On the night of Saturday 6th May 1826 the small Hampshire market town of Romsey was subjected to a series of malicious attacks on both private and public property. The brick walls and paling alongside the River Test were pitched into the water, numerous gates were thrown off their hinges, several porches were demolished and thirty young trees plus a ‘beautiful’ cedar belonging to Lord Palmerston were ‘wantonly cut and broken down’. Whilst the targeting of the property of Palmerston, the Secretary of State for War, aroused particular attention in the provincial press, in other respects there was nothing extraordinary about this systematic campaign of destruction.Footnote 2
The word that history has condescended to use to describe such acts is vandalism, a word tainted with many misconceptions. The common usage of the word suggests an act of wanton, even random damage free from malice let alone politics. The etymology of ‘vandalism’ suggests a more deliberate agency. ‘Vandals’ were members of a Germanic people that ravaged Gaul, Rome, Spain, and North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries. To vandalise is to enact with purpose. Those who carried out the attacks at Romsey may well have, in the words of the Hampshire press, been wanton individuals who had no specific motivation, but their actions were not without purpose.
Language has long been used as a tool by which hegemonic power can be wielded over those with alternative world visions. That the foot soldiers of the French Revolution and the power loom breakers following ‘Ned Ludd’ have left a powerful linguistic legacy in the terms ‘sans-culottes’ and ‘Luddite’ is an inspiring testimony to the ability of protestors to be something other than fodder for the footnotes of history. The etymology of these rich, empowering words is somewhat different however. Both are infused, and constantly (re)generative of, a rich, telling iconography which despite having captured the popular imagination is steeped in derision.Footnote 3 Whilst, retrospectively, neither Parisian revolutionaries nor deprived Lancashire cloth workers can be judged to be quite as forceful as the German Vandals, all three popular movements have been tarred with the brush of mental lassitude. Protest, so this analysis goes, is something temporary and transient, a reactionary position doomed to failure.Footnote 4
The now well-established genre of the study of protest past developed from a very different political position. Although arguably beginning with the publication of the Hammond's The Village Labourer in 1911, the study of popular protest as a vibrant genus of social history owes everything to E. P. Thompson's seminal The Making of the English Working Class. Whilst it would be unhelpful to accuse Thompson of a Whiggish reading of history, necessarily a title including the words ‘making’ and ‘class’ suggests history with a deeper political purpose.Footnote 5 This position has dominated protest studies ever since: acts of resistance necessarily assume broader ‘political’ goals and are thus inevitably linked to either a wider movement or to a general burgeoning political consciousness.
Subsequent studies of popular protest have tended therefore either to scrutinise the archive to find a whiff of a Continental-style revolutionary challenge,Footnote 6 to delineate the active processes of class formation and the development of class consciousness,Footnote 7 or to examine the defence of custom in the face of capitalist change.Footnote 8 Research undertaken from these perspectives has without doubt added immeasurably to our understandings of the complexity and politics of popular protest, not least for the period between the French Revolution and the onset of Chartism. But whilst the exceptional outbreaks of protest have tended to be subjected to particularly intensive research,Footnote 9 more ‘everyday’ manifestations of the impacts of proletarianisation have largely eluded historians. Indeed, as Timothy Shakesheff has recently noted in relation to the study of wood and crop theft, what appears ‘petty’ is easily overlooked and thus rendered obscure.Footnote 10 We may now better understand incendiarism and animal maiming,Footnote 11 but attacks such as occurred at Romsey in May 1826 await their historian.
The focus of this paper is not, however, the gates, walls, pales and porches destroyed at Romsey but instead the thirty-one trees attacked on the same spring evening. For trees, unlike the inanimate gates and porches, invoke particularly deeply held (and felt) meanings. Trees were wrapped up in bitterly contested conflicts concerning enclosures and the division between customary rights and private property rights. Trees were also physical symbols of both attachments to place and socio-economic change. Gospel oaks, for instance, were supposed to be the physical embodiment of a community's continued existence, while the planting of vast orchards in early nineteenth-century Kent occurred in part due to the slump in cereal prices at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Other forms of flora too could assume symbolic status. As Archer has shown in relation to animal maiming, that which was not only valuable to farmers but also central to the ways in which labouring life unfurled day-to-day were obvious and highly symbolic targets.Footnote 12 Thus the creation of hop gardens should be understood as not only transforming the space, usually from arable production, but also as transforming the ‘social technologies’ required of the local workforce. The cultivation of hops demanded specific skills, planting, tying, stringing and picking, and also new working practices that were both highly seasonal and gendered.
This paper attempts to redress the imbalance in our understandings of the forms of popular protest by, to paraphrase Thompson, rescuing malicious attacks on plants (herein ‘plant maiming’) from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.Footnote 13 The paper is structured as follows. The first section locates plant maiming as a protest practice within existing understandings of rural resistance in the context of Hanoverian rural England. The second section considers the way in which plant maiming was manifested in the area stretching between Kent to the east and Hampshire to the west, an area which covered a huge range of communities, landscapes and agricultural systems. Additional examples will also be drawn from Berkshire, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire.Footnote 14 The second section, utilising a wide range of archival sources, most notably judicial papers and newspaper reports, for the period between 1750 and 1850, starts with a detailed analysis of plant maiming typologies before ending with an examination of plant maimers’ identities and motivations.
Plant maiming as concept, plant maiming as possibility
Captain Swing is widely acknowledged as having transformed our understanding of rural protest, moving beyond reductivist assumptions that protest either equated to riot or the formation of a union, to an appreciation that acts such as incendiarism and the sending of threatening letters were also important tools of covert rural terror.Footnote 15 Hobsbawm and Rudé's acknowledgement of the importance of covert protest was, however, somewhat partial. Incendiarism and the sending of threatening letters were both considered integral to Swing, not only in terms of the fear they generated but also in terms of the wider public perception of the movement.Footnote 16 However, whilst Hobsbawm and Rudé noted that there was some precedence for deploying weapons of rural terror in rural movements (specifically the 1816 ‘Bread or Blood’ riots and the 1822 East Anglian protests), they concluded that incendiarism remained ‘exceptional and not a normal part of rural agitation’.Footnote 17 Other forms of non-riotous protest were apparently even less important. Rural machine-breaking ‘virtually occurred only during major outbreaks of unrest, and almost certainly not much before 1815’, whilst cattle maiming ‘never played a significant part in England and is probably best neglected’.Footnote 18
However partial these readings of non-riotous protest now appear, it is inconceivable that subsequent papers by Thompson on threatening letters, Jones on 1840s East Anglian incendiarism and by Wells on the increasing importance of incendiarism as a response to subsistence crises in the 1790s could have been written prior to the publication of Captain Swing.Footnote 19 Whilst Thompson's paper has stimulated little in the way of further research upon threatening letters, Kevin Binfield's recent analysis of Luddite writings being the notable exception,Footnote 20 both Jones’ and Wells’ papers have proved very influential. In concluding that between the major overt outbreaks of popular protest the rural poor did not remain quiescent in the face of grinding poverty but instead frequently resorted to tools of covert protest, Jones parted with the prevailing orthodoxy and opened up early nineteenth-century rural protest to further examination. Was the level of resistance uncovered in East Anglia exceptional or the norm?Footnote 21 Wells’ paper came to a similar conclusion: covert protest assumed an increased importance post-1795 in both periods of crisis and the ‘quieter’ years between.Footnote 22
Debates about the form and extent of rural protest since the mid 1970s have therefore, unsurprisingly, focused almost exclusively upon the relative importance of incendiarism, Archer's studies of animal maiming in East Anglia being the exception that proves the rule.Footnote 23 Indeed, it is instructive that whilst the debate that followed the publication of Wells’ paper concurred that what was needed were future studies of ‘everyday’ forms of resistance, conceptions of ‘everyday’ acts of defiance have remained narrow.Footnote 24 Subsequent studies have tended to focus upon either incendiarism or the possibility that seemingly straightforward acquisitive criminal acts, such as poaching or sheep-stealing, may actually betray an element of protest (‘social criminality’).Footnote 25
The historiography of rural protest could, however, have taken a rather different direction. The mid 1970s not only witnessed the publication of several landmark papers on rural protest but also Whigs and Hunters, E.P. Thompson's seminal account of the passing of the ‘Black Act’.Footnote 26 This single piece of legislation, enacted in 1723, contained more capital offences than any other European country had in their entire statute books.Footnote 27 As Thompson noted:
[By 1700] it was not still a matter of course that the legislature should . . . attach the penalty of death to new descriptions of [property] offence. Premonitions of this development can be noted in the late seventeenth century. But perhaps no event did more to habituate men's minds to this recipe of state than the passage into law of 9 George I c.22.Footnote 28
Most of the offences concerned hunting and poaching. The Bill was, after all, introduced to the Commons with the intention of suppressing the activities of the ‘Blacks’ whose bitter long-running battles with the officers of the Royal Forests of Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey were most notably manifested in deer stealing. Other weapons of protest, specifically, but not exclusively, deployed by the Blacks, were also made capital offences. Some, such as incendiarism, were already felonies, whilst other offences were newly proscribed. Amongst these ‘new’ offences was the act of ‘cut[ing] down or otherwise destroy[ing] any trees planted in any avenue, or growing in any garden, orchard or plantation, for ornament, shelter or profit’.Footnote 29 The Black Act was, however, only infrequently invoked by prosecutors, although it would appear that a high proportion of subsequent prosecutions under the Black Act were against plant maimers.Footnote 30 Justices of the Peace clearly understood, and worried, about plant maiming.
Notwithstanding the centrality of malicious attacks on plants to this most dramatic of all eighteenth-century judicial Acts and the fact that Whigs and Hunters was very well-received, plant maiming has either been ignored or, at best, received token acknow-ledgements from protest scholars ever since. Archer has detected that before 1840 the ‘destruction of trees, gardens, and orchards’ was ‘endemic’ in East Anglia. Musing as to whether such attacks were a substitute for arson, Archer concluded that whilst there appeared to be two forms of attack ‘no systematic study ha[d] been undertaken’ and thus nothing more than supposition could be offered.Footnote 31 Wells has noted that amongst the wave of covert protests after the imposition of the New Poor Law in Sussex a nurseryman's prize-wining dahlias were attacked at the notorious trouble spot of Maresfield.Footnote 32 Similarly Neeson has identified that anti-enclosure protestors in eighteenth-century Northamptonshire often resorted to tree-barking and the malicious cutting down of trees.Footnote 33 Shakesheff's recent study of conflict in nineteenth-century Herefordshire concluded that in addition to ‘the rick fire and the maimed pony’ acts of protest extended to frequent malicious attacks upon hedges, gates, fences, crops, fruit trees and hop bines. ‘[I]t would be possible’, claimed Shakesheff, ‘to argue that there was not a crop that had not been vandalized at one time or another’. ‘It is unfortunate’, he concluded, that as very few cases ever reached the courts ‘we will never discover the reason for these attacks’.Footnote 34
Another reference to such acts was made by Bob Bushaway in his study of wood-taking in eighteenth-century Hampshire and Wiltshire. According to Bushaway, the taking of wood from ‘parks, woodlands, copses and hedgerows’ was ‘possibly the most common way in which the law and rights of landed property were infringed’, but that wood taken from fences and hedges was surrounded by a ‘certain amount of ambivalence’.Footnote 35 This ambiguity arose from whether such acts were malicious damage, thus implying a degree of wantonness, or theft.Footnote 36 By locating wood-taking within the category of ‘social crime’, Bushaway's thesis has major implications for any understanding of plant maiming. The taking of wood, claimed Bushaway, was not only an act of subsistence but could also take on a wider significance as an act of deliberate protest against the very notion that wood could have a clear legal owner. Moreover, Bushaway also demonstrated that wood-taking also took on a wider importance as a focus for class-conflict in the countryside, essentially pitching those with capital against those without.Footnote 37
Strikingly, Bushaway's analysis bears a strong similarity to James Scott's analyses of peasant cultures of resistance in late twentieth-century Malaysia. By showing the ways in which the meanings of otherwise ‘everyday’ acts of subsistence could be subtly inverted to become acts of deliberate resistance, Scott's work has profound implications for the ways in which we conceptualise protest, unsettling the long held focus upon the explicitly provocative as the sole wellspring of popular discontent. For instance, our understanding of the most important component of proletarianisation, the undertaking of wage labour, can be revolutionised if we consider how the meanings of ‘work’ could be profoundly changed by simple acts. Thus foot dragging may outwardly appear to be laziness but could actually be an act of protest, an attempt to do as little work as possible for an exploitative employer.Footnote 38
Despite these conceptual possibilities it is, of course, the archive that determines what is ‘knowable’ about past protests. It is important therefore to stress that the major potential application of Scott's work to protest past is in new ways of reading archival fragments. We cannot assume on the basis of Scott's analysis alone that all agricultural labourers went about their work in a spirit of protest against forced enrolments (for instance see Dipankar Gupta's recent critique of Scott's work),Footnote 39 but we can appreciate the myriad ways in which everyday acts could possibly be invested with a spirit of protest. In relation to writing histories of protest, such an analysis means that all accounts are necessarily partial. They can only relate to those incidents that were recorded, the tip of an iceberg of unknown size. We need to cast an imaginative eye over the archive, to search for suggestion and then proceed with interpretative caution. As Archer has shown in relation to animal maiming, it is epistemologically unsound to assume from often very cursory archival readings that attacks on animals were necessarily predicated on animosity towards the owner. In one case that Archer details, a cow was speared through the chest not in an act of protest against the owner but due to the animal becoming animated as a result of the maimer's sexual advances.Footnote 40
This is an important lesson for any consideration of rural protest. Plants were, of course, as much a part of the dynamic fabric of rural England as the labourer toiling in the field, the threshing machine displacing labour or systems of parochial governance. Flora was, as I will show, often attacked as an embodied proxy of oppressive or unjust property rights or as a symbol of the (living) capital of an exploitative individual. In exactly the same way that Adrian Randall has delineated a political economy of machine-breaking, so too was there a political economy of plant maiming.Footnote 41 We also need to be alert to the possibility that attacks on flora could be a critique of enrolling property as manifestations as power. In such an analysis, as Nick Blomley has recently asserted, a hedge can be read as a public performance of ownership rather than just a barrier to, say, keep a herd of cows within.Footnote 42
Such attacks could also potentially represent more complex and multifaceted readings of the role of the non-human in rural cultures. We should not assume that the attack on the Maresfield nurseryman's prize-winning dahlias was not animated simply out of individual pique.Footnote 43 We need to be alive to the fact that the concept of agency needs to extend beyond considerations of ‘active’ non-human things, such as birds or mammals, to a broader understanding that even apparently ‘passive’ things could be objected to because of the way in which they were enrolled and enrolled themselves in human networks. For instance, a tree may be planted as part of a hedge to act as a barrier but could grow in ways initially unexpected, so as to deprive the soil of an adjacent garden of its nutrients, or shade a neighbours’ crops, one of Arthur Young's leading complaints against Wealden agricultural practice.Footnote 44
Plant maiming in practice
Against the individual
Attacks on plants which did not seek to hurt the pockets of an individual but instead acted simply to register the maimer's anger and frustration were the most common form of plant maiming.Footnote 45 Whilst such attacks sought to address individual grievances they could, as with incendiarism, take on a wider symbolic role within the community. We need to be careful, however, in interpreting the often very short reports of plant maiming. The difference between, for example, an aborted case of wood taking and a case with a clear malicious motive was often impossibly small.Footnote 46 This interpretative suspicion can partly be mitigated by confining the status of plant maiming only to those attacks where the ambiguity of the report is assuaged by the use of the word malicious, something that demonstrates the ‘crime’ was perceived as an act of wretched resistance. Moreover, this form of plant maiming usually targeted plants which held particular meanings for the ‘victim’. For instance early in the morning of 6th June 1824 the gardens of Ann Hillman on Malling Street, Lewes, were entered and all her flowers, shrubs and small trees were ‘maliciously’ torn-up. The plants were, according to the Lewes press, her ‘pride and joy’. Similarly when Mrs. Brett's gardens at Ash-next-Wingham (Kent) were targeted in March 1769 only the ‘very curious’ ornamental shrubs were destroyed.Footnote 47
Unlike incendiarism, most cases of which occurred upon farmsteads in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century rural England,Footnote 48 very few acts of plant maiming were actually committed upon farming premises. In one of the few such cases that the archive details, the Headley (Hampshire) farmstead of Daniel Knight was subjected not only to the cutting down of several trees and shrubs but also to a catastrophic incendiary fire in which six cart horses and two calves were burnt to death.Footnote 49 Knight's case was exceptional, however, and clearly carried out by extraordinarily determined individuals. Striking a match or lighting a tinder box required little time and effort, injuring an ornamental tree or slashing through a flower required both time and either brute strength or a sharp implement. Engaging in plant maiming in the vicinity of the farmhouse was therefore a potentially risky business for the simple reason that the maimer was far more likely to be seen than an incendiarist. Yet the Headley case is instructive in one important sense. With few exceptions, plant maiming, in common with other acts of covert protest, was a nocturnal practice.
Private gardens, unlike farmsteads, were frequently attacked. The majority, although by no means all, such reports emanated from market towns and related to attacks upon the gardens of the emergent middle classes.Footnote 50 Whilst trees in the targeted gardens were often cut to shreds, barked and even pulled up by the roots, attacks on other types of flora, most notably shrubs, vegetables and flowers were more typical. Less common, although far from rare, were attacks on vines,Footnote 51 cucumbers, melon plants, asparagus beds, plants contained in hot frames, raspberries, blackcurrants and even sages.Footnote 52 Other plants which were far harder to destroy were even targeted. In 1842 ‘some miscreant’, as the Sussex Advertiser put it, entered the garden of an East Hoathly gentleman and ‘regaled’ himself with a quantity of apricots and plums before ‘wantonly’ destroying a quantity of growing potatoes. Twelve years earlier at North Bradley in Wiltshire a serial potato attacker was summarily tried and sentenced to six months imprisonment and two public whippings.Footnote 53 Decorative ivy was even ripped off the side of a Southampton house in the summer of 1830.Footnote 54
The preponderance of cases in provincial towns might well be a function of the fact that such towns were better integrated into news reporting networks than country parishes whilst at the same time offering a relatively high concentration of gardens.Footnote 55 Indeed, the reduced possibilities for both animal maiming and incendiarism, with fewer easily combustible ricks, stacks and barns in market towns, undoubtedly increased the attractiveness of plant maiming as a protest form. Yet it would be misleading to equate the fear generated and the loss sustained in a serious incendiary fire to the small scale act of attacking a garden. This is not to say, however, that the targeted individuals were not similarly incensed. Nor is it to say that rural gardens were not attacked. In the spring of 1771 the shrubs and decorative plants growing in the gardens of Thomas Barrett at Lee in the Kentish parish of Ickham were destroyed, prompting the offer of a twenty guinea reward, easily equivalent to contemporaneous rewards offered in cases of incendiarism. This was no one-off, for in 1790 alone two cases of malicious attacks on trees in East Kent prompted twenty guinea rewards, whilst in the 1820s and early 1830s, as is indicated below, rewards offered following mass plant mutilations easily matched those offered in cases of incendiarism.Footnote 56
Rural gardens subjected to attacks, or rather those cases of maiming which were reported, tended to belong to the gentry, the attack on Lord Palmerston's grounds on the fringes of Romsey proving an emblematic example. Indeed, the loss of Palmerston's cedar is also instructive in the sense that attacks on the gardens of the rural gentry tended to focus upon ornamental trees rather than other plants. For example, the cedar trees upon the lawns in front of Denys Rolle's mansion house at East Tuderly were targeted by a plant maimer who left the other plants untouched. Similarly, the poplar trees planted in front of General Banthem's house at Kingston near Portsmouth were twice targeted in the winter of 1800–01, reportedly by ‘some neighbours’.Footnote 57 Such acts should be viewed therefore not only as an attack upon the individual but also as acts that criticised the enrolment of trees, which were vital in the struggle to sustain plebeian life, as symbols of power and ostentation and also challenged the ‘gentrification’ of otherwise productive rural space. In such cases we can also read a striking sense of class-hostility. That which was not integral to the subsistence of labouring families, but which was flaunted as ornament whilst labouring families went hungry, was an open provocation and consequently singled out for attack.
Against capital
Whilst attacking a lone cedar tree or a set of raspberry canes undoubtedly represented a form of psychological protest, such attacks were unlikely to hurt the pockets of either farmers or the gentry. Plant maiming was most effective as a tool of social protest when it occurred on a scale which inflicted, like incendiarism, a financial as well as a psychological wound upon the target. Indeed, it is possible that such attacks could potentially be more financially damaging to the intended victim than incendiarism for the simple reason that whilst insuring for loss by fire, at least amongst large farmers, was the standard practice before Swing, insuring for losses sustained by attacks on living capital appears to have been uncommon.Footnote 58 In the same way that rural incendiarism attacked ‘dead’ capital, such forms of plant maiming attacked the living capital of farmers and landowners.Footnote 59 In this form plant maiming was an ideal substitute for incendiarism. Whilst setting fire to a barn or hay stack was an extremely efficient method of inflicting financial pain upon an alleged oppressor, it also drew attention almost automatically to the scene and thus potentially to the fleeing perpetrator. Likewise maiming an animal would provoke an instant response in the loud squeals of pain from the animal and also in all probability cover the maimer in blood. Moreover, whilst an incendiary fire caused short-term destruction the mass destruction of trees would also have a long-term impact upon revenues: trees of whatever kind took time to establish themselves. Thus in the case of the destruction of four hundred apple trees at Bradford-upon-Avon in April 1835 or the destruction in 1818 of ‘many thousands’ of young fir and ash trees in the plantations of G Norman Esq. at Bromley (Kent) the potential loss of revenue over time could run into thousands of pounds.Footnote 60
Another way in which plant maiming held obvious advantages as a method of inflicting financial pain occurred through virtue of the location of plant maimers’ targets. Whilst the targets of rural incendiarists were usually to be found in the farmyard and likewise the animals of choice for the maimer, cattle, horses, sheep and dogs, were either to be found in the yard or in nearby folds, the targets of plant maimers attempting to inflict financial pain were usually located in more obscure(d) locations. There was, however, one major disadvantage. Whilst many forms of plant maiming relied simply upon physical strength, most cases of plant maiming which sought to inflict financial damage, as with incendiarism and animal maiming, required equipment: an axe, knife or saw compared to the incendiarist's lucifer or tinder box. When several young oaks were maliciously cut down on the premises of farmer Fellows of Ringmer (Sussex) in October 1805 the maimer was reported to have used a carpenter's axe, a specialist (and expensive) tool, which would make it relatively easy to detect the offender.Footnote 61
Such attacks essentially took four forms: attacks upon growing crops; attacks upon hop gardens; attacks upon orchards; and, finally, attacks upon plantations and woodlands. All four forms were, to varying degrees, linked to land use changes and large scale capital investment. For instance, as noted in the introduction, the creation of hop gardens radically transformed the landscape from grass or tilled soil to a hybrid space of soil and inert wooden poles, but it also altered the working practices and the level of demand for labour. When the transformation was from arable land to orchards and plantations, after the initial investment in creating the orchard or plantation was made, the subsequent labour requirements were only a fraction of that required to till arable land. Orchards required little labour other than to prune the branches and pick the fruit. Plantations, once well-established, required little labour until the timber was ready to be harvested. If the land was previously forest heath or waste, as was the case in many of the huge plantations created in Hampshire and on the Berkshire-Surrey borders, then the commercial planting of trees also effectively rendered common and/or customary rights useless.Footnote 62 Hop gardens, orchards and plantations all therefore engendered deep resentments. Indeed, plantations were arguably the most bitterly contested of all spaces in rural England. In this sense plantation and orchard trees and hop bines were to plant maimers what hay ricks and wheat stacks were to incendiarists: symbols of the exploitation of labour by an aggressive, amoral capital.
Reports of attacks on crops took two key forms: either deliberate trampling or the letting of animals into the field, thereby ruining the crop. Whilst rare, this form of plant maiming could be extremely damaging. In February 1802 a group of men, self-styled as ‘fox hunters’, presumably mocking the pretensions of the local gentry, forcibly entered upon horseback a fourteen acre cinquefoil field and a sixteen acre wheat field at Ewell near Dover, taking care to trample the whole crop. At nearby Coldred, ten years later, a flock of four hundred ewes were allowed into a field of ripening oats and a wheat field thus inflicting by hoof and mouth considerable damage.Footnote 63 A variation on this form of plant maiming was occasionally observed in cases where the just harvested corn was scattered across fields, roads or even thrown into ponds, a protest practice deployed in the summer of 1831 at Ripple near Deal in tandem with the destruction of a threshing machine.Footnote 64
Attacks on growing hop bines were so potentially damaging that although this form of plant maiming was relatively rare, it was a practice that was worrying enough to warrant the insertion of the following clause in a statute of 1732 which built upon the Black Act:
That if any person or persons shall unlawfully and maliciously cut and 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.Footnote 65
The Assizes of the major southern hop growing counties did not utilise the statute until 1772, although by the early 1750s the Kentish Assizes were trying cases of hop cutting in a rather roundabout way. At the 1752 Kent Lent Assizes a Mr. Richard Taddy of Canterbury was arraigned for committing a trespass upon a hop garden owned by the Canterbury Board of Guardians but leased to a female farmer. Taddy upon entering the garden had, it was alleged, broken down several hop poles and cut several hop bines. A true bill was found but Taddy was found not guilty. When the news reached Canterbury a universal celebration ensued: church bells were rung and bonfires were lit. Clearly the practice of hop cutting was widely known and well-understood.Footnote 66
The next attempt by a Kent grand jury to try a case of hop cutting occurred twenty years later on the back of a campaign by the hop planters of the Canterbury district calling for information regarding a series of recent attacks on hop poles and bines. These attacks were, according to the planters, motivated ‘merely for the lucre’. The two alleged culprits, Edward Cook and Joseph Higgins, although brought to trial, were quickly discharged after the Grand Jury threw out the bill on the basis of insubstantial evidence.Footnote 67 The next recorded case of hop cutting also attracted the attention of the Canterbury hop planters. On the night of Saturday 23rd August 1777 the bines were cut on 247 and sixty-three hills of hops belonging to two separate farmers. The hop planters again met to consider how further attacks could be prevented.Footnote 68 Whatever measures they adopted (no record exists detailing the minutes of the meeting) they appeared to have some impact. No further cases were recorded until an epidemic of hop cutting struck the hop belt between Canterbury and Maidstone in the summer of 1789.
An attempt at the Kent Lent Assizes of 1789 to bring a prosecution utilising the Statute of 1732 failed after the indictment detailed that the ruined hops had been destroyed by being ‘pulled’ as opposed to ‘cut’ as specified in the statute. The failure of the prosecution must have received widespread coverage for a spate of cases of hop ‘pulling’ subsequently occurred. In one case a woman caught in the act of pulling farmer Shepherd's hops at Maidstone was even suffered to ‘pass’ in the knowledge that she could not be successfully prosecuted.Footnote 69 Parliament, dominated by the landed interest, was quick to fill this judicial loop hole by drafting and engrossing the ‘Bill for Improving the Cultivation of Trees, Roots, &c’, an amendment to the 1766 ‘Preservation of Timber Trees Act’.Footnote 70 This amendment allowed for ‘any person who shall wilfully or maliciously steal, break down, destroy, or carry away any Roots, Trees, or Plants, in any Nursery, Garden, or other inclosed Ground’ to be transported for seven years. Unsurprisingly, the Kentish hop planters were keen to draw attention to this important change and decided to offer, apropos of no specific case, the promise of a reward for any information leading to successful prosecutions of hop cutters.Footnote 71
Such swift action appeared to be decisive for the archive details no further cases of hop cutting in Kent until 1810, although hop cutters did strike during the subsistence crisis of 1800–01 at Framfield (Sussex) where the bines on 1,300 hills of hops were cut and at Shalden for which William Seward was sentenced to death at the Hampshire Assizes.Footnote 72 In many ways it was the end of the French Wars and the ensuing agricultural depression that marked the turning point in the resort to hop cutting. Of the forty-one cases of hop cutting I have identified between 1772 and 1834, thirty-three occurred after 1815.Footnote 73 In part this was probably due to expanding acreages, farmers increasingly resorting to the potentially highly profitable hop in the face of dramatically declining cereal prices. Equally important though was the general upturn in the levels of covert protest after 1815. The level of incendiarism, for instance, in Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex increased from an average 4.8 reported cases per year between 1810 and 1814 to 10.6 in the following five years.Footnote 74
Whilst hops, with varying degrees of success, could be grown anywhere, in the south the vast majority of hop gardens were to be found in the Weald, the vicinities of Maidstone and Canterbury, the coastal fringes of north Kent and in the area between Farnham and Alton. These areas were, unsurprisingly, also responsible for most cases of hop cutting. This geography was not, however, simply a function of opportunity, in that hops were close to hand and offered a ‘soft’ target. It was also a consequence of the specific resentments generated in these highly capital-intensive spaces. Farmer Ellis at Barming, one of several parishes near Maidstone where hop farming was at its most intensive in the whole of England, was the world's largest hop grower and in a successful year required the labour of 3,500 workers during the harvest.Footnote 75 The cultivation of hops was therefore extremely important in these parishes to the household economies of the labouring poor. In the wretchedly impoverished Wealden parishes this plebeian dependency was even more important. Here the combination of the highest levels of labouring unemployment in the south and astronomically high poor rates meant that labourer-farmer relations had deteriorated to a point where open revolt was feared.Footnote 76 Capital-intensive hops thus became arguably the most symbolic, and softest, target.
The case of John Cruttenden, a thirty-three year old Benenden labourer, is instructive. On the night of 5th July 1819, twenty-five hop bines belonging to farmer Santer of Benenden were cut. Cruttenden and sixteen year old John Bryant were soon taken into custody on suspicion and committed to stand trial as suspected felons at the Kent Summer Assizes. Cruttenden, it transpired, had offered Bryant a shilling if he cut Santers’ hop bines. Bryant, however, had refused, so Cruttenden proceeded to carry out the act alone. When Bryant subsequently turned King's evidence, it was enough to secure a capital conviction against the lone maimer. Cruttenden's life was spared, when his sentence was ‘reduced’ to permanent transportation to Australia after a petition was got up in Benenden declaring his conduct and character to have hitherto been exemplary. Farmer Reeves of Bendenden refused to sign the reprieve petition and a few days later his hops were also cut. Many Benenden parishioners, reported the Maidstone Journal, thought that Reeves deserved it.Footnote 77 Social relations in Benenden were clearly intricately tied up with the hop.Footnote 78
Before 1815 attacks on plantations and orchards were sporadic and usually carried out on a small scale against large landowners. During subsistence crises attacks on plantations appear to have occurred with some regularity, suggesting that tree maiming was an important alternative in some parts of southern England to the firing of wheat ricks and barns. Whilst there is no discernible geography to these pre-1815 attacks, it is evident that, of the few cases where more than ten trees were mutilated, all occurred in newly created plantations. Thomas Slack's plantations at Braywick (Berkshire) were subjected to multiple attacks as were the plantations of Lord Arundel at Ilchester (Somerset) where thousands of young trees were destroyed by individuals wielding bill hooks, one maimer narrowly missing the hand of one of Arundel's woodsmen who was set watch in the hope of catching those who had been desecrating his Lordship's property.Footnote 79
Other mass mutilators of trees before 1815 were not so lucky. At the Wiltshire County Quarter Sessions in April 1800, labourer Abraham Robinson was found guilty of cutting down the fir trees lately planted on an enclosure made upon the common at Marlborough and was sentenced to seven years transportation. Robinson's actions were presumably precipitated by the enclosure of the common and the subsequent loss of common rights, something which also motivated Joseph Kennett, who was found guilty at the Droxford Petty Sessions of ‘wilfully throwing down’ the rails of a new timber enclosure at Hambledon in the Forest of Bere.Footnote 80 Similarly, at Melksham in 1758, a group of men headed by a baker levelled the banks and fences erected to protect an orchard which had been planted on land ‘purloined from the Common’.Footnote 81
After 1815 there was not only a notable increase in the level of attacks on plantations and orchards but also a more definite and, as with attacks on hop gardens, functionally-driven, geography. The plantations in Hampshire and on the Berkshire-Surrey borders cited above were particularly liable to attack, from having been created upon commonable Forests and Chases and wastes. This concentration of attacks beyond 1815 in some ways represents an already well-established protest pattern. The establishment of commercial plantations upon Bagshot Heath was bitterly resisted by repeated acts of tree maiming and other malicious acts during the subsistence crisis of 1795–6.Footnote 82 Similarly from the 1790s the creation of vast enclosures in the New Forest and Woolmer Forest in Hampshire for the growth of naval timber and, from the late 1810s, quick-growing fir trees, provoked bitter protests at the loss of common rights. Incendiarism, rather than tree maiming was initially the malcontents’ weapon of choice, although, in a sense, fire was simply utilised as an efficient alternative to saws and knives in effecting the maiming of a large number of trees.Footnote 83 Attacks against the plantations in the New Forest and Bagshot Heath reached something of a fever pitch in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Indeed, during 1829, arguably the highpoint for this form of plant maiming in south-central England, attacks upon New Forest plantations intensified and were marked with the ‘most malicious circumstances’ that local magistrates publicly resolved to use their ‘full powers’ to prevent further attacks.Footnote 84
Whilst this form of plant maiming was relatively rare in Kent and Sussex there were some hotspots of agitation. The Faversham Blean, a huge expanse of ancient woodland stretching between Canterbury, Whitstable and Faversham, was notoriously lawless and had a long history of resistance to enclosure and changing land-use going back to the late sixteenth century.Footnote 85 In the 1770s and 1780s tree maiming attacks against new plantations were frequent occurrences, whilst during and immediately after Swing, and again in the early 1840s, incendiarism was frequently deployed against the Blean plantations.Footnote 86
Maiming multiple trees was time-intensive and usually required some form of axe or saw. It was by far the most risky form of plant maiming. The maimers in most such cases tended therefore to target less than a hundred trees. Occasionally, however, vast numbers of trees were destroyed. In January 1828, 12,000 young trees growing in Maidenhead Thicket (Berkshire) were destroyed, causing an estimated £3,000 worth of damage, equal in terms of destruction to all but the most catastrophic of incendiary fires.Footnote 87 Whilst the modal number of trees destroyed in reported cases was ‘several’, a numerical device deployed by newspaper editors reliant on often uncertain and vague reports they received, it is apparent that attacks upon plantations tended to destroy far more trees than did similar attacks upon orchards. This is probably partly a function of the fact that orchards invariably covered smaller areas than plantations, were less densely planted and tended to be stocked with more young trees raised in nurseries rather than the saplings planted in most plantations.Footnote 88 Moreover, attacks upon orchards were also often accompanied by other forms of malicious damage. For instance at Stockbury (Kent) in May 1828 not only were thirty-nine young fruit trees ‘wrenched asunder’ on the farm of John Fuller but a plough was also destroyed.Footnote 89 At Crawley near Winchester farmer Bright had seventy-four of his ‘most choice’ fruit trees destroyed, evidence, according to the report given to the Salisbury press, that the culprit must have been someone ‘well acquainted with the trees’, as well as suffering the theft of a bee hive and other ‘depredations’. Bright's onetime foreman, who on account of his earlier misconduct had been demoted to the status of a day labourer, was subsequently sentenced to seven years transportation by the Hampshire Epiphany Quarter Sessions on the strength of the ‘wholly circumstantial’ evidence that his bill hook matched the marks on the maimed trees.Footnote 90
Against nothing? Plant maiming as ‘vandalism’
Some cases of plant maiming, at least as reported, appear to contain no discernible element of protest but, conversely, clearly did not represent attempted thefts of plant matter. In practice such reports were made relatively infrequently, perhaps because such acts were infrequent or alternatively because in many cases they were too trivial to be deemed worthy of comment by the provincial press or for the aggrieved to press criminal charges. Occasionally reports even assumed a somewhat mocking tone. One such report appeared in the Sussex Advertiser. The notice stated that ‘several’ young men from Ospringe near Faversham had been committed to prison for a week but suggested in a condescending tone that their crime had been the feckless act of destroying the standing corn whilst ‘in the habit’ of playing cards, dice and other games.Footnote 91 Most other reports are somewhat more perfunctory, relating only what had been attacked and when and where the attack had occurred. It is worth noting that many stories that related to the place of publication of a provincial paper were reported in a particularly skewed way for such papers had to be publicly seen to uphold a sense of civic pride and duty. Acts that violated the local polity were therefore held to be particularly dastardly. The Canterbury press rarely reported acts of plant vandalism from outside the city but made frequent notice of attacks made upon the Dane John Gardens. Even these reports could be somewhat sketchy though. A 1792 report noted only that ‘some’ trees had been damaged in the Dane John Gardens, whilst the details of an 1813 attack survives not by virtue of editorial comment but because the Corporation placed an advert in the Kentish Gazette offering a twenty guinea reward.Footnote 92
The experience of Canterbury was typical. As with the majority of the attacks against individuals, most of the reports of plant ‘vandalism’ emanated from market towns. Almost by definition, these attacks tended to occur in public as opposed to private spaces, most notably pleasure gardens, parks and the verges of roads. In turn, this geography determined which plants were attacked: flower beds, ornamental trees and hedges. Perhaps unsurprisingly, because this form of plant maiming was not a direct comment about the ways in which plants were socially enrolled nor attacks upon any specific individual, other objects were often attacked at the same time. Indeed, in the winter of 1821 so ‘numerous’ were the attacks upon the trees, fences and rails in the cathedral close at Winchester that a watch had to be established.Footnote 93
One can, however, read these apparently randomly-directed acts in a different way. Enrolling plants as ornament tended to draw greater attention to their existence, for ornament tended to go hand-in-hand with a form of social exclusion. Cathedral closes, pleasure grounds and ornamental avenues were all spaces of polite leisure rather than hard labour. Thus whilst an individual or group hell-bent on destruction of whatever kind would not wait until they found the nearest public plant, it is reasonable to assume that when plants were so targeted they effectively were attacked as physical proxies for their attackers’ oppressors.
Whilst such attacks were made, by definition, against seemingly random targets they could also target particular streets. For instance on a Saturday night in April in 1822, the year in which the post-Napoleonic War depression was at its nadir, the trees of several residents in South Street, Eastbourne, were maliciously attacked. A similar Saturday night onslaught saw the shrubs and flowers in the ‘little gardens’ of two Lewes men attacked.Footnote 94 Such rampages usually also involved the destruction of fences, street lamps and other forms of street furniture. On one June night in 1828 three residents of the Parade in Tunbridge Wells respectively had their shop glass broken, their vegetable beds destroyed and their trees cut and broken.Footnote 95
Identities and Motivations
I have identified seventy cases in which 103 (alleged) plant maimers were tried.Footnote 96 Of these judicial cases only two related to women of which one involved two women and the other involved a woman and a man acting in tandem.Footnote 97 This gender imbalance is important for two key reasons. Firstly, Shakesheff has recently suggested that wood-taking was an activity primarily associated with the ‘classic’ female role of sustaining the household economy.Footnote 98 In the same way that labourers targeted that which was central to their work in many acts of protest, such as the horses with which they worked, the hay ricks they had helped to form, or the threshing machines on which they worked, we would expect that in many cases of plant maiming that which was being attacked would assume a central role to the maimer's everyday life. All else being equal, it would be reasonable to assume that as wood gathering was an integral practice to many rural women's lives, then plant maiming would be an important way in which their resentments, for instance regarding attempts to more tightly regulate access to woodlands, could be partially assuaged.
It is possible, however, that women were more likely to be cautioned by local landowners and magistrates rather than being formally prosecuted. Evidence from the justice's notebook of Wiltshire magistrate William Hunt suggests that in cases relating to plants, women were treated more leniently than men. In April 1746 a search warrant was issued against three female labourers of Urchfont. When they appeared before Hunt they were pardoned ‘out of regard of their great poverty and their promises of not offending in the like again’ rather than being prosecuted. Even in a case where two female brick-makers of Market Lavington cut down a plum tree and also destroyed a quantity of mustard seed, clearly an act of plant maiming, Hunt only fined the women five shillings to cover the farmers’ losses.Footnote 99
Such an argument is given further credence by the fact that the difference between many acts of plant maiming and the taking of wood was impossibly slight. If Shakesheff is correct in stating that the collecting of wood was primarily undertaken by women, something landowners and magistrates alike would surely have been alert to, then the combination of ambiguity and of magistrates treating women with a degree of leniency suggests that many women were prosecuted with the theft, or attempted theft, of plant matter rather than with plant maiming. For instance, an advert in the Kentish Gazette during February 1796, a time of grinding dearth, stated that Bizing Wood on the fringe of Faversham had been subject to numerous recent depredations. ‘Many people’ had been observed to have lately ‘pulled down the hedges and broken the fences, turned the stock into the seed, cut down green wood and breaking dead wood out of stocks in the woods and hedges’.Footnote 100 Combined, these relatively minor acts constituted a phalanx of plebeian resistance. Women might not regularly engage in the dramatic acts of cutting hundreds of hop bines or the night time destruction of a whole orchard but did enrol plants, especially trees, in often subtle acts of resistance. Through such subtle acts did plants become, as Bushaway suggested, a major source of conflict in the countryside.
Secondly, Archer has identified that the vast majority of animal maimers and incendiarists were male.Footnote 101 If the statistics concerning the identity of plant maimers are correct, then we can begin to draw some important conclusions concerning the nature of covert protest in the countryside. Broadly speaking, whilst women might occasionally resort to covert protest, covert protest as a tool of rural terror was, by and large, a man's game. Women's resistances were more subtle. Where the archive records that women were found guilty of plant maiming such cases invariably involved damage to garden produce, prosecutions that were hard to secure as they relied upon eyewitness testimonies.
The age profile of plant maimers adds further credence to these conclusions. In total I have identified one hundred men and three women who were tried in the seventy identified plant maiming prosecutions. Of these individuals the ages of only twenty men are recorded at an average age of 22.65. The profile of these maimers suggests however that this average might be too high. Ten of the twenty individuals were younger than twenty years of age whilst two were in their late forties. If these two outliers are removed the average age of plant maimers is 19.94, a figure substantiated by the fact that in many other cases where no age was stated the alleged maimers were referred to as ‘young’. If these admittedly partial statistics are an accurate reflection of those who usually maimed plants, then it would appear that plant maiming was a young man's game, an observation that tallies with Archer's analysis of East Anglian incendiarists and animal maimers who had an average age of twenty-four, or twenty-two years amongst farm labourers, and eighteen years respectively.Footnote 102 Such young men were the most economically and socially marginal members of rural communities, suffering from a combination of employment instability, low wages and negligent poor law payments. In short, they had arguably the most to complain about and the least to lose from protesting. Young women, whilst in many cases as economically marginal as young men, were, by virtue of the dynamics of rural communities, likely either to be engaged in service, still living in the familial house or at home looking after their children. If covert protest was a young person's game, then women, without even considering differing sensibilities and coping tactics between men and women in Hanoverian England, were less likely to engage in such acts by simple virtue of having fewer possibilities to do so.
Ascertaining the precise motives of plant maimers, as with those of incendiarists and animal maimers, is rather more difficult. In the vast majority of cases the general motivation is easy to discern: opposition to enclosures (and enclosers), opposition to penny-pinching farmers and vestrymen, or to individuals apparently out of personal pique and revenge. Beyond these attacks, and those where it appeared there was no specific target, the archive occasionally provides compelling, if not conclusive, evidence that individuals were targeted due to clear resentments. In the summer of 1830 the late gardener of the Dane John Gardens in Canterbury was successfully prosecuted and transported for seven years for barking a total of six trees on two separate occasions.Footnote 103 Prosecutions relating to attacks on overseers’ plants sometimes offer a little more detail. In August 1832 John Humphrey, the Sandhurst overseer, had the bines on eighty hills of hops cut. Unfortunately for John Shepherd, a twenty-three year-old labourer with one wooden leg, Humphrey had observed him enter the hop garden at seven a.m. and a fellow labourer, to whom Shepherd confessed an hour after committing the act, gave evidence against Shepherd. At the subsequent trial at the West Kent Quarter Sessions Shepherd had little option but to confess his guilt: ‘I owed Mr. Humphrey a grudge and now I have paid him off’.Footnote 104
Before the late 1830s newspaper reports of plant maiming trials tended to be somewhat cursory, rarely detailing more than the who, where and when of the case. The reduction of Stamp Duty on newspapers in 1836 and its eventual abolition in 1855 removed the economic necessity of producing one sheet, four page journals. The move to an eight, twelve or even sixteen page format allowed for a dramatic increase in both the range of reports printed and the level of detail of each report. As such, the late 1830s represented something of a watershed in the reporting of plant maiming, especially in relation to legal cases, and better allows for motivations to be understood. The two following cases are instructive.
On 3rd July, 1841 farmer Neame of Selling, one of the largest hop growers in East Kent, had forty hop bines cut. The constable followed two sets of footprints from the hop garden to the fair at nearby Boughton and upon searching the bedrooms in the adjacent houses found two sets of boots whose tread perfectly matched the footprints. Two labourers who had been working by the piece in Neame's hop gardens were subsequently arrested. It transpired that the two men had earlier that day been involved in an altercation with Neame regarding the quality of their work, for which the farmer had warned them that unless they repeated their work they would not be paid. The men had then left Neame and walked off in the direction of the garden where the hops were later found to have been cut. The jury at the Kent Assizes concluded that this evidence was largely circumstantial and acquitted the labourers.Footnote 105 This was, circumstantially at least, a classic act of social protest. Conversely, in September 1849, Mrs. Banks of Godstone (Surrey) attempted to evict her tenant ‘Old man Stripp’. After refusing to take his rent Banks sent her son to bully Stripp into moving. He first threatened Stripp with eviction before lashing out at the tenant's plants. Stripp then launched a prosecution at the Godstone Petty Sessions at which Banks’ son was found guilty and ordered to pay £1.1s.6d. in penalty and costs to Stripp.Footnote 106
Plant maiming, so it would appear, was not always a straightforward act of social protest, pitting the poor against the rulers of rural England. It was not always motivated by class revulsion or an attempt to assuage oppression. For instance, when some young trees growing upon the grounds of a gentleman at Whetstone in Middlesex were destroyed it was not an immiserated labourer who was convicted of the offence but another ‘man of circumstance’. The guilty maimer, notwithstanding his status, was, publicly whipped by the common hangman.Footnote 107 Similarly during the 1831 General Election the success of the anti-reform Tories at Wareham (Dorset) was marked by a spree of attacks on the gardens of those opposed to reform. Trees and shrubs were pulled up, vegetables were ‘hacked up’, whilst the vines and espalier trees were wrenched from the walls.Footnote 108 Plant maiming, a form of protest normally practised in the realm of everyday community politics, could also be a weapon of party politics.
Conclusions
Whilst plant maiming may fail to suggest the immediate and visceral visions invoked by the burning inferno of incendiarism, or the bloodied, braying body of animal maiming, there can be little doubt that it should be considered as an important tool of rural terror in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. The rules and guidelines of prosecution societies, a good barometer of the anxieties of rural communities, invariably included some pronouncement against plant maiming. The Wimborne Association, founded in 1790, offered its members the assistance of a small reward to help try to secure evidence leading to a successful prosecution in cases of ‘Cutting, breaking down, lopping, topping, burning, defacing, or damaging any timber trees . . . stealing, pulling up, or destroying turnips, or other roots, or vegetables’. Similarly the Wiltshire Association, founded the following year, offered a £1.1s.1d. reward in cases of ‘damaging trees’ and ‘pulling up, or destroying turnips, garden stuff, or other roots or vegetables’.Footnote 109
It is not too surprising therefore that magistrates and the courts took plant maiming very seriously. As Justice Parkes stated when sentencing labourer Richard Dawson for cutting two hundred hop bines belonging to overseer Dawson of Stockbury at the Kent Summer Assizes in 1833: ‘Ten years ago your life would have been forfeited, for this was then a capital crime. It was so, because it was easily perpetrated, the property being entirely unprotected, and of frequent occurrence’. Dawson was sentenced to life transportation, something which ‘deeply impressed’ the many agricultural labourers in the public gallery of the court.Footnote 110 Whether Parkes was simply attempting to maximise the potential deterrent by highlighting the once even greater terror of the law is unclear, but it is perhaps telling that I have identified no cases in which southern plant maimers were executed.Footnote 111 Many poor rural workers were, however, like Dawson, wrenched from their families and communities and transported to Australia.
The entrenched nature of plant maiming and its deep cultural importance is best demonstrated not by the attitudes of the courts but by the fact that it was frequently used in tandem with other forms of covert protest. Attacks on both garden produce and ‘urban’ parks were often accompanied by a resort to malicious damage, whilst attacks on plantations were often most successfully accomplished by a parallel resort to incendiarism. Even an attack on the grounds of Faversham parish church in February 1827 combined malicious damage to gravestones, an arson attack on an outhouse and the destruction of some young trees.Footnote 112 The strongest proof that plant maiming was part of the protest vocabulary came in the form of an attempt to extort money from a Kentish farmer. The extorter wrote a letter to the farmer threatening that unless ten pounds was placed under a particular stone he would have his barns fired, his stock poisoned and his hop bines cut. The scheme was successfully carried off and the extorter decided to repeat his scheme against another Kentish hop-farmer. His second attempt failed, however, when he attempted to offer the cheques to a Maidstone hatter.Footnote 113
It is important to note that across southern England as a whole plant maiming was not as frequently resorted to as incendiarism. However, in certain communities, most notably those Wealden and Maidstone hop parishes, plant maiming was not only clearly understood by the rural poor but it was also the most effective and most common form of covert protest. Indeed, the experience of the Kentish hop-growers is instructive. Long before associations were formed to combat incendiarism, something that did not occur in the south-east until 1830,Footnote 114 campaigns were waged to attempt to prevent financially punishing hop cutting.Footnote 115 In Kent, and perhaps elsewhere too, the practice of maliciously cutting hops represented a shared cultural identity and embodied wider community beliefs regarding the defence of plebeian livelihoods and identities. Wherever capital was most heavily invested in hops, fruit trees or commercial plantations, it was invariably to plant maiming that the aggrieved and oppressed initially turned to address their grievances.
That plant maiming was practised not only in the gardens, orchards, plantations and woodlands dotted throughout the countryside but also in the gardens and parks of market towns, those spaces which were as much defined by agriculture as by commerce and leisure, shows its flexibility and universal applicability. Wherever flora was to be found, plant maiming was possible. It is also particularly striking that opposition to enclosure frequently involved plant maiming, both initially and in residual resistances to the consequences of changing land-uses and the loss of customary rights. After all, beyond the often ineffectual setting fire to fences, incendiarism would be of little use in the initial physical opposition to enclosure. Plant maiming was thus important because it could directly address the bio-physical manifestations of socio-economic change.
It is important to realise therefore that whilst we could reasonably assume that the geography of plant maiming should be a function of both the geography of flora and the geography of the ways in which flora was enrolled in human systems, our understandings will always be skewed by the highly partial nature of the archive. The complex geographies of newspaper publishing meant that large areas of rural England were under- or even unrepresented in the news columns of the provincial press.Footnote 116 One such area was the major hop belt between Farnham and Alton. Surrey did not have a county paper until the launch of the London-published Surrey Standard in 1835, whilst the towns of Farnham and Alton did not have their own newspapers until the respective publication of the Surrey and Hants News in 1864 and the Alton Advertiser and East Hants Gazette in 1874.Footnote 117 Similarly the poor survival of the formal records of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century petty sessions, the forum at which many plant maimers were tried, offers a further distortion. This, in turn, is further compounded by the increased tendency from the early 1830s of provincial papers to offer detailed reports of the proceedings of local petty sessions.
A further complication is that sometimes plant maiming was quite deliberately enacted as a secondary practice to theft. Whilst cases of wood stealing which also involved the auxiliary destruction of twigs and branches are legion, in some cases those stealing plant matter also deliberately injured plants too. In the summer of 1800 not only were grapes stolen from a vine growing at the Crown Inn in Reading but the vine itself was greatly injured.Footnote 118 Similarly, two labourers who were alleged by the Goudhurst Prosecution Society to have maimed the hops of farmer Manwarring were also reported to have stolen some of the farmers’ cherries.Footnote 119 In some ways, however, the distinction between crime and acts of protest tends to obscure rather than clarify our understanding for, as Bushaway suggested, seemingly simple acquisitive acts were also subtle acts of resistance against the conception of private rather than communal property. Ultimately, in order to understand the ways in which the rural poor attempted to enforce a customary and community justice, we must identify the mechanisms at their disposal. And herein lies the greatest power of plant maiming. The individual(s) could moderate the strength of their protest through the severity of their attack. To maim one hundred apple trees was to make a very different point to wrenching down a solitary vine, although both were expressions of dissent. It was a form of protest that could, unlike animal maiming and incendiarism, be subtle or brutally dramatic.
