The soCial C onTeXTs of Wildlife, C.1650–1750^69suspected of possessing equipment which could be used to take game. The
right to possess such equipment was restricted to owners of property with
a yearly rental value of £100, possessors of leasehold property valued at
£150 per annum, the sons and heirs of ‘an Esquire, or other person of higher
degree’, and the owners of parks and warrens and their gamekeepers. The
act maintained the penalties laid down in earlier legislation, that is, a fine
of 20 shillings per head of game killed or three months imprisonment. But
the stakes were subsequently raised higher. An act of 1707 increased the
penalty for poaching to a fine of £5, while the Black Act of 1723 prescribed
the death penalty for merely being found in the vicinity of a game reserve,
suitably disguised or equipped.^41 This was an extraordinary piece of
legislation, initially a response to raids carried out by groups of poachers –
disguised by having their faces blackened – on parks at Farnham in Surrey
and Caversham in Berkshire. It introduced the death penalty for more than
fifty offences relating to poaching, vandalism and – in some cases – no more
than suspicious behaviour in forests or near parks. It is noticeable that
particular legislation was thus required to protect these wild or semi-wild
animals. Like the Civil War soldiers, convinced that pigeons were simply
‘fowls of the air’ given to all men, the rural population evidently regarded
these creatures as somehow different in kind to domesticated animals like
sheep or cows. Their uncertain, intermediate status between domesticated
and wild allowed some moral ambiguity over their status as property, even
when restrained within warrens or parks. It is indeed noteworthy that the
legislation passed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was
essentially concerned with protecting the denizens of rabbit warrens, fish
ponds, and deer parks – that is, with forms of ‘intermediate exploitation’ –
rather than with preventing the poaching of birds and animals running freely
in the countryside. Only gradually, in the course of the eighteenth century –
and especially after 1750 – did legislation come to focus more directly on
the preservation of pheasants, partridges, hares and other game in the wider
landscapes. This was because it was only in the second half of the eighteenth
century that game-shooting, and game preservation, developed in its highly
organized modern form.^42
That development, as we shall see, was dependent on two things: the
consolidation of large and continuous landed estates, which meant that it was
feasible to breed and preserve game in large numbers; and improvements in
firearm technology, which enabled large numbers of game to be shot. In the
period with which we are here concerned, between 1650 and 1750, the main
firearm employed for recreational shooting was the flintlock. This was more
compact and manageable than the earlier matchlock, but still cumbersome
enough: anything from 4' 6" to 6' in length, and unreliable in ways that
have bequeathed to us a range of common sayings, such as ‘flash in the
pan’ and ‘going off at half cock’.^43 Shooting tended to be a casual affair:
small groups of legally qualified individuals would go out in the countryside
on an informal basis.^44 Often they would hunt across the property of
others without hindrance – it was sometimes hard to do otherwise, where