Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:31:21.225Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Cut down by some cowardly miscreants’: Plant Maiming, or the Malicious Cutting of Flora, as an Act of Protest in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rural England1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2008

CARL J. GRIFFIN
CARL J. GRIFFIN*
Affiliation:
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen's University, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Since the publication of Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing our understanding of the role(s) of covert protests in Hanoverian rural England has advanced considerably. Whilst we now know much about the dramatic practices of incendiarism and animal maiming and the voices of resistance in seemingly straightforward acquisitive acts, one major gap remains. Despite the fact that almost thirty years have passed since E. P. Thompson brought to our attention that under the notorious ‘Black Act’ the malicious cutting of trees was a capital offence, no subsequent research has been published. This paper seeks to address this major lacuna by systematically analysing the practices and patterns of malicious attacks on plants (‘plant maiming’) in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southern England. It is shown that not only did plant maiming take many different forms, attacking every conceivable type of flora, but also that it was universally understood and practised. In some communities plant maiming was the protestors' weapon of choice. As a social practice it therefore embodied wider community beliefs regarding the defence of plebeian livelihoods and identities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 29 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

2. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 8th May 1826.

3. K. Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore, 2004); Navickas, L., ‘The Search for ‘General Ludd’: The Mythology of Luddism’, Social History 15 (2005), 281–95;CrossRefGoogle Scholar A. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991); A. Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford, 2006), passim; G. Rudé, The Crowd in History 1730–1848 (London, 1964); Thomis, M., The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (New York, 1972);Google ScholarWilliams, G., Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (London, 1968).Google Scholar

4. For the classic exposition of this position see: G. LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Kila, MT, 2003).

5. Hammond, J. and Hammond, B., The Village Labourer (London, 1978);Google ScholarThompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).Google Scholar

6. Darvall, F., Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (Oxford, 1969);Google ScholarStevenson, J., Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Tilly, C., Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758–1834 (Cambridge, Mass, 1995)Google Scholar; Wells, R., Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983)Google Scholar.

7. Wells, R., ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700–1850’, Journal of Peasant Studies 6 (1979), 115–39;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWells, R., ‘Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness, in the English Countryside’ in Reed, M. and Wells, R., eds., Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880 (London, 1990) pp. 121–214;Google ScholarCalhoun, C., The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1982);Google ScholarStedman-Jones, G., Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983).Google Scholar

8. Neeson, J., Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Randall, Before the Luddites; Rule, J., ‘Against Innovation? Custom and Resistance in the Workplace, 1700–1850’, in Harris, T., ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (London, 1995), pp. 168–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

9. Most notably the food riots of the 1790s, the ‘Luddite’ protests of the 1810s and the quasi-insurrectionary ‘Swing Riots’ of 1830–1: Poole, S., ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition: Market Management in Bristol, 1709–1815’, in Randall, A. and Charlesworth, A., eds., Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), 91–114;Google ScholarRandall, A. and Charlesworth, A., ‘The Moral Economy: Riots, Markets and Social Conflict’, in Randall, A. and Charlesworth, A., eds., Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 1–32;Google ScholarThompson, E.P., ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (1791), 76–136;CrossRefGoogle Scholar R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1803 (Stroud, 1988); Bailey, B., The Luddite Rebellion (New York, 1998);Google Scholar Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites; Navickas, ‘In Search of General Ludd’; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 271–302; Thomis, The Luddites; A. Charlesworth, Social Protest in a Rural Society: The Spatial Diffusion of the Captain Swing Disturbances of 1830–1831 (Norwich, 1979); Griffin, C., ‘There was no law to punish that offence’ Re-assessing ‘Captain Swing’: Rural Luddism and Rebellion in East Kent, 1830–31’, Southern History 22 (2000), 131–163;Google ScholarGriffin, C., ‘Policy on the Hoof: Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Trial of the Elham Machine-Breakers, 1830’, Rural History 15 (2004), 1–22;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHobsbawm, E. and Rudé, G., Captain Swing (London, 1969);Google ScholarJones, P., ‘Swing, Speenhamland and Rural Social Relations: The ‘Moral Economy’ of the English Crowd in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History 32 (2007) 271–90;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWells, R., ‘Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside’, in Reed, M. and Wells, R., eds., Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880 (London, 1990), pp. 121–214;Google ScholarWells, R., ‘Mr. William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV’,’ Agricultural History Review 45 (1997), 34–48.Google Scholar

10. Shakesheff, T., ‘Wood and Crop Theft in Rural Herefordshire, 1800–60’, Rural History 13 (2002), 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Jones, D., ‘Thomas Campbell Foster and the Rural Labourer: Incendiarism in East Anglia in the 1840s’, Social History 1 (1976), 5–37;CrossRefGoogle ScholarArcher, J., ‘A fiendish outrage’?: A Study of Animal Maiming in East Anglia, 1830–1870’, Agricultural History Review 33 (1985), 147–57.Google Scholar The classic example of this is Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing, the book that arguably first noted the importance of covert protest: see below.

12. Archer, J., ‘By a Flash and a Scare’: Arson, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 210–11.Google Scholar

13. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 12.

14. For a more detailed consideration of both the ways in which trees were utilised and, in association, particular cultural forms developed in southern England see: Griffin, C., ‘Protest Practice and (Tree) Cultures of Conflict: Understanding the Spaces of ‘Tree Maiming’ in Eighteenth- and early Nineteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40 (2008), forthcoming.Google Scholar

15. A similar claim is also made in T. Shakesheff, Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest: Herefordshire, 1800–1860 (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 177.

16. Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 200–2.

17. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

18. Ibid., p. 80.

19. Thompson, E.P., ‘The Crime of Anonymity’, in Hay, D.Linebaugh, P.Rule, J.Thompson, E.P. and Winslow, C., eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 255–344;Google Scholar Jones, ‘Thomas Campbell Foster’; Wells, ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat’.

20. Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites.

21. Jones, ‘Thomas Campbell Foster’. There have been few subsequent county and regional studies focusing upon the 1840s and the few that exist suggest that the level of incendiarism in East Anglia during that decade was exceptional, something confirmed by Archer's exhaustive study of East Anglian incendiarism between 1815 and 1870. Incendiary fires, by county, during the 1840s: Essex, 211; Herefordshire, 40; Norfolk, 271; Suffolk, 353. Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 70–1; S. Husssey and L. Swash, ‘Horrid Lights’: 19th-Century Incendiarism in Essex (Chelmsford, 1994), iii; Shakesheff, Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest, pp. 213–16.

22. Wells, ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat’, passim.

23. Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 67–197; Charlesworth, A., ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700–1850: A Comment’, Journal of Peasant Studies 8 (1980), 101–11;CrossRefGoogle ScholarGriffin, C., ‘Knowable Geographies? The Reporting of Incendiarism in the Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century English Provincial Press’, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006), 38–56;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hussey and Swash, ‘Horrid Lights’; Wells, ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat’; Wells, ‘Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness’. For animal maiming see: Archer, ‘A Fiendish Outrage?’; Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 198–221.

24. The papers in the so-called Wells-Charlesworth debate were originally published in the Journal of Peasant Studies and were later collected together along with original contributions from Mick Reed and Roger Wells in: Reed and Wells, Class, Conflict and Protest; cf. J. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 21–2.

25. Social criminality: those acts which blur the boundaries between the supposedly straight-forward criminal act, whether for subsistence or profit. See Hobsbawm, E., ‘Distinctions between Socio-Political and Other Forms of Crime’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 25 (1972), 5–6;Google ScholarRule, J., ‘Social Crime in the Rural South in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Southern History 1 (1979), 135–53;Google Scholar Shakesheff, Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest, passim.

26. ‘The Black Act’: 9 Geo. I, c.22. Thompson, E.P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975).Google Scholar For a further revision of the origins of the Black Act see: Broad, J., ‘Whigs and Deer-Stealers in Other Guises: A Return to the Origins of the Black Act’, Past and Present 119 (1988), 56–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Radzinonwicz, L., ‘Waltham Black Act’, Cambridge Law Journal 9 (1945), 72.Google Scholar Also see Radzinowicz, L., A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750: Volume I (London, 1948), pp. 49–70.Google Scholar

28. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, p. 21.

29. ‘The Black Act’: 9 Geo. I c.22, i.

30. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, pp. 191, 229–30, 246, 255.

31. Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, p. 17.

32. R. Wells, ‘Resistance to the New Poor Law in the Rural South’ in J. Rule and R. Wells, Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740–1850 (London, 1997), pp. 105–6.

33. Neeson, J., ‘The Opponents of Enclosure in Eighteenth-Century Northamptonshire’, Past and Present 105 (1984), 130, 135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Shakesheff, Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest, pp. 130–1.

35. B. Bushaway, ‘From Custom to Crime: Wood-Gathering in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England: A Focus for Conflict in Hampshire, Wiltshire and the South’ in J. Rule, ed., Outside the Law: Studies in Crime and Order 1650–1850 (Exeter, 1982), pp. 67 and 78.

36. Certain factors are worth noting. Firstly, plant maiming was not always physically obvious. For instance malicious damage to a hedge could appear to be the result of animal damage or even the result of attempted wood stealing. Secondly, to cottagers the value of fruit from their orchard trees meant that plant maiming was a hugely effective method of intra-class protest. The wilful causing of damage might, however, be left unreported to the magistrates for the fear of both reprisals and the cost of using judicial law if no conviction was made.

37. Bushaway, ‘From Custom to Crime’, pp. 74–8 and 81–101. Also see Bushaway, B., By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1800–1880 (London, 1982), pp. 207–37.Google Scholar

38. J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985), esp. pp. 241–89.Google Scholar

39. Gupta, D., ‘Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as Stratagem in Agrarian Conflict’, Journal of Peasant Studies 29 (2001), 89–108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

40. Archer, J., ‘Under Cover of Night: Arson and Animal Maiming’, in Mingay, G., ed., The Unquiet Countryside (London, 1989), p. 76.Google Scholar

41. Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 221–48.

42. Blomley, N., ‘Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges’, Rural History 18 (2007), 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Wells, ‘Resistance to the New Poor Law’, 105–6.

44. Young, A., General View of the Agriculture of the County of Sussex (London, 1813), p. 62.Google Scholar

45. It is important to note, however, that just because attacks were not predicated primarily on the basis that they would hurt the pockets of an individual does not mean that that they had no financial impact, especially in the relatively rare cases of attacks on the gardens of the poor.

46. For a detailed examination of the importance of ‘discourse’ in crime reporting see: E. Snell, ‘Discourses of Criminality in the Eighteenth-Century Press: The Presentation of Crime in The Kentish Post, 1717–1768’, Continuity and Change 22 (2007), 13–47.

47. Sussex Advertiser, 14th June 1824; Kentish Gazette, 25th March 1769.

48. See Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, chapters 6 and 7; K. Bawn, ‘Social Protest, Popular Disturbances and Public Disorder in Dorset, 1790–1840’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Reading, 1984), pp. 101–15; C. Griffin, ‘“As Lated Tongues Bespoke”: Popular Protest in South-East England, 1790–1840’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bristol, 2002), passim.

49. Times, 11th June; Hampshire Chronicle 15th June 1818.

50. In relation to Hampshire see: Portsmouth Telegraph, 26th May 1800 (case at Southsea); Hampshire Courier, 11th March 1811 (Ryde) and 20th January 1812 (Portsmouth); Hamp-shire Advertiser, 3rd July 1830 (Southampton); Hampshire Chronicle, 6th September 1830 (Southampton); Hampshire Telegraph, 19th March 1832 (Winchester) and 8th June 1833 (Southampton).

51. For example, Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 21st May 1792 (Horsham); Reading Mercury, 11th August 1800 (Reading); Brighton Herald, 25th June 1842 (West Wittering) and Dover Telegraph, 17th September 1842 (Dover).

52. For cucumbers and melons see: Kentish Gazette, 16th April 1824 (New Romney); Hampshire Chronicle, 25th May 1829 (Rumboldswhyke); Maidstone Journal, 19th August 1845 (Cranbrook); asparagus beds: Brighton Gazette, 21st May 1829 (Rumboldswhyke); hot frames: Brighton Herald, 11th February 1832 (Crocker Hill, near Chichester); Raspberries: Maidstone Journal, 9th June 1835 (Sutton Valence); Sussex Advertiser, 2nd September 1839 (Rye – probably financially motivated); Maidstone Journal, 12th February 1850 (also blackcurrants: Cranbrook); sages: Indictment of William Howard and Ann Dyer, Surrey Lent Assizes 1787, N[ational] A[rchives] Assi 31/15; Sussex Advertiser, 2nd September 1839 (Rye: see above).

53. Sussex Advertiser, 9th August 1842. Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 17th June 1830.

54. Hampshire Advertiser, 3rd July 1830.

55. Griffin, ‘Knowable Geographies?’, 44–5.

56. Kentish Gazette, 4th May 1771, 23rd March and 21st September 1790.

57. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 16th May 1796; Portsmouth Telegraph, 5th January 1801.

58. It is striking though that many smaller farmers did not take out fire insurance until prompted to do so by the wave of south-eastern incendiarism during and immediately after Swing. So great was the uptake that a petition was circulated throughout the south calling for a reduction of duty on insurance ‘against incendiarism’: Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 4th February 1833. For the dynamics of insurance against protests see Griffin, ‘Knowable Geographies?’, 50.

59. The produce of the harvest as well as the implements and machinery of a farm were frequently referred to as ‘deadstock’.

60. Hampshire Advertiser, 25th April; Dorset County Chronicle, 30th April 1835; Maidstone Journal, 24th November 1818.

61. Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 14th October 1805.

62. William Cobbett, although fiercely opposed to the continued existence of heaths and wastes, was a particularly ferocious critic of the plantations created in their place: Rural Rides (London, 2001), see especially pp. 115–16, 149, 416–19.

63. Kentish Gazette, 9th February 1802 and 2nd June 1812.

64. Deal Bench to Lord Melbourne, 5th August 1831, NA HO 52/13, ff. 75–6.

65. ‘Attorneys and Solicitors Act’: 6 Geo. 2d. Ch. 27. f.6: ‘That if any person or persons shall unlawfully and maliciously cut any hop bines growing on poles in any plantation of hops, every person or persons so offending, being thereof lawfully convicted, shall be adjudged guilty of felony, without benefit of clergy’.

66. Kentish Post, 25th March 1752.

67. Indictment of Edward Cook and Joseph Higgins, Kent Winter Assizes, NA Assi 31/10; Kentish Gazette, 26th February 1771.

68. Kentish Gazette, 27th August 1777.

69. Kentish Gazette, 14th August 1789.

70. ‘Preservation of Timber Trees Act’, 6 Geo. III c.48; Times, 21st, 23rd and 29th May, 24th, 25th and 26th June 1789.

71. Kentish Gazette, 14th August 1789. For the new legislation see: ‘An Act to amend an Act, made in the Sixth Year of the Reign of His present Majesty, intitled ‘An Act for encouraging the Cultivation, and for the better Preservation, of Trees, Roots, Plants, and Shrubs’, engrossed 26th June 1789: Journal of the House of Commons, XLIV, 20th and 28th May, 9th, 23rd, 24th, 25th and 26th June 1789.

72. Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 6th June 1800; Hampshire Chronicle, 20th July; Indictment of William Seward, Hampshire Summer Assizes 1801, NA Assi 25/4/2. A month after his trial Seward's sentence was reduced to twelve month's hard labour in the Winchester House of Correction: Western Circuit Gaol Book, entry for Hampshire Summer Assizes 1801, NA Assi 23/9.

73. These figures relate to the counties of Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex. All but five of these cases occurred in Kent.

74. The information on which this paragraph is based is taken from a survey of the provincial press and the courts of quarter sessions and assizes for the south-eastern counties of Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex. A detailed breakdown is available, on application, from the author.

75. Kentish Gazette, 26th September 1817.

76. By the summer of 1829 the practice of working men on the roads in the Weald was discontinued ‘so as to prevent them from forming confederacies’. Cobbett too predicted a rebellion, uncannily stating that it would occur the following autumn. When protests started to occur, Cobbett reacted with something approaching glee: Kentish Gazette, 24th July 1829; Cobbett's Political Register, 12th June 1830.

77. Indictment of James Cruttenden and John Bryant, Kent Summer Assizes, NA Assi 94/1795; Kentish Gazette, 16th July and 27th August; Maidstone Journal, 10th, 17th and 31st August 1819.

78. Three years later when parish officer Ledger of Ulcomb near Maidstone had the bines of four hundred hills of hops destroyed the local press noted the potential judicial sanctions the maimer could face, dutifully reminding its readers that Cruttenden was only reprieved because of some ‘very peculiar circumstances’: Maidstone Gazette, 23rd July 1822.

79. Reading Mercury, 30th March 1795 and 18th January 1796; Western Flying Post, 16th May 1796.

80. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 7th and 28th April 1800; Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, 1800 Easter Quarter Sessions Calendar, A1/125/46T; Hampshire Chronicle, 31st August 1807.

81. Kentish Post, 17th June 1758.

82. Reading Mercury, 30th March 1795, 18th January and 27th June 1796.

83. Tubbs, C., The New Forest: History, Ecology and Conservation (Lyndhurst, 2001), pp. 82–6.Google Scholar Also see Tubbs, C., ‘The Development of the Smallholding and Cottage Stock-Keeping Economy of the New Forest’, Agricultural History Review 13 (1965), 27, 29.Google Scholar

84. Hampshire Chronicle, 26th January 1829.

85. Hipkin, S., ‘“Sitting on his penny rent”: Conflict and Right of Common in Faversham Blean, 1595–1610’, Rural History 11 (2000), 1–35;CrossRefGoogle ScholarReay, B., The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990), especially chapters 3 and 4.Google Scholar

86. Tree maiming: Kentish Gazette, 13th March 1770, 26th February 1774, 11th January 1783 and 6th March 1787. Incendiarism: Kentish Gazette, 19th November 1830; Kent Herald, 19th May 1831 (two cases); Rochester Gazette, 17th May 1842 and 6th June 1843.

87. County Chronicle, 15th January 1828.

88. Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983), pp. 198–211.Google Scholar For a consideration of the importance of orchards as new spaces of capital in eighteenth-century southern England see: Griffin, ‘Protest Practice and (Tree) Cultures of Conflict’.

89. Kentish Gazette, 24th May 1828.

90. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 24th November 1828; Hampshire Chronicle, 19th January 1829. Unfortunately neither the calendar nor the Sessions role has survived for the 1829 Hampshire Epiphany Quarter Sessions: see Hampshire County Record Office Q/9/1 series.

91. Sussex Advertiser, 21st July 1822.

92. Kentish Gazette, 4th May 1792, 21st March 1794, 3rd March 1813, 17th February 1815, 25th June 1824, 10th June and 15th July 1830.

93. Hampshire Chronicle, 31st December 1821.

94. Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 29th April; Brighton Gazette, 2nd May 1822; Sussex Advertiser, 22nd April 1833.

95. Brighton Gazette, 19th June 1828.

96. These cases relate to all forms of plant maiming, not just hop cutting.

97. Case against William Howard and Anny Dyer for ‘pulling up and spoiling’ sage roots of William Higgins, Surrey Lent Assizes 1787, NA Assi 31/15; Summary conviction against Eliza Allder and Elizabeth Belcher for destroying turnips of Mr. Godfrey of Chawley (Berkshire): Reading Mercury, 29th March 1830.

98. Shakesheff, ‘Wood and Crop Theft in Rural Herefordshire’, 8–9.

99. Griffin, C., ‘Wood-Taking and Customary Practice: William Hunt's Justices Notebook, 1744–49’, Regional Historian 13 (2005), 22.Google Scholar

100. Kentish Gazette, 15th February 1796.

101. Archer, ‘A Fiendish Outrage?’, 154.

102. Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 179, 214.

103. Kent Herald, 10th June and 15th July 1830.

104. Various depositions taken 23rd August 1832, Centre for Kentish Studies [herein CKS] QS BW 131.

105. Kentish Gazette, 27th July and 3rd August 1841.

106. Sussex Agricultural Express, 29th September 1849.

107. Indictment of John and Daniel Dibble, Surrey Summer Assizes 1773, NA Assi 31/11; Kentish Post, 15th March 1758.

108. Dorset County Chronicle, 13th October 1831.

109. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 5th April 1790 and 30th May 1791.

110. Sussex Advertiser, 5th August 1833.

111. One ‘jobbing man’ from the Essex market town of Witham was, however, executed in 1814 for maliciously cutting down between sixty and seventy young fruit trees belonging to a local miller. His prosecution and subsequent execution was considered to be ‘a case of extreme hardship’: BPP. ‘Report from the House of Commons Select Committee on Criminal Laws’, (1819) vol. VIII, Evidence of Robert Torin JP, p. 45. My thanks to one of the anonymous referees for this reference.

112. Kent Herald, 1st March; Kentish Gazette, 2nd March; Maidstone Journal, 6th March 1827.

113. Maidstone Journal, 24th April 1827.

114. The first (recorded) dedicated south-eastern association to prevent incendiarism was founded at Sevenoaks on 11th September 1830, a response to the wave of fires in the vicinity that occurred concurrently with the start of threshing machine-breaking in the Elham area of East Kent: Minutes and Account Book of the Association for the Detection of Incendiaries in Sevenoaks, CKS U442/o67. An association for the ‘Protection of Life and Property against Fire’ was founded in December 1828 on the other side of the Thames Estuary at Witham in response to a similarly intense wave of local incendiarism: see Gyford, J., Men of Bad Character: The Witham Fires of the 1820s (Chelmsford, 1991), p. 5.Google Scholar

115. It is important to add a note of caution here. Preliminary studies of Herefordshire, the other major hop growing area in England, suggest that hop cutting was probably not as important as it was in Kent.

116. Griffin, ‘Knowable Geographies?’, 41–6.

117. The Alton Advertiser and East Hants Gazette was renamed the Southern Gazette before the year was out but continued to be published in Alton.

118. Reading Mercury, 11th August 1800.

119. Minutes of the Goudhurst Prosecuting Society, 19th November 1823, CKS U769 L6.