A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



able to employ professional rabbit catchers to do 

 so, are by no means averse to a certain stock 

 of rabbits on their farms, as they have a definite 

 and practically unfailing market value. A few 

 years ago a friend of the writer's, renting a shoot- 

 ing in West Durham, offered to compensate the 

 farm-tenants for crop damage by rabbits, if they 

 would not avail themselves of the Ground 

 Game Act. Only one man among them, the 

 largest tenant on the property, refused, who sub- 

 sequently admitted having trapped some 2,000 

 rabbits. As his farm was largely a grass one, 

 and his rent only {jZ20 per annum, his venture 

 must have been tolerably profitable. With the 

 exception of Wynyard, where enormous bags 

 of rabbits are made, the preservation of them 

 for sporting purposes is not a great feature in 

 Durham. 



Despite its large extent of sea-board, wild- 

 fowling in Durham is practically a dead letter. 

 The coast line, save in the estuary of the Tees, 

 offers none of those mud-flats which are the 

 chief attraction to sea-fowl ; and with the growth 

 of the ports of Stockton and Middlesbrough, 

 this has lost its former reputation for wild-fowl- 

 ing, though a shore-shooter who is content with 

 a moderate bag may still find amusement here. 

 Nor does the county inland afford any better 

 sport, owing to its dense population, the rapid 

 course of its rivers, and the absence of suitable 

 marshes or sheets of water, though before it was 

 drained, Morden Carrs is reputed to have rivalled 

 an east-country fen. Of course a certain num- 

 ber of wild fowl are none the less killed inland 

 every year ; and the writer himself has, at various 

 times, either shot, or shot at, the commoner 

 varieties — teal, wigcon, scoters, and especially 

 wild duck, in different parts of the county. The 

 latter species is the one most generally met, and 

 we could point out an estate within three miles 

 of the cathedral city, where upwards of a hun- 

 dred wild duck have been seen during an after- 

 noon's stroll in hard weather. 



The writer has been frequently asked whether 

 poaching be not rampant in Durham — a question 

 to which he is no less happily than truthfully 

 enabled to reply in the negative. As a general 

 body pitmen are not poachers. Whatever the 

 fictitious joys of poaching, it offers but little at- 

 traction to a hard-working man whose high wages 

 enable him to indulge in horse-racing, dog-racing, 

 rabbit-coursing, pigeon-flying, ball-playing, ' ex- 

 cursions, ' and a score of other diversions, far 

 more to his taste than crawling about in a damp 

 wood, with the chance of a broken head, and a 

 visit to petty sessions — nay, perhaps to ' Dorm ' '' 

 itself, as the sequel. A keeper's office is no 

 more a sinecure in Durham than elsewhere, but 

 in proportion to the population, the number 



of systematic poachers is very small. What 

 poaching there is, is almost entirely confined to 

 rabbits, which find a ready market dead or alive, 

 and especially for that brutal thing — we know 

 not what name to give to it, it is not sport — 

 rabbit-coursing. The advent of the hand-reared 

 pheasant has, however, created a new and rather 

 deadly method of poaching with the catapult. 

 The poacher secretes himself in a quiet corner 

 of a stubble-field near a covert, which he perhaps 

 ground-baits with a few raisins, and bags his 

 unsuspecting quarry as it feeds up to him at a 

 few feet distance. There is no noise to scare 

 the birds, or attract gamekeepers, and though 

 it seems improbable that such a weapon as 

 a catapult would kill so large a bird as a 

 pheasant dead, a keeper once assured the writer 

 that he tested one taken from a poacher on his 

 own coalhouse door, and sent the bullets clean 

 through it. 



It is noticeable that poaching becomes more 

 prevalent in the west of the county, due perhaps 

 to some inherent strain of the old forest-blood, 

 and westward from the Aucklands is probably 

 the worst district for it. Here have always 

 occurred the bloodiest poaching affrays, the most 

 famous of which is the ' Battle of Weardale,' 

 which took place in 1 81 8. About this time 

 poaching had become so rife in Weardale, but 

 especially on the moors of the Bishop of Dur- 

 ham, that the episcopal keepers were unable to 

 cope with it, and it was therefore decided to 

 reinforce them with posses of constables from 

 Bishop Auckland and Darlington, and capture 

 the ringleaders of the poachers by a coup de main. 

 Accordingly the Auckland and Darlington con- 

 tingents trysted at Wolsingham Bridge on Sun- 

 day, 6 December, 181 8, and after a most 

 adventurous night march across the fells, met 

 the bishop's head-keeper, Rippon, at St. John's 

 Chapel early on the following morning. Here 

 they immediately effected the capture of two 

 notorious poachers, Charles and Anthony Siddle, 

 whom they found in bed, and after handcuffing 

 and locking them up in the Black Bull Inn, 

 started in quest of John Kidd, another poacher, 

 who lived at East Dene Bridge. The mother 

 of the Siddles was, however, by this time sum- 

 moning the dale by blowing a horn,'^ and Kidd 

 had escaped from his house before the keepers 

 reached it, and as a matter of fact was waiting 

 behind a hedge, gun in hand, intending to fire 

 on them, only desisting from doing so on the 

 repeated entreaty of a friend, who had hurried 

 down from Chapel to warn him. The keepers 

 then returned to Chapel, and placing their cap- 

 tives in a cart, started for Durham with them, 

 boasting before they left that they could ' sweep 

 Weardale with a black pudding,' a curious threat 



" Durham gaol. The vernacular expression that a 

 man has been ' in Dorm ' has only one meaning. 



'^ This exemplifies a curious survival of mediaeval 

 custom. 



412 



