Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 279

It is quite hard to know what to make of this book because it is uncertain about its aims. At one level it is a contribution to the perennial discussion of the origins of the English Civil War. At another it is about forests as ‘special places’. It is also about masculine honor [sic] in the early seventeenth century seen through hunting and acts of violence in forests; and it is about defence of custom by the communities within the forests, which leads Beaver into questions of popular politics. The first chapter is about the hunt as a male pursuit: then we have detailed discussions of four locations in southern England all of which were convulsed by disputes over forests in the generation before the Civil War. The introduction takes the book in one direction: the first chapter in another. So there is no lack of ambition here, but this is not a satisfactory book. The four studies are closely wrought and yet it may be asked whether they actually convey the meaning that Beaver attaches to them. He has drunk deeply at the fount of anthropology and I am not always convinced that his explanation of events is necessarily the most obvious. Not everyone will be persuaded by his discovery of the ‘sacrificial aspect’ of the hunt. He persistently reads honour as a leading motive in gentry behaviour when more base questions of possession sometimes seem to be at the forefront of the cases he discusses.

This may be seen in the first of the four studies, ‘Honor, property and the symbolism of the hunt in Stowe, 1590–1642’, an account of the conflict between the Temples (of whom we have heard) and the Dayrells (of whom we have not). For Beaver, ‘… the imbroglio of the Temples and Dayrells evokes the violent competition for honor at the heart of orderliness and power in the seventeenth century’ (p.52). Beaver wants to read the dispute as a competition for honour when it is really about possession. What happened was that Sir Peter Temple, having decided to enlarge Stowe Park, and having had an offer to exchange land for Dayrell’s declined, simply went ahead and enclosed Abel Dayrell’s land in his park. The Dayrells were left with no option but to try and prove their rights at law whilst maintaining their possession by violence. The dispute then became confused with counterclaims over Temple’s depopulation of Stowe and Dayrell’s overgrazing. As Beaver acknowledges, Temple humiliated the Dayrells and it is hard to see that he was anything but in the wrong. Overall though, Beaver seems to lean to Temple’s side. At one moment he comments that ‘Contests over the power to keep or recover economically marginal slivers of land reveal the extent to which honor represented an end in itself in the political economy of gentility …’ (p.38) but in a petition of 1642 the extent of the land in question is given as 40 acres, hardly a sliver. It is a considerable weakness of the essay that Beaver does not view the Dayrells’ hunting in terms of its exact location. It seems entirely plausible to think that they were not hunting in the park, but on their own land within the park. Without this spatial dimension, my sense is that Beaver cannot fully understand what is happening.

The second of the four essays, on Waltham Forest, 1608–42, is also rather an odd piece. Here the body of the essay concerns a dispute between Edward Denny, lord of the manor of Nazeing, and his copyholders over the use of a substantial (600-acre) wood pasture within the manor which fell within the bounds of Waltham Forest. Beaver’s account is given up-side-down. His interest is caught by a riot in 1622 after Denny had ordered the common to be driven: a rescue of some of the animals caught by this drift took place, led by a number of village women. Denny’s officer was mildly beaten and died later in the year, and this gave Denny his opportunity to bring a Star Chamber suit against the women. What is admitted only some pages later is that Denny had sought to make an enclosure of the wood, but when the copyholders refused to be a party to his plans, he threatened either to open up the wood to the deer of the Forest or turn it into a warren. The drift and the Star Chamber suit was all part of a process of intimidation of the villagers, and the drift was a clear affront to village and manorial authority. The dispute is, it seems to me, only peripherally about the deer or the forest: it is, as the copyholders understood, about them standing in the way of Denny’s enclosure project.

The account of Windsor Forest, 1603–42 is, like the others, rich in detail, but it is not always clear what Beaver thinks he is proving. Certainly there is much of interest on the way, on organized poaching for the meat trade, the crackdown on turf cutting in Winksfield and Wargrave in the early 1620s and the implementation of revived Forest Law after 1632. The crown’s officers assumed they had rights in the 1630s which were historically unverified: in 1640 the Earl of Holland went so far as to challenge the customary rights of common in Windsor Great Park. The final study is an account of events on Corse Lawn Chase in the 1630s which led to the mass slaughter of deer in the chase in October 1642. Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex acquired the land in 1629 and tried repeatedly to establish discipline in the chase, excluding both hunters and poachers and thoroughly alienating the neighbourhood. But again, by concentrating so exclusively on the deer, Beaver cannot fully understand the dynamics of the politics surrounding the chase: Middlesex, it seems, was evidently oppressing the tenants of Forthampton at the same time. While Beaver tries to connect the slaughter of October 1642 to the ‘blood month’ of November (do we, as rural historians, believe in such a thing?), the evidence seems to suggest something quite different. The deer were slaughtered and left to rot. There seems to be no suggestion that they were taken for food. To carry them away would have been to diminish the force of the rejection implicit in the massacre.

This suggests a further blindness in the book. Beaver is interested in hunting as a manifestation of gentry honour and gentry ethos. Hence he is very interesting on gentry purlieu hunters in Essex and elsewhere. What he does not consider is just how hated the deer were by those who had to cope with them on a day-to-day basis eating their crops but who might be prosecuted for driving them off their land. Deer may well have been the objects of aristocratic desire, if not perhaps a ritual sacrifice: but for many others they were merely particularly large vermin. There is some interesting data on the number of deer found dead within Windsor Forest, some of whom had certainly died from gunshot wounds, and the appearance is that there was a great deal of illicit destruction of the animals. (This is less clear-cut than Beaver acknowledges. He attributes the unusually large numbers of deer dead in 1624 to the commoners’ actions in defence of their common rights, but the deer may simply have starved in this unusually severe year.) Hence we can suggest that the king’s deer had three enemies who are not sufficiently distinguished in the book; those gentlemen who subscribed to the aristocratic ethos and who, rightly or wrongly, claimed a right to hunt; those who poached the deer for profit; and those who regarded the animals as a nuisance and were desperate to be rid of them.

What is also fascinating is the extent to which the crown attempted to create new powers (under the guise of a revived Forest Law) in the 1630s, how these powers were implemented locally in and around Windsor without any regard for the established relations of commoners to Forest, and how bullying landowners (Temple or Middlesex) took their cue from this to make their own claims over the deer. The revival of forest law was a sufficient grievance for parliament to legislate on it in 1641, but it is plain that this did not satisfy, and in the breakdown of law and order in the following months, a great many people had their revenge on the deer in ways which showed their rejection of aristocratic assumptions. Some (not all) were maintaining one set of property rights over another and taking back what they regarded as theirs, including rights of common, but moreover, they were claiming an exclusive right to their land without the intrusion of someone else’s deer into their corn. Whatever else, deer did not roam over the post-Restoration countryside and those who wanted something to chase had to look to the fox.

Beaver’s book has its moments and will be ransacked for its detail. But its purpose is far from clear, and its judgements sometimes quirky. It is neither the book on aristocratic hunting nor the study of the royal forests in the 1630s that we need. As a study of the royal forests, Beaver never acknowledges the scale of disafforestation in the 1620s and 1630s: whilst the crown was extending its authority in some locations, it was pulling in its horns in others. Odd to say, the outcome of both policies – popular violence – was probably much the same.