The Deer & The Hangman

This story begins in the all too familiar climate of economic downturn.  In 1711, the South Sea Company was set up with monopoly trading rights in South America.  While the company failed to realise any profits from this monopoly, there was huge speculative investment in the company, causing an expediential rise in its stock.   This effect became known as the South Sea Bubble when it inevitably burst in 1720.  What followed was Britain’s first modern economic crisis as investors lost millions of pounds.  Sir Isaac Newton reportedly lost twenty thousand pounds (£2.4 million in today’s terms) in the crash. He was quoted as saying “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”

The South Sea Crisis quickly became a target for satire in the press and in engraved prints by artists such as William Hogarth.  It also led to a rise in crime.  Highway robbery increased, although it had declined again by 1724.  There was also a sharp increase in deer poaching.  Furthermore, in the 1720s England had no police force and even the Bow Street Runners would not exist for another thirty years.  Watchmen and parish constables, many of them quite elderly, were meant to keep the peace in towns, but there was little provision for fighting crime in the country.  The primary means of catching criminals was offering rewards for information leading to their capture.  Members of gangs who gave evidence against their cohorts were pardoned.  Land owners armed their game keepers to defend against the deer stealers, leading to violent clashes.

Forests like Waltham Chase were a source of cheap meat, yet only the wealthy land owners were permitted to hunt in them.  The depression inevitably increased social tension and this became apparent in the activities of two particular gangs of deer stealers.  The gangs became famous for covering their faces with gunpowder to disguise their features and frighten people.  Because of this they became known as the ‘Blacks’. 

These gangs, one operating in Windsor, the other in Hampshire, went into forests in daylight armed with pistols and rifles to shoot and take deer.  The Hampshire gang primarily targeted the Bishop of Winchester’s park in Farnham.  The first major incident occurred in October 1721 when 16 poachers raided the park. Five deer were killed, a deer stealer shot (although he recovered) and four other poachers were soon caught.  Two were released and the others made to stand in the stocks, sentenced to a year and a day imprisonment and given a twenty pound fine.

The gang sought revenge.  They broke into the park at Farnham again and shot or stole more than twenty deer.  The deer stealers passed through the nearby town in triumph and without any opposition.  After this attack, rewards were offered for information leading to their capture and soldiers were stationed in Farnham.  So the deer stealers turned the focus of their attacks to Waltham Chase.  It took only two months for them to deplete the deer herds there.  These Waltham Blacks also sent letters to the local gentry, threatening to burn down their houses if there was any opposition to their hunting.

It was widely claimed that the deer stealers were Jacobites - supporters of the Catholic pretender to the throne James Stuart, who were attempting to incite rebellion against the Hanoverian George I.  The gentry and the government stoked public fears over Jacobitism to turn opinion against the Blacks.  However, there is little evidence that the Waltham Blacks supported the Jacobite cause.  Their leader, an unidentified man known as ‘King John’ distributed a pamphlet asserting that the Waltham Blacks were loyal subjects of King George.

That is not to say that they were not politicised. Shortly after the printing of this pamphlet, 16 of the deer stealers - armed, faces blackened, some wearing coats and caps of deerskin - converged on a public house near the Chase.  ‘King John’ appeared and proclaimed that they were loyal to the king and that their aim was justice.  They wished to see that the rich did not oppress the poor.  They were determined to remove the deer from the Chase because the area was intended for grazing cattle, not to fatten deer for the tables of the wealthy.  Three hundred people had gathered to see the Blacks.  No one tried to catch them as they rode away.

Their attacks diversified, often suggesting socio-political motivation.  When an estate owner near Farnham charged poor people for picking small firewood on his estate (customarily free) the Blacks destroyed a stand of trees on his land and warned they would pay him a second visit if the money he had charged was not returned.  Soon afterwards a shipment of venison and wine for the Prince of Wales was intercepted outside Winchester.  Following this, a significant reward was offered for the capture of the Waltham Blacks.  With arrest being a real danger, the deer stealers went to ground.

Almost immediately, a gang of deer stealers began to operate in the royal Windsor Forest.  Maybe some of the Waltham Blacks moved north or perhaps they were copycats, but the attacks they carried out in 1722 and 1723 were as violent, although no proclamations of social justice were made.

The crimes of the Berkshire Blacks reached a peak in spring 1723 when an old poacher was prosecuted for killing game, being fined 10 pounds and his guns deposited with a church warden.  A group of Blacks sought out the church warden and in the ensuing confrontation the warden’s son was shot through the head.  In the wake of such violence, Parliament was spurred to act against the poachers.

The government introduced an Act of Parliament designed specifically to target the poachers.  Formally titled ‘An Act for the more effectual punishing wicked and evil disposed Persons going armed in Disguise and doing Injuries and Violence to the Persons and Properties of His Majesty's Subject, and for the more speedy bringing the Offenders to Justice’ the bill became more widely known as the Waltham Black Act.  It came into effect on the 27 May 1723.  Going into a forest with your face blacked or in any other disguise; wounding, killing or stealing red or fallow deer; and sending a letter without a name or signed with a fictitious name that made monetary demands all became offences punishable with death.  It also made poaching fish or hunting hares in a forest, as well as damaging trees or setting fire to buildings capital offences.  In short, the Blacks could now be hung for most of their actions.

The Secretary of State sent two agents to Berkshire who succeeded in capturing three of the gang’s ringleaders.  A week later 21 other Blacks were arrested and sent to Newgate Prison.  They were returned to Reading for trial on 6 June.  Four of the accused were hanged for murder and six others were transported to the colonies.  The others were discharged due to insufficient evidence.

This put an end to the Berkshire Blacks, but soon the Hampshire deer stealers returned and renewed their actions.  They made numerous attacks in different parts of the county during the summer, including their final attack on Waltham Chase.  On Sunday 1 September 1723, seven men with blackened faces entered the Chase in search of deer.  One of their number, Edward Elliot, an apprentice tailor from Guildford, was captured by armed gamekeepers.  The rest of the gang came to his aid.  Closing to just a few yards, a poacher named Henry Marshall shot one of the keepers ‘unexpectedly in the breast and out the back’.  He died immediately.  More shots were exchanged, during which a keeper received a broken thigh from a shot to the hip and one of the deer stealers was also injured.  Marshall, Elliot and two others were captured in the running battle that ensued.  The remaining three were subsequently caught in their home town of Portsmouth.

Due to the infamy of the gang, they were moved under armed guard to London and kept in the notorious Newgate Prison.  They were tried at the court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall and found guilty of deer stealing and given the death sentence.  They were executed at Tyburn on 4 December 1723.

The Waltham Black Act remained on the statute book for a century, finally repealed in 1823, with the exception of the provisions against arson and shooting a person.  During its time in force, countless people were sent to the gallows for offences that it contained.  However, like many Draconian measures it failed to solve the problem it was devised to address.  The Berkshire and Waltham Blacks orchestrated their own downfall through the audacity of their final raids, while the Act that they had inspired was over-zealously interpreted by the courts to allow them to order the execution of thousands over the next century. But deer-stealing still continued after the law came into force. In the 1730s a large gang began taking the deer from Epping Forest, selling their ill-gotten meat through a butcher named Richard Turpin.  But that’s a different story.