1. INTRODUCTION
In the century after 1750, approximately 5000 separate acts of parliament were passed enabling the enclosure of large swathes of open field, common and waste land in England and Wales. As much as one-fifth of the country was enclosed by these means, with the Midland counties – where the largest incidence of open-field farming remained – the most affected. As much as 50 per cent of land was enclosed in counties such as Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire in this period. The privatisation of the landscape, and the large-scale transfer into private hands of land that had formerly been subject to communal regulation, was accompanied by significant changes in land use. Greater specialisation was evident, with areas naturally suited to pastoral agriculture giving up the unequal struggle to grow significant quantities of grain, and arable regions focusing their energies on raising wheat. In both cases, the fact that significant blocks of land now came under the control of individual farmers allowed them to import new, ‘scientific’ methods to aid production.Footnote 1
Historians continue to debate the effects of parliamentary enclosure on the communities within these privatised landscapes. For some scholars, enclosure abruptly curtailed a traditional, communal way of life by denying the poor access to resources such as the commons. The Hammonds, writing in the early twentieth century, considered that enclosure destroyed the traditional ‘companionship of classes’ that had marked English rural life and led to ‘the break up of the village community’.Footnote 2 Modern scholars such as Jeanette Neeson concur. In a study based on Northamptonshire land tax returns, Neeson calculated that a staggering 49 per cent of landholders were dispossessed at enclosure.Footnote 3 Enclosure, in her view, was a disaster for the poorer sections of village society:
Where the peasant economy had survived in open-field villages until enclosure it had depended on a particular agricultural practice, a set of social relations, a right to use common lands and a body of commoners large enough to support it: after enclosure all of these were either changed or lost.Footnote 4
This perspective has not passed unchallenged. From the 1960s, historians have sought to play down the impact of parliamentary enclosure by pointing out that as much as 80 per cent of England and Wales had already been enclosed by 1700.Footnote 5 More recent scholarship has questioned the extent to which the poor had access to common land in unenclosed rural communities and the terms on which such access was granted. Sara Birtles and Leigh Shaw-Taylor have both argued that where ‘common’ resources continued to exist, access to them was not simply available to all comers: in most villages the right to enjoy the bounty of the commons was strictly regulated – and jealously guarded by those who possessed it.Footnote 6 Even where, in the wake of the Elizabethan Poor Law settlement, the poor were allowed to gather fuel from waste land, it was clearly understood by the owners of the commons that this was a privilege granted them in order to reduce the burden of poor-rate, and not a right to commons in fee simple.Footnote 7 In this reading, both the scale of the dispossession caused by enclosure and its social impact on the community were far less severe.
In this article, the question of how far parliamentary enclosure made an impact on the everyday life of the communities it touched will be approached from a slightly different perspective. Using a sample of parishes in Northamptonshire, the article will focus on the efforts of parishes to control the various species of vermin. In what follows, it will be suggested that by the eighteenth century, the parish-sponsored regulation of vermin had become a form of popular hunting that existed beyond the limits imposed by the game laws. Since, as will be seen, local vermin control involved people from a range of social backgrounds, its history during the period of enclosure provides an interesting index of how the redrawing of the landscape affected the sense of ‘community’ within a parish.Footnote 8
The article begins by sketching out the origins of parish-level vermin control, before turning to examine its role as a form of ‘popular hunting’. The article ends by examining how these cultures of popular hunting were affected by parliamentary enclosure. As will be seen, the evidence from this most active of enclosure counties suggests that popular cultures of vermin hunting were surprisingly resilient, a finding which adds weight to the notion that levels of disruption to village culture caused by enclosure can be exaggerated.
2. PARISH VERMIN CONTROL
Despite burgeoning interest in human–animal interactions, very little work has been undertaken on people's relationship with ‘vermin’.Footnote 9 In fact, vermin control was a major preoccupation of parish vestries for some three centuries after 1532, when the first English legislation on the subject was enacted.Footnote 10 Faced with the problem of persistent hunger and occasional famine among the human population, Tudor governments not only instituted new arrangements for the care of the poor, charging parishes with their upkeep, but also sought to eliminate unwelcome competition for scarce food supplies.Footnote 11 Under the 1566 Act for Protecting Grain, parishes were enjoined to take up arms against a long list of ‘vermin’. Various bird species, foxes, hedgehogs, otters, moles, polecats and badgers found themselves reclassified in these unflattering terms – and with a fixed price on their heads.Footnote 12 While the legislation was ostensibly aimed at protecting grain supplies, villagers across the country took aim at many other animal and bird species such as kingfishers and wildcats that simply possessed nuisance value.
The consequence of the legislation was what Keith Thomas has called a ‘colossal’ destruction of targeted species.Footnote 13 The numbers grew especially large from the late seventeenth century, when it became increasingly common to take out birds with guns. As the most important historian of vermin hunting, Roger Lovegrove, has demonstrated, the levels of destruction would remain enormous for the next 100 years, only falling away towards the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 14
This article makes no claim to be a comprehensive history of vermin hunting over the longue durée. Instead, as discussed in the introduction, its aim is to explore local approaches to vermin hunting on the eve of enclosure, and assess how they changed as enclosure made an impact upon the patterns of land ownership and occupation in the countryside. The focus of the article is thus the period between the mid-eighteenth century, when the war against vermin was at its hottest, and the early nineteenth century, when it was drawing to its close. At the heart of what follows lies an analysis of parish-sponsored vermin regimes in two distinct topographical regions within Northamptonshire. The sample takes three contiguous hundreds in the western, and predominantly pastoral, portion of the county (Guilsborough, Fawsley and Greens Norton) and four in the more arable east (Higham Ferrers, Huxloe, Navisford and Polebrook). The total of 96 parishes contained in these two groups represents approximately one-third of the parishes in the historic county. For all parishes, detailed surveys were conducted of surviving accounts kept by churchwardens and constables for the period 1700–1900. The records of 41 parishes (some 43 per cent of the original sample) made references to bounties for vermin and it is on these that the following sections are based.
The sums required to pay the bounties – like the money expended in poor relief – were raised locally from the parish rates, and the disbursements were duly recorded in the accounts of either the churchwardens or, more rarely, the constable or the overseer of the poor. In a very few parishes, such as Culworth in Northamptonshire, it seems that the manorial courts took responsibility for vermin control.Footnote 15 Undated seventeenth-century field orders from the parish specified that:
every man after they come home from following the cross on Cross Monday be ready with cither spythll spade, chontte or other spade & divide themselves by ii & ii in all the fields … until night to destroy moles nests, upon pain to him that is away iiiid.Footnote 16
Here vermin control was a communal responsibility undertaken at Rogationtide, when the bounds of the parish were also beaten and the fields and crops blessed.Footnote 17 Elsewhere, the money used to pay vermin bounties might be generated by manorial court fines, whilst at Finedon in eastern Northamptonshire, the manorial officials organised an annual levy based on the holding of each tenant in order to pay a mole-catcher.Footnote 18 For the most part, however, payments for vermin control were made by parish officers.
Significant regional differences are apparent in the kinds of vermin recorded in the parish accounts, as the work of Lovegrove has demonstrated. His exhaustive sampling of the surviving records for many different parts of the country reveals that in areas of old enclosure such as southern England a wide variety of species was hunted and killed. In the traditional open-field Midland counties, however, the range of species for which bounties were paid was much narrower. The research conducted for this article suggests that, in Northamptonshire, while there were sundry payments for everything from polecats and otters to snakes and large birds of prey, parish inventories were dominated by the rewards given for hedgehogs, moles, foxes and sparrows. Hedgehogs were hunted because of the erroneous popular belief that they sucked milk from sleeping cows and the more sustainable objection that they ate eggs; moles for the damage they did to the roots of growing crops; and foxes for their predations on the flocks of domestic chickens kept by many rural households.Footnote 19 All three were traditional enemies of the country dweller, and long-standing victims of parish vermin control strategies; sparrows, however, appear to have become a particular pest from the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote 20
Sparrows were considered troublesome in both the garden and the field, eating seeds and buds, consuming vast amounts of grain, and fouling more in the farmyards, rendering the grain unusable. In addition, they did considerable damage to thatch, burrowing into roofs to make nests. Enclosure ensured a proliferation of the favourite habitat of sparrows, as miles of new hedgerows were planted.Footnote 21 From the mid-century, newspaper reports regularly detailed their depredations. In 1745, the Dublin Journal reported the complaints of those farming newly enclosed fields that sparrows were even more destructive of their crops than Norway rats.Footnote 22 Eight years later, a report in the Whitehall Evening Post recounted that sparrows had destroyed a whole field of barley near Galway, blithely ignoring the desperate attempts of farmers to frighten them away by shooting guns and throwing stones.Footnote 23 It was, said the paper, ‘the first instance of an entire Crop being carried off by Sparrows’. If such extreme cases were mercifully rare, sparrows were regular pests across the corn-growing areas. John Middleton, in his account of agriculture in Middlesex, reckoned that sparrows cost farmers at least a shilling an acre on the whole value of a farm, taking into account both what they ate and the cost of hiring boys to protect the newly sown corn in the spring.Footnote 24 This figure did not take account of other damage committed by jays (on bean crops), pigeons (tares) and rooks (beans). At all events, it is no surprise that a law designed to protect human food supplies came to be enacted with particular ferocity against such a voracious competitor.
In Northamptonshire, the distribution of payments for different species varied according to topography. Hedgehogs more frequently came to grief in the western pastoral parishes, for example, while the amounts expended by the churchwardens on crows, rooks, magpies and other members of the corvid family were also much higher and continued to be paid for a much longer period in western than eastern Northamptonshire. This may reflect the fact that this was a sheep-rearing area: crows in particular were known for occasional predations on newborn lambs, as well as for taking barnyard fowls.Footnote 25 Equally, farmers might have been keen to protect small, but important, acreages of arable crops from rooks that damaged newly sown spring corn by picking the seeds from the ground.Footnote 26 Moles, meanwhile, were the classic victims of the arable east, presumably reflecting the damage they caused to the roots of crops.Footnote 27 Three times as many parishes in the eastern than western sample paid bounties for moles, a division between arable and pastoral areas that is also reflected on a national level.Footnote 28
Payments for foxes and sparrows, however, were common in both sample areas. The latter, in particular, were the subject of especial hostility, and, as a consequence, the sums paid for foxes, hedgehogs and moles pale into insignificance with the amount expended by parishes across Northamptonshire for sparrows.Footnote 29 Some 75 per cent of parishes in the sample abetted the destruction of sparrows, and it is known that farmers often supplemented this by paying sums from their own pockets.Footnote 30 Sparrows remained the object of determined parish-funded hostility until the mid-nineteenth century, although how little good came of this can be seen from the example of Braunston. The vestry began its campaign against sparrows in 1672: as late as 1787 they were still paying out on 258 dozen. Clearly the tactic of mass killing failed to have a significant impact on the overall sparrow population level.Footnote 31
The mechanics of vermin control were various. Some parishes retained a specialist vermin-killer or employed a ‘field-man’ who looked after both the hedges and gates in the open fields and took care of the vermin, as was the case across the Northamptonshire border in Pertenhall, Bedfordshire.Footnote 32 In Northamptonshire itself, it is clear that many moles were taken by mole-catchers who were retained by the parish.Footnote 33 The sums paid to these specialists varied. The mole-catchers at Braunston, Crick and Thrapston received 10s a year, while their colleagues in Isham and Barnwell received £1 10s annually, a variance presumably reflecting the differing destructive ambitions of the local moles.Footnote 34 The churchwardens and constables of some parishes also paid one or more individuals for ‘crow keeping’: that is, scaring the crows and other birds off the fields with clappers or guns, usually immediately after the spring crops had been planted.Footnote 35 Gypsies were also said to make a little money by vermin catching in some areas.Footnote 36
Whatever was paid to the professionals, however, it is clear from local records that the front-line warriors in the battle against vermin were the parishioners themselves.Footnote 37 In Northamptonshire the bulk of payments recorded in the accounts of churchwardens were made to individuals who brought in a dozen sparrow heads, a single mole or a solitary hedgehog. At Ringstead, for example, 26 different men brought in dead moles at various times during 1820: 6 names appeared only once in the annual account, each individual receiving payment for a single mole; no one delivered more than 10 on any one occasion. Much the same was true at Ecton. Here, the churchwardens paid 1d a mole to a succession of individuals, some of whom brought in no more than a single animal. Nevertheless, the cost added up: in the early eighteenth century, the Ecton vestry was paying out about £4 a year for moles alone.
Fox bounties were also normally paid to an individual, though occasionally two names were listed. The perambulatory nature of the fox meant that payments were sometimes made to men from outside the parish, although there is little sense that those involved in vermin hunting partook of the village hunts described by Manning which still survived in some areas.Footnote 38 The churchwardens of Everdon paid for nine foxes ‘taken at places that [are] near to us’ in 1725, for example, while those at Crick paid out for foxes killed in Watford, Kilsby and Hillmorton (Warwickshire). Of the 37 foxes paid for by the churchwardens of Guilsborough between 1755 and 1779, only 10 were killed in the parish: the rest were caught in neighbouring parishes, mainly West Haddon and Naseby.Footnote 39
Not all the churchwardens' accounts give the names of the individuals paid for vermin; where they do, comparison with parish rate books, vestry records and estate rentals allow us to say something about the people who brought vermin in. It seems that all classes of the community from farmers to labourers were represented in the accounts. At Ashby St Ledgers, for example, sparrows, polecats and hedgehogs were brought in by several of the biggest farmers on the Ashley estate in 1750, as well as by some of the cottagers, while in later decades even the coachman and the gardener at Ashby Hall occasionally supplemented their incomes with a dead polecat or hedgehog.Footnote 40 At Thorpe Achurch in the 1780s and 1790s, most of the sparrows were brought in by the children of cottagers on the Powys estate, although the tenant of the Rectory Farm and his young son also claimed bounties.Footnote 41 Much the same was true in the parish of Wicken. Of the 23 named individuals who brought sparrows to the Wicken churchwardens in the mid-1770s, one was the tenant of a medium-sized farm on the Prowse estate, another was rated for an unidentified property worth £35, three were freeholders or tenants with a single house each and three more were probably the children of tenant farmers. The rest do not appear in the church rate levy for 1775, and were almost certainly cottagers or their children.Footnote 42
In many parishes children brought in the bulk of vermin.Footnote 43 This was the case in Guilsborough, Stoke Doyle, Thorpe Achurch and Clapton, for example, and familiarity with the involvement of children is reflected in these disapproving lines written by the Northampton poet–labourer, John Clare:
Hedgehogs were also taken by children, as Clare records in the same poem:
By the time Clare penned these lines, vestry payments for vermin hunting were tailing off in Northamptonshire, much as they were elsewhere in the country. The last payments in the county for foxes and crows were made in 1820–1825 and for hedgehogs and moles around 1830. The bounties on sparrows, however, continued to be paid well into the middle of the nineteenth century – this in spite of an increasingly vocal campaign insisting that sparrows did more good than harm because they devoured vast quantities of insect pests along with the grain they consumed.Footnote 45 Churchwardens at Wollaston paid almost £11 for the heads of 16,000 sparrows in 1845, their peers at Norton expended more than £3 in 1850, and the parish of Whittlebury only finally abandoned sparrow bounties in 1852, when they nevertheless expended £2 13s 3d on the birds. The last payment for sparrows in the sample of Northamptonshire parishes was recorded at Hellidon in 1868, whilst the last in nearby Bedfordshire was at Tingrith in 1873.Footnote 46
The abandonment of payments brought to an end some 300 years of parish-sanctioned action against a wide range of competitor species. How successful the campaign was in protecting scarce food supplies is perhaps questionable; however, what does seem clear is that the Tudor laws facilitated the emergence of a widely embraced culture of popular hunting. Whilst higher-value species were protected by ever-more severe game laws, parishes across the country encouraged local inhabitants in the relentless pursuit of vermin. As this section has demonstrated, local people of all ages and degrees of status, from sizeable farmers down to the children of poor cottagers, heeded the call. The mocking truism quoted in one mid-eighteenth century newspaper, ‘in the Country where they have no Game, those pass for Sportsmen who shoot Sparrows’,Footnote 47 doubtless contained more than a grain of truth in many parts of rural England where, unnoticed by historians, a culture of popular hunting thrived. The question at issue, however, is the extent to which this popular pastime was disrupted by parliamentary enclosure.
3. VILLAGE CULTURE AND PARLIAMENTARY ENCLOSURE
The era of parliamentary enclosure in Northamptonshire began in 1727, and was marked by two significant peaks of activity.Footnote 48 In the west, enclosure was particularly heavy between 1750 and 1780, and the land was laid chiefly to pasture. In the east, by contrast, the great period of enclosure came in response to rocketing grain prices during the Napoleonic wars, and was a feature of the period 1790–1820. The advent of enclosure undoubtedly altered the internal spatial logic of any given parish: numbers of landowners fell; land use changed; and the new laws meant old patterns of access to the landscape and its resources were challenged. Yet, as this section will demonstrate, while enclosure certainly underlined the exclusive nature of private property, not all aspects of village life changed.
The passage of an act of enclosure had an important impact on the topography of a parish. Whatever material losses it caused to the poor, it undoubtedly reshaped the world within which they lived and moved in ways that must have felt artificial and unnatural. That was certainly the impression formed by Clare, on returning to find that his native parish of Helpston had been enclosed. The countryside of his free-ranging boyhood existed no more, and the old rights of way were closed and blocked. He recorded his feelings in ‘The Mores’:Footnote 49
Many must have lamented the passing of old ways as much as Clare, and some took up a more immediate weapon than the pen to make their feelings known. At Northampton, where the common fields outside the town were enclosed in 1778, people broke fences and forced their way through onto what had formerly been a communal resource in order to exercise their horses. The new owners of these previously ‘common’ fields were convinced that the horses would ruin the new system of husbandry they had instituted and, in 1784, threatened that any future breaches would be regarded as trespass and the perpetrators prosecuted accordingly.Footnote 50
Restrictions on access relating to recreation were one thing; however, enclosure also affected access to various natural resources that had formerly been accessible to the whole community – fodder for livestock, wood and furze for fuel, and various wild nuts and berries. In the Northamptonshire parish of Newbottle, for example, the completion of enclosure in 1772 was marked by a tightening of the regulations respecting the gathering of nuts, on the grounds that those who went nutting destroyed valuable underwood in the process. The owners took out an advertisement in the Northamptonshire Mercury threatening with prosecution any who persisted in what they termed the ‘usual and scandalous Practice’ of nutting.Footnote 51 Clearly an attempt was being made to enforce a new spatial morality within the parish: ‘usual’ practice had now become ‘scandalous’ because of the damage to the underwood – which was private property. How effective such admonitions were is not clear since two years later a second advertisement appeared giving notice that Earl Spencer had been obliged to set a ‘strong guard’ over Newbottle Wood and reiterating that anyone caught in the wood would be prosecuted.Footnote 52
As well as defending newly acquired rights, property owners frequently reasserted existing ones. This was particularly true in relation to game. The game laws were notoriously restrictive in eighteenth-century England – much more so than in contemporary France, for example.Footnote 53 Under the Game Act of 1671, only those with freehold property worth £100 per annum, or leasehold property worth £150 per annum could shoot hare, pheasant, partridge or moor fowl.Footnote 54 Wealth derived from any other source, be it ever so great, did not qualify. The taking of deer, ducks and rabbits was prohibited even to those who had the requisite property qualifications outlined in the 1671 Act: these could only be hunted with the express permission of the owner on whose land they were found. Only in the first half of the nineteenth century, under the terms of the 1831 Game Act, was the connection between land ownership and the right to take game explicitly broken: from this point on, anyone hunting had simply to have the correct license to hunt. The range of penalties facing those caught poaching illegally was notoriously harsh, but was particularly severe on those apprehended night poaching. Even after the relaxation of the law in 1831, those guilty of night poaching faced three months of hard labour for a first offence, rising to seven years' transportation for a third.Footnote 55
In Northamptonshire, the enclosure of a parish was frequently accompanied by a newspaper advertisement to the effect that the game in the newly privatised area was exclusive property. On many occasions, such advertisements appeared as simple statements with a warning that those who trespassed would face prosecution, as occurred at Moulton (1772) and Rushden (1778).Footnote 56 Others, however, suggested that the situation on the ground was more complicated, and that during the period in which an enclosure was being effected, and the precise limits of property were necessarily blurred, game was regularly taken. The parish of Yardley Hastings, for example, was enclosed between 1775 and 1777. In 1776, the owners of Yardley Chase felt obliged to take out an advertisement in the Mercury warning people off the land:
Whereas great Liberty was last Season taken by several unqualified Persons, not only in Yardley-Chase but likewise in several other Manors in the Neighbourhood of Castle-Ashby, by SHOOTING, COURSING, and FISHING in the same: This therefore, is to give Notice that if any unqualified Person or Persons shall hereafter be found trespassing on any of the said Manors, they will be prosecuted according to Law.Footnote 57
A very similar advertisement appeared in 1779 forbidding unqualified individuals in East Haddon to go ‘shooting, coursing, tracing’ in the parish.Footnote 58 The enclosure of the parish took place in 1773, suggesting that the period of uncertainty over property rights in game lasted several years, something also true of Yelvertoft (enclosed 1776) where a £5 reward was offered for any information leading to convictions in 1779.Footnote 59
The mechanisms employed by landowners to defend their property in game might extend beyond the placing of advertisements in newspapers to embrace the employment of gamekeepers, as happened in the manors of Eltington, Sibbertoft and Walgrave (enclosed 1776) in 1779.Footnote 60 More general solutions to the problems posed by poachers were also considered: a subscription for the prosecution of poachers was suggested in August 1778, and in 1800 the Northamptonshire Association for the Preservation of Game was founded.Footnote 61 The persistence of the problem is reflected by the fact that the landowners in the Higham Ferrers region felt it worth their while to found a similar society as late as 1818.Footnote 62
How effective the raft of measures undertaken by Northamptonshire property owners were is difficult to tell: the absence of any record of the summary proceedings carried out before Justices of the Peace for the years before 1770 or of their activities in petty sessions thereafter, allied with the lack of systematic newspaper coverage, precludes any meaningful analysis.Footnote 63 However, the offering of rewards and the appointment of gamekeepers certainly underscore the serious intent of those who had invested in enclosure to protect the value of their privatised property.
Access to the countryside was thus more circumscribed in the post-enclosure parish. Yet how far did this have an impact on the informal culture of popular hunting associated with vermin control? In what follows the two samples of Northamptonshire parishes consulted in section 1 have been augmented by a third group, comprising the parishes studied by Neeson for her book, Commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700–1820. If enclosure really did destroy the older set of social relations within the village that underpinned the peasant economy, one might expect it to be most evident in this group of parishes.
The simple conclusion arising from an analysis of these data is that parliamentary enclosure had little impact on parish-sponsored vermin control in Northamptonshire. Indeed, there is clear evidence for continuity through enclosure, particularly in the west of the county. In Ashby St Ledgers, for example, payments for sparrows, foxes, hedgehogs and polecats continued without a break through the 1764 enclosure, trailing off only in the 1820s and 1830s. Much the same was true for the nearby parishes of Guilsborough, Hollowell, Staverton and Stowe Nine ChurchesFootnote 64, where bounty payments on a variety of species continued long after the enclosures of the third quarter of the eighteenth century.
At Everdon and Norton, payments for vermin continued after temporarily disappearing from the churchwardens' accounts in the years immediately following enclosure. Elsewhere the only visible effect of enclosure in western Northamptonshire was to persuade an occasional parish to concentrate its fire on fewer species. At Crick, payments for foxes and hedgehogs ceased at enclosure in 1777, and those for crows were reduced from an average of more than £1 10s a year in the 60 years before enclosure, to only a few pence or shillings a year thereafter. Payments for sparrows and moles, however, continued unabated, and the stipend of the mole-catcher actually rose from 10 to 15s per annum. Much the same was true at Braunston where payments for crow scaring were given up, but those for sparrows and foxes continued.
In a handful of parishes in western Northamptonshire the records are not available for the period immediately around the enclosure date, but later accounts demonstrate that parish officers were paying out for vermin in subsequent decades. Yelvertoft, for example, was enclosed under an award of 1777 but the accounts have not survived before 1784. At that date, however, the constables were still paying for sparrows, foxes and hedgehogs, something they continued to do until the accounts end in 1810. Much the same was true at Welford, Daventry and Hellidon, all enclosed between 1774 and 1802. Elsewhere, churchwardens continued to pay out for vermin long after enclosure was achieved. Thus the churchwardens in the early-enclosed parishes of Thornby, Winwick, Litchborough and Preston Capes all paid for sparrows and other vermin – usually foxes and hedgehogs – throughout the later eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century.
In the eastern sample, where many parishes were enclosed just as the general trend away from parish-supported vermin control was getting underway around the turn of the nineteenth century, the picture is slightly muddied. Yet, even here, there is little sign that the parliamentary enclosures of the late eighteenth century marked an end to vermin payments. At Wollaston, payments for foxes continued unabated through the 1789 enclosure, finally trailing off in the 1820s. At Lowick, which was enclosed under an act and award of 1771, bounties for sparrows disappeared from the accounts for the three years immediately surrounding the enclosure, but this was the only interruption in a pattern of payments that continued throughout the period 1763–1810. As in the western sample, there are also parishes for which documentation of the enclosure period is lacking, but for which it is possible to demonstrate that the parish officers continued to pay for vermin in later decades. Just as the churchwardens of Easton Maudit, Pilton and Stoke Doyle all paid for sparrows or foxes long after the parishes were enclosed in the first half of the seventeenth century, so those at Thorpe Achurch and Thrapston were still paying for sparrows in the early decades of the nineteenth century following parliamentary enclosures in 1772 and 1780, respectively. The continued payment of bounties in Thorpe Achurch is particularly interesting. The parish was owned by Thomas Powys and he enclosed the neighbouring parish of Lilford, where he had his seat, at the same time. Lilford provides one of the few examples in which payments for vermin totally ceased at enclosure. The explanation, however, is not far to seek: Powys not only enclosed the parish, he also demolished the village and relocated his cottagers to other parts of the estate. There were no parishioners left to pay.Footnote 65
It is perhaps not surprising that the churchwardens and parishioners chose to stop paying for vermin control in a parish wholly owned by a single landlord, and one who had demolished their homes and laid out a park over the site of the village. Yet the overall picture in Northamptonshire is indisputably one of continuity through enclosure. In 30 of the 41 sample parishes for which adequate records survive, churchwardens or constables continued to pay out for vermin in the period after enclosure, compared with only a handful of examples where the parish officers took this opportunity to abandon the bounties. In addition to the case of Lilford, it appears that payments for sparrows in Irthlingborough ceased after enclosure of the open fields in 1813, while at Rushden, the occasional bounties paid by the vestry disappeared following enclosure in 1778.
The picture of continuity is also clear in the parishes studied by Neeson. She studied a sample of 23 parishes, located in various landscape settings, and found evidence of considerable turnover among landholders in the 10 years surrounding enclosure. The most dramatic fall in the number of landholders recorded in her sample occurred in Wollaston, where some 70 per cent of landowners disappeared immediately after enclosure in 1789. Here, if anywhere, it might be expected that, with village culture so thoroughly disrupted, there would be evidence of enclosure having an impact on vermin payments. In fact, the churchwardens pursued their traditional pattern of vermin payments into the 1820s.
Detailed examination of the vermin records for the sample parishes selected by Neeson allows us to point to continuities through enclosure in a further five parishes. At Greens Norton (enclosed 1799), Hargrave (1802), Eye (1820) and Abthorpe (1823), the churchwardens continued to pay out for vermin in the years after enclosure. At Whittlebury, no documents exist from the period of enclosure itself, but the churchwardens were still paying for vermin more than half a century after the enclosure of 1800: the final payment for hedgehogs was made in 1829, and that for sparrows in 1852.
In all three sample groups consulted in this study, there is strong evidence that whatever disruption was caused to the pattern of landholding, especially among the poorer sort, other aspects of popular community culture continued with little interruption through parliamentary enclosure. Why was this the case?
The first reason was that hunting vermin was not considered as poaching. Legal treatises of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries make clear that mere possession of a gun while out in the fields was not proof that the person so armed was intent upon taking game.Footnote 66 Justices of the Peace, before whom poaching cases were tried, were certainly sensitive to this, and many cases can be found where Magistrates dismissed a case on these grounds. In 1854, for example, Rev. J. Wetherall and W. de Capel Brooke dismissed the case brought against George Smith of Great Bowden, who was charged with using a gun for the purpose of taking game on land belonging to H. H. Hungerford, esq, in the Northamptonshire parish of Dingley. ‘For the defendant it was contended that he was out for the purpose of shooting sparrows and blackbirds, and that there was no proof that he was out for killing game,’ the Magistrates concurred.Footnote 67
Another reason the popular tradition of vermin hunting survived parliamentary enclosure was that the law did not regard the pursuit of non-game as ‘trespass’. The common law allowed those killing foxes and other ‘ravenous beasts of prey’ access to the property of other people. Hunting vermin in the grounds of another man was not trespass, as the legal expert, T. L. Cunningham, made clear in 1783:
the Common Law warrants the hunting of ravenous beasts, such as foxes, wolves, badgers, &c., so that the party pursuing those through the grounds of another is subject to no action whatsoever; but it hath been resolved, that the hunting and killing such noxious animals must be done in the ordinary and usual manner ….Footnote 68
Cunningham did not specify what was meant by the ‘usual manner’, but for the most part, as vermin manuals published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrate, foxes were usually caught either in traps or by using dogs to drive them into nets.Footnote 69 Actions for trespass could only be brought where animals such as foxes were dug up, and property thus damaged.Footnote 70 A famous judgement by Justice Buller in 1788 confirmed the principle that hunters following a fox with hounds across private property could not be prosecuted for trespass providing they did not cause unnecessary damage.Footnote 71 Only in the early nineteenth century, when parishes had all but stopped paying out on foxes, did it become established that huntsmen, engaged in the recreational pursuit of foxes, rather than in ensuring their destruction as ‘ravenous beasts’, could be prosecuted for trespass.Footnote 72
As a result, enclosure had an impact upon the ease with which game could be caught in a way it did not on vermin control. An example from the Northamptonshire parish of Ashby St Ledgers illustrates the point. In a letter to Mrs Jane Ashley, lady of the manor at Ashby St Ledgers, her London solicitor Samuel Harris reported a conversation with her brother-in-law:
I told him that the Inclosure Round Ashby has distroyed most of the pidgeons and that all the Hares run into these Inclosures where they could not be followed. So that you had not a tenth part of the Pidgeons & hares you used to have…Footnote 73
Hares and other animals were no respecters of the new boundaries between enclosed and unenclosed land, and in this example their flight to the enclosures of a neighbouring landowner made it impossible for their nominal ‘owner’ to pursue them.
By contrast, vermin catching at Ashby St Ledgers was unaffected by parliamentary enclosure. As discussed above, payments for sparrows, foxes, hedgehogs and polecats continued without a break through the enclosure of 1764, being finally abandoned only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It seems that parishioners and specialist vermin-takers (such as mole-catchers) both continued to have access to newly enclosed land when pursuing vermin, the removal of which would have benefited the landowner as well as the individual claiming his few pence or shilling on the dead fox, hedgehog or polecat.
It was only in the 1820s and 1830s, more than half a century after the peak years of parliamentary enclosure in the 1770s, that churchwardens and constables across Northamptonshire abandoned payments for vermin. In the case of foxes this coincided with the growth of organised hunting by hounds.Footnote 74 The Midland shires were home to some of the most fashionable hunts in the country, the hunters thriving on the broad expanses of pasture to be found in the newly enclosed landscape.Footnote 75 Disputes between the hunt and local landowners and farmers were of course a perennial feature of the countryside,Footnote 76 but as the popularity of fox hunting grew, conflict also emerged between members of the hunt and those who pursued foxes as ‘vermin’.Footnote 77 Brothers Thomas and Daniel Wilson of Moreton Pinkney brought in 23 foxes accounting for about two-thirds of those on which the Moreton churchwardens paid out between 1797 and 1802.Footnote 78 One of the brothers also turned in another 15 foxes to the churchwardens at neighbouring Sulgrave between 1798 and 1805.Footnote 79 Their father was a gamekeeper on a local estate and the foxes were presumably killed because they predated on partridges, pheasants and other game birds. Yet the Wilson brothers made a shilling apiece from their kills, and their activities eventually brought them into conflict with the local hunt. In 1801, when a deposition was taken as part of a dispute over game with another local landowner, Daniel Wilson was reported as having:
begun some conversation about Mr Beauclerk who he said he had abused him for killing the foxes, & that he had told him he would kill them in spite of him or any of the Hunt & he were not satisfied with that he would fight him or any of the Hunt.Footnote 80
How the issue was resolved, with fists or by some more peaceful means, is not recorded. However, it was the hunts that won the battle for the ‘right’ to pursue foxes. Payments for foxes disappear from the accounts of Northamptonshire churchwardens and constables around 1820, just as the term ‘vulpicide’ – referring to the anti-social action of killing a fox by some means other than hunting it with hounds – first began to be used.Footnote 81 From the 1820s, therefore, foxes were increasingly defined as quarry of the hunt rather than as vermin, a cultural redefinition that had little to do with enclosure.
At around the same time the parish accounts ceased to record payments for other traditional targets, notably hedgehogs and moles, as well as the great birds of prey that had sometimes fallen victim of a villager's gun. In part this was undoubtedly a reaction to the reform of the poor law in 1834 – and perhaps to the escalating costs that added urgency to the situation. The poor law explicitly outlawed the payment of sums from the poor rate ‘for the extirpation of vermin’, and thereafter Poor Law Commissioners regularly held up to execration examples of ‘illegal’ payments made for this purpose.Footnote 82 If this altered the behaviour of parish authorities in some areas, another factor was a change in the nature of game-keeping regimes on the great estates. As Lovegrove recounts, the nineteenth century saw the business of vermin control increasingly taken over by the great estates, under the supervision of the same gamekeepers often first appointed to preserve game in the aftermath of enclosure.Footnote 83 The traditions of parish sporting undoubtedly continued, but the parishes largely ceased to subsidise the slaughter. All that can be found in the vestry accounts for Northamptonshire parishes by the mid-century are sundry payments for sparrows.
4. CONCLUSION
The end of parish payments for most species of vermin coincided with the replacement of the old parish-based arrangements for poor relief with the more distant and impersonal arrangements of the New Poor Law. The original justification for both – the periodic subsistence crises that haunted early modern England – had passed and new methods and new ideologies had come to the fore. Yet, for three centuries, the laws enjoining on parishes a responsibility for taking vermin provided a framework for a very particular relationship between villagers across rural England and the wildlife around them.
In this article it has been suggested that the laws continued to shape local approaches throughout the eighteenth century. The reasons are not far to seek. If famine had abated, the farmer's need for protection against the depredations of sparrows, moles and foxes, in particular, had not. While foxhunting increasingly became the preferred mode of dealing with that particular enemy, sparrows and moles remained to be dealt with by more traditional means. If the needs of farmers help explain the enduring influence of vermin hunting, a second reason is the recreation it afforded to the rural community. The number of people rewarded for bringing in game to Northamptonshire vestries, and their diverse social backgrounds, suggests that the hunting of vermin served another purpose and provided a form of popular recreation for generations of rural dwellers. To all intents and purposes, the vast majority of villagers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries truly found themselves in a country where there was no game: pheasants, partridges and hares there were aplenty, but they were beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, protected by high walls and severe laws. What villagers were left with was the wide range of wildlife dismissed as ‘vermin’. This ‘sport’, however, was not only tolerated, it was rewarded. The evidence suggests that many individuals earned useful pocket money from taking sparrows, foxes and moles, and shooting sparrows and other small hedgerow birds. Indeed, as the correspondent of a leading daily newspaper celebrated in 1852: ‘All the legal traps of the game laws, the treadmills to boot, have not prevented a score or two of unmistakable “good shots” from being trained in most rural villages of England.’Footnote 84
Interestingly, the patterns of disbursement recorded in the parish accounts changed little across the centuries: the data from Northamptonshire do not suggest any concerted effort to meet periodic subsistence crises by putting the impoverished to work catching vermin, and thus subsidising the cost of poor relief, despite the contiguous origins of the two measures. While the Poor Law Commissioners clearly felt the practice was sufficiently commonplace to warrant their specific condemnation in 1834, there is little evidence from Northamptonshire to suggest that parish authorities saw the bounties paid for vermin as a means of providing relief to poor villagers: the sums involved were quite simply too small.
Most importantly, the changes in the ownership of the property and access to the landscape at enclosure had very little impact on parish-sponsored vermin control. Parishes remained willing to pay the cost of vermin control, despite the fact that the immediate benefit no longer accrued to the community as a whole, but to the private farmer whose crops, and their market value, were thereby protected. As this article has clearly demonstrated, parish-sponsored vermin control continued even in those places where parliamentary enclosure had its greatest impact and where we might therefore expect to see the most radical changes to the social and cultural life of communities. In Northamptonshire, a county that experienced particularly high levels of parliamentary enclosure, and where historians have suggested that severe social dislocation resulted, the evidence of the vermin records is that well-established traditions of popular hunting survived parliamentary enclosure intact. Village culture, it appears, was more resilient and enduring than historians have allowed.
