to be regarded as laws 
 founded on sound and rational principles, doing 
 good to the community instead of harm, mainly 
 instrumental in preventing the ruin which would 
 be caused by absenteeism, affording a wide and 
 beneficial employment to the local poor, not in 
 the least demoralising in their effects, while they
 
 78 
 
 afford a considerable revenue to government, in 
 no way whatever pressing upon the lower classes. 
 As a friend to the true interests of the tenant 
 farmer, as an advocate on all occasions for the 
 maintenance of the just rights and recreations of 
 the poor, I come forward openly and strenuously 
 to defend the game laws, and to offer to the public 
 the facts of my own experience. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 Printed by A. SPOTTISWOODK, 
 New- Street- Square.
 
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