Rather than a conventional monograph, this book comprises a series of four ‘micro-history’ case studies of hunting in early seventeenth-century England. It builds on two of Beaver's previously published essays to analyse violence and deer killing in Stowe Park in Buckinghamshire, Waltham Forest in Essex, Windsor Forest in Berkshire and Surrey, and Corse Lawn Chase in Gloucestershire. While the author admits this approach leads to a loss of breadth, these detailed case studies do much to illuminate the cultural meaning of attacks on deer in forests, chases and parks, going beyond analysis of them as disputes over land use. Beaver is unconvinced by Roger Manning's hypothesis that hunting was a symbolic substitute for war. Instead he develops a more cultural explanation, interpreting the ritualised killing and meticulous code of practice for the hunt as a means to convey gentility and honour, the essential prerequisites for those exercising magisterial authority in early modern England.
Despite the attempt by the Jacobean Game Laws to make the right to hunt more exclusive, Beaver shows how the lower orders sought to participate, forging reputations for themselves as poachers or as the servants and henchmen of gentlemen hunters. In particular, the Long Parliament's attack on Charles I's expansion of the royal forests during the 1630s endowed non-gentry poachers with a sense of legitimacy for their actions. When John Browne was challenged by a keeper in Waltham Forest on 25th April 1642, he replied ‘there was no law settled at this time’. However, the deer hunting that resulted in court cases in the 1630s was not the action of poor men desperate to feed their families. Illegal deer-killing might entail a defence of customary rights, but it was also intended to be confrontational and to diminish the honour of the deer's owner. It was accompanied by ritual display, violence against a park's enclosures and scandalous words against the owner to maximise the insult. Beaver draws upon Corse Lawn as the bloodiest example of this, where six hundred deer were butchered by crowds in October 1642 to affront Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, an avaricious, confrontational landlord, supposedly tainted with popery.
This book succeeds in offering a new interpretation of hunting and its role in the outbreak of civil war, but its price, brevity, and disinclination to explain technical terms militate against accessibility for all but the specialist reader. This is unfortunate because Beaver's impressive research lends weight to the recent interpretations of historians like David Cressy and John Walter, who have emphasised the importance of the pre-war crisis of 1640 to 1642. It also supports the post-revisionist stress on the depth and importance of politics beyond parliaments in early modern England.
