Rural and urban poaching in Victorian England.

Winstanley, M. J. and Osborne, H. (2006) Rural and urban poaching in Victorian England. Rural History, 17 (2). pp. 187-212. ISSN 0956-7933

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Abstract

Poaching is commonly portrayed as the archetypal nineteenth-century ‘rural’ crime, particularly associated with agricultural districts of southern and eastern England. This study argues that this interpretation is misleading. Judicial statistics collected from the mid-nineteenth century suggest that poaching was much more widespread in the North and Midlands than has previously been acknowledged. These industrialising regions largely determined the national trends in poaching in the second half of the century which have usually been considered to be characteristics of rural society in the South. The South shared neither the national peak in prosecutions of the mid-1870s nor the dramatic decline in prosecutions thereafter. It considers a range of possible explanations for these different regional trends. These include a discussion of the potential motivation of so-called ‘steam age poachers’ but also the growing regional specialisation in game preservation during the period and the different opportunities, and obstacles, this presented for poaching.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Rural History
Additional Information:
The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Rural History, 17 (2), pp 187-212 2006, © 2006 Cambridge University Press. This is a genuinely joint article arising out of shared postgraduate teaching and research interests while Dr Osborne was at Lancaster. Data collection was equally shared and the analysis and format of the article jointly written. Two presentations on the subject were made by the authors to the Agricultural History Conference (2001) and Field Sports conference (2005). RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : History
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/libraryofcongress/da
Subjects:
?? ARTS AND HUMANITIES (MISCELLANEOUS)HISTORYURBAN STUDIESGEOGRAPHY, PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENTDA GREAT BRITAIN ??
ID Code:
4191
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
29 Feb 2008 15:29
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
02 Oct 2023 00:15