30 WOLMEB, rOKEST. THE BLACK ACT. 



be possessed of manhood or gallantry. The Waltham blacks 

 at length committed such enormities, that Government was 

 forced to interfere with that severe and sanguinary act 

 called the Black Act,* which now comprehends more felonies 

 than any law that ever was framed before ; and, therefore, 

 a late bishop of Winchester, when urged to re-stock 

 "Waltham chase,t refused, from a motive worthy of a pre- 

 late, replying, that " It had done mischief enough already." 



Our old race of deer-stealers are hardly extinct yet. It 

 was but a little while ago that, over their ale, they used to 

 recount the exploits of their youth ; such as watching the 

 pregnant hind to her lair, and when the calf was dropped, 

 paring its feet with a penknife to the quick, to prevent its 

 escape, till it was large and fat enough to be killed ; the 

 shooting at one of their neighbours with a bullet, in a 

 turnip-field, by moonshine, mistaking him for a deer ; and 

 the losing a dog in the following extraordinary manner : 

 Some fellows, suspecting that a calf new-fallen was depo- 

 sited in a certain spot of thick fern, went with a lurcher to 

 surprise it ; when the parent hind rushed out of the brake, 

 and taking a vast spring, with all her feet close together, 

 pitched upon the neck of the dog, and broke it short in two. 



Another temptation to idleness and sporting, was a num- 

 ber of rabbits, which possessed all the hillocks and dry 

 places ; but these being inconvenient to the huntsmen, on 

 account of their burrows, when they came to take away the 

 deer, they permitted the country people to destroy them all. 



Such 'forests and wastes, when their allurements to irre- 

 gularities are removed, are of considerable service to neigh- 

 bourhoods that verge upon them, by furnishing them with 

 peat and turf for their firing; with fuel for the burning 

 their lime ; and with ashes for their grasses ; and by main- 

 taining their geese and their stock of young cattle at little 

 or no expense 4 



* Statute 9 Geo. I. c. 22. 



+ This chase remains unstocked to this day ; the bishop was Dr. Hoadley. 



This was the case when Mr. "White wrote this passage ; but alas, since 

 then Parliamentary enactments have deprived the labourers of much of their 

 rights of common, by enclosing them, and thus much of their means of sub- 

 sistence, and consequently of their prosperity, have disappeared. Whenever 

 labour was slack, the common was always a reserve on which the labourer 

 could employ himself, by cutting fuel, making brooms, &c. ED. 



