Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 216

This volume contributes to a now firmly established debate on the nature of rural conflict in the nineteenth-century English countryside, and the familiar principal elements of what historians have categorized as social protest. Most forms remained firmly outside the law rendering the perpetrators open to prosecution for crimes including capital ones, prior to the latter’s incremental removal from the 1820s. In historiographical terms, the book is to be welcomed on two main counts. First, in the choice of Herefordshire, Shakesheff has focused on a western borderland county, in stark contrast to the existing concentrations on East Anglia and southern England, though he perhaps exaggerates that geographical feature. One important factor here is the failure of the Swing quasi–insurrection to penetrate Herefordshire, and with it the county escaped the most fearsome expression of overt rural protest – much of it demonstrably imitative – as it swept westwards from Kent, before swirling round into the South Midlands and into East Anglia. Thus Herefordshire’s historian is denied this expression of the serious socio-economic – and in places political – tensions exposed by Swing mobilizations elsewhere. There were, however, three incendiary attacks in the county between 1829 and January 1831. This difference symbolizes the second contrast because almost all of Shakesheff’s evidence involves covert action; indeed, one can detect this feature in the famine years of 1799–1801. Then Herefordshire escaped the intense food-rioting – though not what the local press identified as ‘disposition to riot’ and which the principal study of these years categorizes as actual disturbances – which recurrently engulfed much of England, though two arson cases were reported from the county.

With a small number of exceptional and minor mobilizations, including one against encroachers where locals ‘acting in the character of commoners’ demolished fences, this then is a study of technically-criminal acts committed covertly, ranging from endemic poaching, the petty theft of wood and crops (corn, fruit and root vegetables) growing in the fields and orchards, to the more serious acts of sheep-stealing, animal-maiming and incendiarism. And here we enter into problematic territory which hinges on how perpetrators perceived and legitimated their actions, and ultimately on their motives, especially those of animal maimers and arsonists. In the case of Herefordshire, this operation is rendered much more difficult by the available evidence. It appears that those responsible for the records of the Assize abandoned their eighteenth-century practice of preserving the depositions, namely the statements of witnesses, including those of victims and even some perpetrators; the same documentary loss was presided over by county Clerks of the Peace with respect to cases heard by Quarter Sessions. Shakesheff is primarily dependent on the two county newspapers, both published in the city of Hereford. Although the quality and volume of local newspaper reportage expanded exponentially across this period, detailed coverage of the trials of most offenders – ranging from poachers to sheep-stealers – is rare, largely restricted to major offenders, notably arsonists and not even all of them. In the main, offences which went undetected, received little coverage with the partial exceptions of the most serious.

To degrees, Shakesheff makes good use of the sources consulted, including those categories of Quarter Sessions records which have survived. This enables him to compile various statistical tables respecting prosecuted crime and conviction rates, and relate these to various quantitative data respecting living standards. As might be expected, these reveal some relationships between prosecuted crime and the cost of living, though other contemporary statistical compilations – notably poor-law expenditure – are unexpectedly absent. He is also able to detect some increase in prosecuted crime deriving from policing initiatives, though these were exclusively local as the county eschewed adoption of the permissory rural policing acts of 1839–40, and the issue of detection is addressed in one of the more valuable chapters. But even here, there are problems; did for example the increases in prosecutions for sheep-stealing also reflect its loss of capital status in 1832? Another significant chapter addresses ‘criminal women’ responsible for much – but certainly not all – thefts of wood, and the taking of grain and other produce; these are discussed in the context of the virtual extinction of remaining common rights through enclosure over this period.

There is much to be applauded in this work; our empirical knowledge is fortified, and interpretative debates enriched. Having said that, there are some structural shortcomings and glaring omissions. One wonders why this study commences in 1800, when the entire country was threatened by famine in wartime, rather than say the better benchmark of 1790 before the spiralling inflation and intensifying poverty following 1793. More importantly, the socio-economic context is not systematically addressed. True, we learn that the county’s landlords and farmers responded to rising produce prices with a further round of enclosure and increase in arable acreages, which possibly aggravated the impact of the enduring post-war depression as it did elsewhere. Quite critically, the issue of poor relief is not coherently addressed. Although there are numerous passing references to the poor law and the odd recognition of its importance, including the overall ‘mesh of the welfare net was getting wider’, the fundamental impact of the New Poor Law of 1834 is not analyzed despite its status as the most hated statute enacted in the entire century. If Shakesheff acknowledges that the cost to the parish of workhouse accommodation for families left without the main breadwinner on father’s imprisonment or transportation for theft, probably deterred many victims from prosecution, he fails to see the broader relevance of the loss of customary allowancesin-aid-of-wages even when correctly ascertaining that most sheep-stealers sought meat for the pot. He persists in arguing that was poachers’ identical primary motive too, and this also serves as an example of his penchant – not confined to this topic – for flying in the face of his own evidence. The majority of poachers ‘poached for their own consumption’ (cf. pp.20, 149–50.) In fact, a brace of partridges or pheasants, added very little to the pot. The need to hang them also dictated an additional risk of detection; disposing of them through the higlers who traversed the countryside dealing in legitimate and poached items was lucrative. For the poor, the proceeds secured a tranche of goods ranging from alcohol, replacement footwear and clothing, and the wherewithal to meet rents once their payment by overseers of the poor – said to be universal in the county – was stopped by the loathed Poor Law Commission. After the trade ingame was legalized by a new licensing system in 1831, one Herefordshire debater in the local press in February 1834 observed that the Act’s supporters had claimed that ‘game would become so cheap no poacher would find itworth his while to pursue his trade, but how different has been the result’ (p.175, my emphasis), an observation underpinned by Shakesheff’s own statistics of convictions under the game and trespass laws.

Although there are – curiously – no acknowledgements, the word thesis appears in a couple of places, suggesting that the book derives from a doctorate. In this context, quite uniquely for any major – and unusual even for very localized studies – the footnotes reveal no references to Public Record Office holdings. First, if the Assize records for Herefordshire – unlike other Oxford Circuit documentation – do not contain depositions for most of this period, extant papers, including indictments, have some value. Depositions from the county for the years 1800–1 do exist; hence my earlier remark about actual riot, when the county press – not uniquely – spoke of only a disposition towards collective action. Secondly, incendiarism and animal-maiming, were often perceived as terrorist attacks by landlords and farmers, which warranted reportage to the Home Secretary; moreover, given the growing volume of crime over this 218 the agricultural period, rising levels alone repeatedly galvanized provincial communications to Whitehall (in addition to state sponsored investigations into policing – or the lack of it), and these contain valuable evidence. Thirdly, the records of the Poor Law Commission, especially in the early years following 1834, contain correspondence often embracing a wide variety of issues, including protest and crime, with almost every rural New Poor Law Union. While not all historians of these features of rural communities have used the latter source, one might argue that it should join the other two as obligatory for consultation, where available for the 1830–50 period.