The poacher is a totemic figure for historians, a social criminal reflecting the disjunction between elite and popular conceptions of the law as it applies to wild property and a figure whose activity has often been taken as an expression and barometer of acute rural poverty. A secure consensus among historians that poaching was both the embodiment of the concept of social crime and a routine strategy within the makeshift economy of the rural labouring poor has not however precluded the development of an increasingly nuanced understanding of the crime within this framework.Footnote 1 Although poaching often provided direct sustenance, it was also a commercial activity and for some offenders a form of employment as well as a source of pleasure and identity.Footnote 2 Poaching was conducted within a shifting environmental context and poaching conflict was inextricably related to game preservation, which was itself spatially and temporally variable in intensity.Footnote 3 Although to poach was not regarded as criminal by the bulk of the rural population, and while most offenders were otherwise law-abiding and some were perhaps even the ‘Village Hampdens’ or ‘Don Quixotes’ that early writers imagined them to be, perhaps predictably, as John Archer has demonstrated, criminals poached.Footnote 4 As an activity poaching was highly stratified and multi-faceted. It encompassed night poaching for high-status winged and ground game as well as daylight offences, often focused on rabbits and, at certain seasons, the eggs of game birds. Poaching practices varied and while guns were frequently used by those who raided woodland coverts for pheasants or trespassed on moors for grouse, a great deal of offending relied on the use of dogs, nets, traps and snares. In some areas trout and salmon were also routinely taken at various life-stages and seasons with implements of varying technical complexity, although most, like those used by game poachers, were relatively simple and potentially discreet.
Certainly more is known about the poacher than almost any other contemporary law breaker and there is a good deal of consensus about the typical characteristics of those prosecuted. Perhaps the most unambiguous finding to emerge from virtually all academic studies is that the poacher was invariably male. The sexual exclusivity implicit in Joseph Arch's contemporary assessment that ‘every other man you met’ was a poacher has been reaffirmed by historians such as David Jones and Tim Shakesheff who have argued that ‘poaching was a male-dominated crime’, despite the fact that women were often prominent in what might be regarded as comparable kinds of petty offending in rural areas such as wood and crop theft and the stealing of poultry.Footnote 5 Not surprisingly perhaps, the strength of this archetype has contributed to the neglect or at least perfunctory treatment of female poachers by historians, with their involvement often overlooked or their relegation to apparently subordinate roles. The number of women convicted for poaching offences was certainly small, but an examination of their activity and experience is possibly long overdue. Reintegrating female offenders back into the historical record highlights a number of themes relating to the practice of poaching and women's participation in it as well as the reach and sometimes paradoxical influence of contemporary gender ideologies and constructions.
This article will draw on a range of material including parliamentary enquiries, contemporary published accounts and newspaper reports of court proceedings, primarily from the period 1840 to 1890, in order to explore three principal contentions. Firstly, that female involvement in poaching crime was probably more common than has been previously assumed or acknowledged. While women were certainly much less frequently prosecuted for poaching offences than men they were often nonetheless deeply involved in poaching crime although a range of factors determined that females were much less likely to be detected and punished than their male counterparts. Secondly, that the response of authority to female poachers reveals the fluidity of the law, specifically in the application of justice, by highlighting a far wider spectrum of experience than male offenders typically encountered. Legal responses to male and female offending, even when the same crime was committed, often differed significantly across virtually all categories of criminality during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century and this is also evident in the case of poaching crime.Footnote 6 Female poachers were often treated with leniency, although at times they could also be subject to censure for involvement in an activity which was perceived to unsex them. In this sense they were sometimes perceived, to apply Lucia Zedner's phrase, as ‘doubly deviant’.Footnote 7 At times their illegal hunting activity was also the focus of incredulity and incomprehension which occasionally extended to uncertainty as to whether the law even allowed for the prosecution of women for such a ‘male crime’ as poaching. These reactions were the product of wider cultural assumptions about appropriate male and female spheres. The response of rural magistrates to female poachers highlighted not only a habituated and restricted view of femininity, but also pervasive and deeply held ideas about how men, particularly from the middle and upper classes, should be and how they should conduct themselves. It will be suggested that the performance and demonstration of gentlemanly virtues and behaviours on the part of rural magistrates towards female defendants may have had a particular resonance and importance in the countryside. Finally, the inclusion of women, writing them into the historiography of this form of rural crime, highlights the extent to which poaching was constructed and perceived as a specifically masculine activity, perhaps increasingly so as the nineteenth century progressed. While the increasing masculinisation of crime has been identified by historians as a more general feature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the case of poaching this tendency also owed something to wider developing conceptions of many field sports as exclusively male outdoor pursuits which served as arenas for the display and development of manly qualities.Footnote 8 Ideas about gender shaped women's engagement in poaching crime from the outset, but contemporary shifts towards increased gender exclusivity in many forms of elite hunting also helped influence the varied but distinctive responses of some contemporaries to female participation in plebeian, illegal, hunting practices.
I
David Jones, John Archer and Tim Shakesheff, among others, have convincingly argued that the overwhelming proportion of poachers in the nineteenth century were male.Footnote 9 Much of the available evidence bears this out. Inspectors of prisons reported rarely encountering females imprisoned due to Game Law convictions.Footnote 10 Prosecution statistics for England and Wales, at least for the period for which they are consistently available, demonstrate that women constituted a very small proportion of those brought before the courts. In 1871, for example, of 10,768 summary prosecutions under the Game Laws in England and Wales only thirty-three were of females.Footnote 11 This pattern, in terms of the proportion of women among those convicted, was broadly consistent throughout the mid to late Victorian period. Between 1860 and 1898 typically just over twenty women annually were summarily prosecuted under the Game Laws, consistently comprising less than one per cent of all cases.Footnote 12 Most of these female prosecutions were divided between the two most common categories of poaching offence, trespass in pursuit of game by day and, after 1863, for offences under the 1862 Poaching Prevention Act which granted police new powers to stop and search persons suspected of poaching offences on public roads. Indeed, by the 1880s the Poaching Prevention Act accounted for the majority of game cases involving females. Women were rarely prosecuted for night poaching, although they were more consistently summonsed, although again in low numbers, for illegally selling or buying game. Although the small numbers of prosecutions against females makes it impracticable to identify any meaningful long-term statistical trends, it is clear nonetheless that whereas the numbers of summary prosecutions under the Game Laws as a whole declined perceptibly towards the end of the century, the low level of female prosecutions reflected this experience less and evidenced no marked decline towards the end of Victoria's reign.Footnote 13 Females constituted a slightly higher proportion of those prosecuted for poaching offences under the Salmon Acts during the mid to late Victorian period, typically featuring in one in every 130 cases in England and Wales, but again the actual number of women prosecuted annually for this very spatially concentrated poaching activity was small, usually less than ten annually throughout the period 1862 to 1892.Footnote 14
However, it is certain that the judicial statistics, which as a guide to the real level of poaching are even less reliable than to almost any other category of criminality, considerably understate the true level of female involvement in poaching crime. Such an assumption can be based on factors specific to poaching itself, principally because of the types of poaching offence that women typically committed, and also those relating to the punishment and measurement of contemporary female criminality more broadly. Historians agree that in general women were prosecuted in smaller numbers than men in England and Wales throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that the criminality of women was consistently less well recorded, possibly in part because female offenders were more likely to be subject to informal sanctions and leniency. Contemporary understandings of the criminal as essentially male and crime as essentially a male phenomenon may also have had some influence in contributing to the undetected and unrecorded level of female offending. Lucia Zedner, for example, has argued that the low level of recorded female crime in Victorian England may be ‘at least partly attributable to the pervasive designation of women as non-criminal’.Footnote 15 Furthermore, as Robert Shoemaker has suggested, if female criminality was in both contemporary perception and experience less problematic than male offending then this may have made prosecutors less zealous when faced with female law-breakers. Since prosecution and punishment were designed in part to deter and set an example to others, informants and prosecutors may have felt less compunction to initiate formal measures where female offending was perceived as low-level or unthreatening.Footnote 16 This may be particularly relevant in the context of poaching where female offending was less significant than male transgression and rarely associated with the violence synonymous with the ‘long affray’ and where prosecutions tended in any case to be initiated by a relatively limited group within rural society, consisting almost exclusively of gamekeepers, watchers, landowners and, after 1862, the police.Footnote 17
Most contemporary observers, while cognisant of the male dominated nature of illegal plebeian hunting activity, primarily expressed in offences such as night poaching and trespass in search of game by day, were however acutely aware of the central role that females played once the quarry was dead, principally in the transport and distribution of game or fish to home or to market.Footnote 18 In 1872, for example, the Chief Constables of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Somerset and Staffordshire reported that it was women who were chiefly responsible for transporting game from poachers in country areas to game dealers or local transport hubs for onward distribution. In Derbyshire women were apparently ‘employed in different parts to bring home game’ and deliver it to licensed dealers on behalf of male poaching gangs operating at night and primarily focused on ground game.Footnote 19 James Watson, writing in 1891, observed that poachers were ‘rarely met with game upon them’ which was instead hidden in disused farm buildings, dry ditches, stacks and ricks ‘until women can be sent to fetch the spoil’.Footnote 20 That male offenders, including John ‘Posey’ Gorley of Cockermouth in Cumbria who borrowed his wife Catherine's clothes for the occasion, sometimes dressed as women when transporting illegally procured fish or game, underlines how far femininity was perceived to offer an effective veil for criminality.Footnote 21 These observations reveal that, even after the introduction of the 1862 Poaching Prevention Act, which provided the police with wide-ranging powers to stop and search those suspected of carrying unlawfully obtained game, it was acknowledged by all sides that women were less likely to attract suspicion than men. Although females were heavily involved in this aspect of poaching crime, femininity, or its guise, acted as a potential buffer. Consequently women were less likely to be stopped and physically searched, not least because of related concerns for female propriety, whether coming off private land or on public roads, and were therefore less likely to be detected and prosecuted.
Nonetheless, some were. In July 1870, Mary Ann Borham of Coventry was convicted and fined after being observed collecting a bag containing a rabbit and partridge from a wheat field in the Warwickshire village of Baginton. The bag was apparently left by Borham's father, ‘a well-known poacher’.Footnote 22 Mary Campbell was fined three pounds in February 1873 by Perth magistrates after being found with nine rabbits in her possession on the Dundee Turnpike road.Footnote 23 In August 1887, the bulky appearance of Ann Palfrey aroused the suspicion of police at Thornley in County Durham. Palfrey was found to be carrying a long-net of 100 yards and three rabbits, two still living, and confessed that she was transporting these on behalf of a man named Wakefield who had been out poaching the night before.Footnote 24 In September 1885, Ann Stubbs was prosecuted under the Poaching Prevention Act when stopped near Runcorn in Cheshire with four rabbits hidden in a basket, allegedly carried on behalf of her husband Charles.Footnote 25 Helen Connor of Perth was convicted under the same legislation in September 1892 when a police search revealed seventeen rabbits in her possession.Footnote 26 In March 1891, Andrew Coulson, a postman and regular poacher on the River Esk at Longtown in Cumberland, was seen to hide a freshly gaffed salmon behind a bush which was later collected by two women who carried the concealed fish back into town.Footnote 27 Nichol Corrie, a poacher of both salmon and game based in the Botchergate area of Carlisle, also in Cumberland, regularly used Jane Ann Hutchinson, and her mother's cart, to transport his catch to dealers within the city.Footnote 28
The transportation and distribution of game was a female specialism within the context of commercial poaching, but such activity should not be considered unimportant or entirely subordinate to male offending. These were important roles, reflecting gendered divisions of labour, often within poaching households. Nor did women simply act as couriers at the mid-point of an illegal trade whose hunting and retail ends were otherwise dominated by men. Agnes Boyd, alias Jane Scott, for example, who spent three months in prison after being convicted in December 1829 of poaching hares at Douglas in Lanarkshire, was said to deal in eggs and game for a living.Footnote 29 Phoebe Hankey of Northwich in Cheshire was alleged to keep ‘her house open to poachers and as a place for the collection and distribution of game’.Footnote 30 Many other women occupied positions at the retail end of the trade in illegally obtained game, rabbits and fish, often selling within their own communities. That women often had a ‘close relationship’ with the disposal of illegally obtained goods of this type is perhaps not surprising given their consistently ‘high profile’ within retail and trading networks.Footnote 31 Martha Bartlett of Whitehaven was typical of the female hawkers who sold poached salmon and trout around the working-class districts of the coastal towns of West Cumberland.Footnote 32 So too was Isabella Elland who was apprehended in Workington in November 1891 carrying thirteen trout hidden in a basket.Footnote 33 Transporting and selling poached game and fish was not exclusively a female activity, but it was nonetheless an aspect of offending where women were more likely to be involved and often to the fore. Such subtle gendered differences in the precise kind of offence the sexes generally committed under the Game Laws had implications for how the judiciary responded to female offenders.Footnote 34
These examples highlight women in roles which although illegal under the Game Laws or Salmon Acts were outside the hunting of fish or game itself. However, examples of women who hunted illegally are not difficult to find, despite the physical demands of some modes of poaching, which potentially precluded the less robust of either sex.Footnote 35 Sometimes such women were part of poaching partnerships involving fathers, husbands and partners, again reflecting the household basis of much offending. Frederick Rolfe, for example, the self-styled King of the Norfolk Poachers, reflecting on his experiences in the early 1880s, recounted that his first wife Anna was an equal partner in night poaching expeditions when they were both in their early twenties:
Many and many a night she came out with me. . . . She could run and jump as well as me, and there was few that could beat me at running wen I was a young man. She could carry as many birds to – and carryen birds is no light job.Footnote 36
Many similar partnerships existed and were particularly important where two pairs of hands were required to use nets for trapping animals, birds or fish. Keswick magistrates convicted the fish poaching duo of Sarah Thompson and William Jackson during the early 1890s.Footnote 37 Similarly when, in August 1883, a police constable named Eastaff interrupted Robert Warner netting trout at night in a tributary of the River Derwent in Derbyshire, Warner was trawling the river with a woman with whom he lived. Both were later charged in connection with an assault on Eastaff that left him bleeding and unconscious.Footnote 38 In May 1878 the Penrith constabulary apprehended Mary Jane Mounsey in possession of a net, which smelt strongly of fish, near the river Eamont. Mounsey appears to have been a poacher in her own right, but like many others she was also part of a poaching partnership. As Police Superintendent Fowler explained to Penrith magistrates ‘she cohabited with one of the most notorious poachers in the neighbourhood’.Footnote 39
Other women appeared before magistrates in their own right. Some were clearly repeat offenders and also proficient hunters. When, in December 1876, Sarah Cook of Andover made yet ‘another appearance’ before Hampshire magistrates she was described as ‘one of the most skillful ferreters in the neighbourhood’.Footnote 40 In February 1870, Margaret White, a dressmaker, was gaoled for fifteen days following evidence from river watchers on the River Teith near Stirling that she had been seen to fasten a ‘cleek’ onto a ‘long branch cut from a riverside tree’, and ‘then hook a salmon and carry it away under her dress’.Footnote 41 Hannah Rushton, convicted in Derbyshire in 1861, was said by the gamekeeper bringing the case ‘to be the cleverest snare setter he ever saw’ who had been ‘killing three or four hares a week for months’.Footnote 42 These were not entirely exceptional cases. Mary Killick was prosecuted for snaring hares at Crowborough in Sussex in April 1842.Footnote 43 Margaret Golightly was apprehended on the Colepike Estate outside Lancaster in the act of removing rabbits from snares in June 1876.Footnote 44 Mary Coopey was convicted in May 1877 after being caught by gamekeepers checking snares at five in the morning at Huntley in the Forest of Dean.Footnote 45
Carolyn Darnell, alias Kitty Nash, of Welwyn in Hertfordshire was a repeat offender of a different order. In December 1892 she was convicted of trespass in pursuit of game and of killing game without a license after being seen, wearing a ‘man's hat and coat’, firing into a covey of partridges with a double-barrelled shotgun. Darnell was said to have twenty-one previous convictions, the last under the Poaching Prevention Act two years before. She had also served a period of penal servitude for shooting a policeman, who was only saved from serious injury from the discharge of Darnell's shotgun by the greatcoat he was wearing.Footnote 46 Darnell may have been an exceptional offender in a number of ways. Certainly accounts of women dressing as men are less commonly encountered in the context of poaching and social protest than the reverse.Footnote 47 It is probably unwise to speculate too much on the basis of a single case where details are limited, since it is unclear whether Darnell adopted a ‘man's’ attire for reasons of convenience, practicality or symbolism, but her masculine dress clearly struck a discordant note with those who prosecuted and those who reported the case alike. It may be too much to suggest that Darnell's adoption of male clothing consciously signified gender disempowerment, but there is little doubt that in the eyes of observers her masculine appearance grated and also amplified the extent to which traditional conventions of femininity and respectability were being openly subverted. Darnell challenged contemporary gender constructions in another way too, and to an even greater degree than most other female poachers. Most women committed for poaching offences did not use guns. Nor did females feature strongly in associated and recurrent contemporary fears about poaching violence, particularly those associated with nocturnal affrays and the threat posed by urban or rural poaching gangs. The possibility of physical violence was always inherent in encounters between male poachers and gamekeepers and frequently manifest in one form or another. The fact that women were only rarely associated with poaching related violence unquestionably shaped wider perceptions of female offending.
Even these few examples highlight what was probably the most common type of hunting that female poachers were chiefly involved in, that is to say the setting of snares and traps for rabbits, hares and sometimes gamebirds and the use of nets or basic snagging or gaff-like implements to capture trout and salmon. Where women were prosecuted for poaching offences, outside cases relating to the illegal possession or sale of game or fish, it was normally as a result of these relatively inconspicuous and covert forms of hunting. Snaring in particular was probably the most common method of poaching more generally, for male as well as female offenders, and the hardest to detect, relying on gamekeepers finding carefully concealed ‘wires’ and then catching those who returned to them. Footnote 48 This type of hunting potentially suited the work routines of women in rural areas, particularly those engaged in field work or animal husbandry, but also those involved more broadly in the maintenance of domestic economies. Snares or traps in hedgerows or furrows could be checked discreetly at points in the working day, or on journeys to and fro. Equally, women often played a major role in the informal economy and in the gathering of perquisites. Certainly collecting sticks for kindling and firewood offered both a real and ostensible justification for dawdling and trespass. Elizabeth Moss from Heaton in Staffordshire was prosecuted in December 1845 after gamekeepers watched her seemingly picking up sticks, but also returning, kindling still in hand, unerringly to the spot where a hare lay within a snare she had set earlier.Footnote 49 Mary Jones, Mary Wynne and Ann Gallimore initially claimed to have been gathering mushrooms when apprehended collecting rabbits and nets from a field at Denbigh in 1887.Footnote 50 The routine interaction that many rural women had with hedgerows and woodland fringes, particularly where the common right economy persisted or customary agreements to gather fuel existed locally, provided both an opportunity for poaching and a potential defence.
Patterns of informal and formal work and seasonal peaks in demand for female field workers also provided women with particular opportunities within a specific subset of poaching crime, the theft of game bird eggs.Footnote 51 Egg collecting for home consumption served the domestic economy, but significant cash rewards were possible if opportunities existed locally to sell partridge and pheasant eggs on to specialist dealers. Evidence before a series of Select Committees in the nineteenth century demonstrated how vast and potentially lucrative the highly seasonal trade in eggs could be, with the eggs themselves retailing for up to twelve shillings a dozen in urban markets where they were often purchased by game preservers themselves to hatch and enhance stocks. George Brooke, a poultry and game salesman at Leadenhall in London, estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 dozen pheasant and partridge eggs came into the market annually during the early 1840s, although he reported that they were also sold in ‘a very great quantity’ in local country markets.Footnote 52 Contemporary writers claimed that egg theft was a species of poaching in which ‘women and children [were] largely employed’.Footnote 53 Again self-provisioning activities provided women with particular opportunities for finding the nests of game birds, but significantly the laying season coincided in arable areas with seasonal peaks in female field work, or at least with the period in late spring when weeding, a task that often fell to women, was conducted with most intensity. The 1845 Select Committee into the Game Laws took it for granted that the connection between egg collecting and females had much to do with the weeding of the ‘corn at this season of the year by women’.Footnote 54
II
Female involvement in poaching crime was diverse, but it was also highly concentrated within certain forms of hunting and certain roles within the trade in illegally obtained game and fish, including acting as couriers or sellers. By their very nature these specialisms often carried lower risks of detection and prosecution than other types of offending where confrontation with gamekeepers and police was more likely and where male offenders predominated. Distinctions between the experiences of men and women and the related influence of contemporary constructions of gender were even more apparent when female poachers were caught and prosecuted. Their experience before the courts was often distinct and in terms of the contemporary meanings attributed to both gender and hunting, and the relationship between the two, quite revealing. It is evident from the findings of this analysis that female offenders, when detected and charged, were more likely to benefit from leniency, and a greater degree of leniency, than that routinely extended to male offenders. Again this is a feature thought generally characteristic of the experience of women before the courts, in England and Wales at least, across almost all categories of crime.Footnote 55 The experience of female poachers provides further support for this thesis and also evidence for the more interesting question of how considerations of gender shaped cultures of punishment.
In March 1885 Barbara Cumming, a domestic servant, was prosecuted for trespass while in search of game on land at Durris near Banchory in Aberdeenshire. The procurator fiscal recorded that the only reason that had induced the estate in question:
To adopt the unusual step of prosecuting a woman for poaching was that she had often been warned on account of similar conduct on previous occasions and had even paid sums to the poor of the parish to condone such offences.
This admission itself highlights a possibly more general tendency, and certainly one previously experienced in this context, towards informal penalties. Despite Cumming's recidivist offending, it was reported that, since the presiding Sheriff thought the case to be an unusual one, ‘he would rest satisfied with recording a conviction against her. . . the ends of justice would be met by the publicity the matter would obtain’.Footnote 56
Such public performances of leniency towards female poachers were, in the right conditions, common. When Mary Killick was convicted in Sussex in April 1842, even though she was clearly a practised offender, with ‘several wires found upon her’, the Bench remarked that ‘it was the first time they had heard of a female offender’ and in consequence ‘they only inflicted a small fine on her’.Footnote 57 Similarly when the poaching offence of Mary Coopey, again evidently no novice, was proved before magistrates in 1877, the Bench recorded that ‘this was the first time a female offender had been brought before them and therefore the magistrates would show their leniency by inflicting a small penalty of 2s 6d only with costs’.Footnote 58 When Mary Ann Borham was convicted at Leamington in 1870, the magistrates noted the ‘novelty of seeing a woman charged with poaching, but they had no alternative but to fine her’ although it was reported that ‘the bench gallantly, contrary to custom, allowed her a week to pay the money’.Footnote 59 Efforts to invoke public demonstrations of ‘gallantry’ from magistrates were sometimes clearly part of the strategies of female defendants and their legal representatives. When Elizabeth Moss, described in court as the ‘wife of a respectable cattle dealer’, was convicted at Leek in 1842 of taking hares, her solicitor, ‘as a last resource with their worships . . . appealed to them on behalf of his fair client on the score of gallantry’. Moss was still fined four pounds, but the Chairman of the Bench observed that ‘to prove the days of chivalry were not altogether obsolete he hoped that the further penalty of a £20 fine for sporting without a license would not be levied in this case’.Footnote 60
The extent to which female defendants benefited from lenient sentencing depended, as with male offenders, on a range of factors including past offending, social status, age, behaviour and attitude in court, and the extent of perceived respectability. As D'Cruze and Jackson have argued, ‘notions of respectability were a key reference point in the Victorian court room’.Footnote 61 Leniency was doubtless also conditional on the extent to which women defendants could demonstrate other characteristics, some associated with contemporary conceptions of femininity, such as submission, compliance and fragility. Appeals for leniency for married female offenders could also be based on husbands’ claims of ignorance of their wives’ offending behaviour or indeed other explanations for a lack of patriarchal supervision.Footnote 62 Assessments of ‘work-family relations’ and female responsibilities for children, husbands or parents, also undoubtedly shaped sentencing.Footnote 63 But perhaps just as important as these factors at times, and powerfully interacting with them, was the associated propensity of male magistrates, already working within a system which allowed considerable discretion, to demonstrate and perform behaviours and attitudes consistent with contemporary conceptions of chivalry. The playful comments made after the conviction of Elizabeth Moss by the Chairman of Leek Petty Sessions concerning the apparent obsolescence of chivalry invite further reflection. If anything historians have argued that ideas of chivalry were in fact increasingly important to nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity and formed part of a shift, evident from the middle of the eighteenth century, from what Michele Cohen has described as a ‘hegemonic ideal of politeness to a new ideal of gentlemanliness incorporating elements of a revived chivalry’.Footnote 64 Poaching cases involving female defendants bore witness not only to the rigidities and sometimes tensions surrounding contemporary social constructions of femininity, but also to manifestations of socially constructed masculinity in which chivalry was an increasingly powerful idea. Chivalry, with its promotion of an elevated regard for women and the responsibility of gentlemen to protect the weak and vulnerable, may have been a more than usually easy performative response for male magistrates in the context of female defendants whose poaching activity was often regarded by middle and upper class men in particular as idiosyncratic and no serious social threat.
The fact that most female poachers, if tried at all, had their cases heard at rural petty sessions is also potentially particularly significant when considering the influence that chivalric ideas played in shaping highly gendered interactions in court. Until very late in the nineteenth century the rural magistracy was dominated by those who were part of local landed society or aspirant to be identified as such.Footnote 65 As Howard Newby has argued, for men of this social background, the need to be recognised as a gentleman came to assume a fundamental importance. The rural landed classes invested more than any other group from the early nineteenth century in the revival, refashioning and appropriation of chivalry and its incorporation within a wider gentlemanly ethic. Gentility marked the rural elite apart. It was a code that conferred acceptance within landed society and underpinned the legitimacy of landowners’ claims to exercise authority in rural society as a whole.Footnote 66 That qualities of generosity and mercy were key concerns within this system of manners may not be entirely irrelevant to considerations of why rural magistrates responded to female poachers, usually of relatively humble social status, in the way that they sometimes did.Footnote 67
Public performances and projections of chivalry and gentility, which enabled men to be seen to be acting as gentlemen, were potentially no small matter in terms of reputation and presentations of the self in a context where the proceedings of rural petty sessions were, particularly after mid century, widely reported and read in provincial and national newspapers. This is perhaps particularly significant in the case of court reports covering the prosecution of female poachers, which, because of their relative novelty and occasionally vaguely prurient character, often tended, like other elements of sensational news content, to be widely syndicated, often resulting in national circulation, within the Victorian press.Footnote 68 Literacy, newspaper circulation and the expansion in the availability of provincial newspapers were all in the ascendancy after 1840, particularly following the gradual fiscal deregulation of newspapers in the mid Victorian period. Court reports were a key attraction in the provincial press particularly after mid century and justices operating at formally constituted courts of petty sessions would have been aware that reporting of their adjudications could reach a substantial readership within their own locality and potentially well beyond. A failure to demonstrate sufficient leniency towards female offenders, particularly in the context of matters that were already as controversial, within both rural and urban communities, as the Game Laws and game preservation, could lead to very public censure.
An indication of the potential level of public sensitivity is provided by the case of Mary McGibbon who was successfully prosecuted in October 1859 for killing grouse at Kilmalcolm in Renfrewshire. The case against McGibbon was fairly robust. She had been observed by gamekeepers on two occasions retrieving grouse caught in snares, deliberately set for the purpose around corn stooks, while on her way to put cows out to morning pasture. She was later found to have set no fewer than fifty-two snares to entrap the grouse which came down to feed on the small farm where she lived from the neighbouring moor of Sir Michael Shaw Stewart, the Member of Parliament for Renfrewshire. McGibbon was arguably treated with some leniency by the presiding justice, but she was nonetheless gaoled for a month for killing game without a license in default of payment of a fine of ten pounds. The fine was not inconsiderable, but it was half the normal penalty for such an offence and the prison term imposed in default was significantly below the maximum term allowable of six months imprisonment.Footnote 69
Nonetheless, such was the subsequent furore over the case that in December 1859 the procurator fiscal for Renfrewshire, Thomas Campbell, felt compelled to write an open letter to the press, directed primarily against the editor of the Glasgow Herald concerning the way in which he and the prosecuting justice Archibald Campbell had been traduced at the ‘bar of public opinion’ for their prosecution of what the ‘fourth estate’ had apparently contended was ‘a simple-looking highland girl’. As far as Thomas Campbell could see, there were no legal grounds for contesting what was in his view an aggravated offence and one which had in fact been treated leniently to a degree ‘almost to error’. As he put it, ‘the gravamen of the complaint’ against the prosecuting authorities, ‘seemed to consist of the fact that the offender is a woman’.Footnote 70
It is not sufficient to explain the ire directed at those involved in prosecuting Mary McGibbon entirely in terms of perceptions that they had not demonstrated sufficient leniency towards her based on consideration of her sex. They were clearly embattled within a very public debate in which a highly idealized construction of rural femininity, which Campbell rather uncharitably publicly suggested was some distance from the reality of McGibbon herself, had been mobilized against them. But this was also a debate within the context of the Game Laws, controversial in themselves, and whose very legitimacy was widely contested. Campbell's complaint against his public vilification acknowledged this, arguing ‘why all this clamour on behalf of a woman subjected by her own act to the penalties of a revenue statute, when no sympathizing voice is ever heard on the plea of sex, when widow, wife or maid incurs the same by selling spirits without a license, or contravening any other of that numerous class of public laws’. Footnote 71
Procurator fiscal Campbell had a point of course, but he also acknowledged another issue in his attempt to defend what, in his assessment at least, was the ‘almost unprecedented’ prosecution of a woman for a poaching offence. The fact that the prosecution was ‘unprecedented’ was, in Campbell's opinion, not just because women were rarely prosecuted for poaching, but because they rarely participated in what he described as such ‘unwomanly practices’ in the first place. This assessment was partly erroneous, a manifestation of the distance that existed between rural women and their social superiors on both sides of the argument.Footnote 72 But, it also reflected a perception, held particularly among middle and upper class men, that most forms of hunting, illegal or otherwise, were completely outside a woman's realm, that is to say entirely inconsistent with contemporary constructions of femininity. McGibbon may have experienced relative judicial leniency in sentencing, but in Campbell's published riposte to the Glasgow Herald she was presented as doubly deviant, as both a criminal and a woman who hunted.Footnote 73
These kinds of assumptions about gendered behaviour are illustrated in a curious way by a case heard by Pontefract magistrates in October 1882 when Elizabeth Grant was charged under the 1862 Poaching Prevention Act after being apprehended coming from private land with nets and other poaching implements in her possession. The case was discharged after her solicitor successfully argued that the Act, and specifically the clause directed against ‘any person having in his possession any guns, or nets, or engines for the killing or taking of game’, ‘did not contemplate females being guilty of such offences’, and ‘that the Act referred to males only’. The bench agreed and ordered the return of the seized nets to Grant even though it was acknowledged that she was ‘the daughter of one of the most notorious poachers in Yorkshire’. Metropolitan newspapers subsequently castigated the Pontefract bench for a ‘bluntness of perception rare even among country justices’ pointing out that under the Interpretation Act of 1850, relating to the language used in Acts of Parliament, it was expressly provided that ‘words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females’. ‘According to a decision of the Pontefract magistrates it would seem that females can indulge in poaching with impunity’ observed the Pall Mall Gazette. It was surely obvious, as the Liverpool Mercury highlighted with some derision, that ‘a female poacher can no more claim immunity than a female pickpocket’.Footnote 74
This was clearly true of course, but it is difficult to imagine that the Pontefract justices would have been drawn into such a misunderstanding except perhaps in an area where they held overriding and highly gendered assumptions about the disconnection between the nature of the crime and the sex of the defendant. These assumptions were highlighted in other cases, not least that of the previously mentioned Barbara Cumming, where at its conclusion, presiding Sheriff Brown remarked ‘had it not occurred to the ingenuity of the accused and her agent to suggest that poaching could not be committed by a woman’. He went on to suggest that a possible defence against the prosecution would have been to argue that ‘the temptation [of game] was not enough to overcome the tender sex’.Footnote 75 Brown was teasing the defendant and her legal representative and playing to the gallery, but his observations also reveal something deeper, something beyond reflexive allusions to female delicacy.
III
The notion that game was a special temptation to males reflected powerful assumptions underlying wider contemporary hunting culture which had, since the mid to late eighteenth century, increasingly come to define hunting, and the pursuit of game particularly, as a male pursuit. Writers such as John Mackenzie, Peter Munsche and Emma Griffin have all identified the development of greater sexual, as well as social, separation in field sports, particularly as hunting lost its subsistence and protective purposes and was transformed into a sporting and symbolic activity.Footnote 76 Munsche suggests that while it was not unusual for high status women to hunt, hawk and net game in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, such participation declined markedly alongside the transformation of field sports between 1660 and 1830. This saw traditional forms such as hawking and netting disappear while others such as game shooting were transformed as the battue style of driving winged game towards standing guns took hold. In this analysis, the gradual exclusion of women was in part due to technological and structural alterations to field sports, and particularly those focused on the hunting of game species, but it also owed something to a much more fundamental change in the nature of these sports as competitiveness between sportsmen, rather than simply the contest between hunter and prey, became increasingly important.Footnote 77 Mackenzie also highlights the progressive transformation of hunting into a male pursuit, although he identifies the nineteenth century as the period when the construction of hunting as an exclusively male activity was fully realised and is also much more disposed to link this development explicitly to the greater separation of masculine and feminine worlds more generally at this time.Footnote 78 Indeed, as hunting became increasingly culturally incompatible with emergent ideologies of domesticity and notions of female delicacy, it became increasingly celebrated as an environment for the development and exercise of distinctive male virtues. When elite women joined elite men on the shooting or coursing field in the nineteenth century, it was increasingly not as participants but as spectators of male hunting feats.
Plebeian female hunters, operating outside the law, did not fit this developing paradigm on any level. Their occasional appearance in the courts, and more persistent unrecorded activity as offenders and subsistence hunters, disrupted both contemporary constructions of femininity, in which an idealized vision of the countrywoman played an increasingly important part, and perceptions that to hunt game, at whatever level, was part of the male realm.Footnote 79 These ideas were undoubtedly increasingly present in the communities where female offenders originated, although whether they were shared to quite the same extent is another matter. It is evident that women had a limited role in hunting across all classes throughout the nineteenth century. Illegal plebeian hunting, like legal elite hunting, was also dominated by men and participation was heavily gendered. But the strict sexual exclusion increasingly characteristic of the hunting ethos of the British elite probably took longer to permeate the hunting culture of the labouring classes completely. Plebeian hunting practices, overwhelmingly defined as poaching offences, were in any case more widely incompatible with and often antithetical to elite hunting ideologies. More significantly, for many participants, poaching was a commercial enterprise, a criminal conspiracy, which encouraged the adoption of rational strategies to avoid detection, including women's frequent employment as couriers because they attracted less suspicion. Such strategies both played to assumptions about gender and yet also subverted them. Equally, for the rural poor in the nineteenth century, hunting had not lost its subsistence function. In these circumstances, and where opportunities existed to illicitly procure game and fish to support the domestic economy through either consumption or sale, it is hardly surprising that, while their participation often differed in scale and stratification to men, women were not altogether absent from the ranks of poachers and plebeian hunters.
IV
This discussion has sought to highlight a number of issues relating to the involvement of women in one of the most common crimes committed in the British countryside in the nineteenth century. Perhaps above all, it has simply sought to integrate women into the historiography of poaching crime and arguably for good reason. Up until now the involvement of women in poaching has been largely neglected, but it is clear that despite the relatively infrequent appearance of females in the judicial record their involvement in this crime was widespread and potentially significant. Women were rarely to the fore in those violent and often bloody aspects of the ‘poaching wars’ that frequently caused such contemporary anxiety and that have often captured the attention of historians, but they were sometimes hunters in their own right and more consistently featured in what was often a household activity with gendered divisions of labour.Footnote 80 They were certainly integral to the operation of what was a vast illicit trade in game and fish. Women were also those most likely to prepare or process illegally obtained game, rabbits and fish within the home.Footnote 81 More generally, women interacted with game preservation, and the full implications for rural communities of the Game Laws and Salmon Acts, as part of their daily lived experience and did so as much as, if not sometimes more than, men. Even where their involvement in poaching crime was restricted to familial relationships with offenders, they experienced the very real risk of temporary separation and the attendant financial, social and emotional consequences for families of the conviction of fathers, husbands and sons. These perspectives suggest possibilities for a deeper exploration of both male and female relationships with poaching crime, as well as other forms of rural crime and protest. Recent work by Iain Robertson and Carl Griffin has highlighted not only women's role as protesters, but the complex set of relations that underscored even many ostensibly male acts of protest and also the gender politics potentially inherent in episodes of rural disorder.Footnote 82
The experience of female poachers also reinforces some well-established general concepts of women and criminality during the nineteenth century. It is certain, for example, that, mirroring broader patterns, women were much less likely than men to commit poaching crime, although the paucity of female prosecutions makes temporal trends in particular difficult to establish or estimate. Prosecutions of women for poaching offences were always rare and, although female offenders never entirely vanished from the record, it is probable that real levels of female offending were influenced by the same social, environmental and economic changes that ultimately contributed to a general reduction in poaching towards the end of the century. It is also clear that female offenders were, as with many other categories of crime, less likely to be prosecuted than men and that even if convicted were more likely to experience relatively lenient punishment. As in other contexts, legal responses to men and women were markedly different even where the offence was identical. Explanations for this difference can be primarily located within contemporary gender ideologies and the ways in which assumptions about gender roles and traits shaped understandings of criminality and cultures of penality. The effect of gender on the judicial experience was complex, but poaching cases appear to reinforce Deirdre Palk's observation that differences between the experiences of male and female defendants may have been most strongly influenced by the fact that ‘the criminal act was itself gendered before it came within range of the judicial system’.Footnote 83 In the context of poaching, the influence of contemporary beliefs about appropriate male and female spheres and behaviours on the experience of women defendants was varied and potentially more far reaching than normal. The Game Laws already sought to reinforce elite conceptions of how hunting could be carried out and, in social terms, by whom. The treatment of poaching offences within the judicial system, specifically in terms of the distinctive treatment of female offenders by magistrates in rural areas, ultimately also reinforced similarly hegemonic ideas about the sexually exclusive nature of hunting. The agency and independence of female poachers demonstrates that these ideas were subject to contestation, even if notions about the sexual exclusivity of hunting were also present and perhaps increasingly prevailed within labouring communities as the century progressed, particularly under the influence of economic improvement and internal cultural shifts. Such questions undoubtedly require a deeper analysis, but for the authorities in particular, poaching was imagined as a masculine activity.
Acknowledgements
This article was originally presented as a paper at the Social History Conference in April 2015. I am grateful for the observations offered there and to Louise Carter and Michael Winstanley for their support and advice. Thanks also to the editors of this journal and two anonymous referees for their pertinent and useful comments. I also owe a significant debt to a former undergraduate student, Penny Woodcraft, for prompting me to think a little more about female poachers.
