THE UPSTANDING CROP. 3J 



Apparently, those who ruled cared naught for how the 

 labourer was housed or fed. 



The labourer was smarting in his spirit as well as suffering 

 from low wages and bad housing. He was being policed 

 in a manner he had never been policed before. The Poaching 

 Prevention Act of 1862 made every man liable to the indig- 

 nity of being assailed and searched by a policeman, without a 

 warrant. The rural poor felt this more keenly than the 

 physical hardships of their lives. At that time it was a 

 very common practice for men who had been wood-felling 

 or cutting underwood to carry home with them baskets of 

 chips and dead wood, which were their perquisites. Women, 

 too, who had been working in the fields cleaning turnips 

 commonly carried home a few turnips in their aprons. This 

 was an understood thing at a time when farmers paid them 

 the miserable wages amounting to about a penny an hour. 

 After the Act came into operation every village man and 

 woman returning home from work carrying a bundle was 

 an object of suspicion, and the police again and again way- 

 laid honest men and women and charged them with stealing 

 turnips, or wood, if they failed to find them in possession 

 of game. Angry labourers would resent the indignity of a 

 search, and a scuffle would sometimes take place, resulting 

 in a charge of assault. 



The villager has his own ethical code about poaching. 

 There were poaching gangs, but they 1'vcd, morally, a set 

 apart from the ordinary villager, who, whilst he regarded the 

 regular poacher as having forfeited his claims to respecta- 

 bility, considered it peifcctly legitimate to snare or knock 

 over a rabbit occasionally, in order to feed his half-starving 

 family. Arch, who said that he never poached, nevertheless 

 admitted that 



" an honest labourer would think nothing of knocking over a 

 rabbit in the day-time if he saw it and it came in his way ; and 

 neither should I. I don't see any harm in it because in my 

 opinion ground game is wild. The plain truth is we labourers 

 do not believe hares and rabbits belong to any individual, not 

 any more than thrushes and blackbirds." l 

 * * * * 



1 Evidence, 1873, Select Committee on the Game Laws. 

 VOL. 11. D 



