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  • Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War
  • Keith Wrightson
Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War. By Daniel C. Beaver (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008) 173 pp. $95.00

In the spring and summer of 1642, as England teetered on the brink of civil war, a number of attacks took place upon deer parks and forests across southern England. Coalitions of local gentlemen and commoners slaughtered deer, felled timber, and thereby accomplished a "radical disafforestation" which destroyed the "traditional forest polity" of early modern England" (3). In this short, but deeply researched and intensely argued, study, Beaver employs a series of microhistories to explore the culture and politics of the forests and thus make sense of the nature and significance of these tumultuous events.

Beaver begins by examining the hunt as one of the "highest ritual expressions of royalty and nobility" in early modern society (2). In a discussion informed by the insights of cultural anthropology, he shows how the ritual violence of hunting was "a fertile medium for symbols of honor, nobility and authority" (10–11). It was not only a "school of honor and gentility," but also constitutive of both, and participation in the hunt, and in the distribution of venison that followed it, further created "powerful social networks instrumental in the constitution of power" (11, 17).

Having established the significance of the hunt in the aristocratic culture of the time, Beaver proceeds to illuminate the politics of hunting [End Page 89] in four of the chases and forests that provided "a landscape for this theatre of honor" (11). Collectively, these studies bring out three points in satisfying detail. First, Beaver reveals how the traditional regime of forest law defined orderly relations between the Crown, the nobility, and the commons of the forest areas. It regulated the competition for honor among gentlemen by controlling and licensing participation in the hunt, restrained serious infractions of forest law by presumptuous gentry or commercial poachers, and adjudicated the claims of the Crown, local gentlemen, and the commoners of the forest areas to the use of their resources. Forest politics involved both a gentry politics focused on access to honor, and a popular politics focused on access to material resources. Both versions were perennially contentious, but they were conducted within a framework that for the most part contained their potential for violent confrontation.

Second, Beaver shows how the fiscally driven extension of forest law under Charles I destabilized this situation during the 1630s. These policies appeared to pit the honor and rights of the Crown against those of whole local societies. They intensified the elements of conflict always present in the forests, alienating gentlemen humiliated by exemplary prosecutions and commoners to whom the Crown, or its favored supporters, appeared to be elevating the protection of deer above the maintenance of the human economy of the forests.

Third, Beaver investigates local grievances as articulated in the language of general principle that animated national political resistance to the policies of Charles I. The outcome, once the king had been forced into reversing his policies in 1641, was the "practical disafforestation" by direct action witnessed in 1642 (121).

Beaver makes his points confidently and convincingly. Like Walter and Wood, he demonstrates how closely contextualized studies of the political dynamics of particular local societies can enhance awareness of the many elements that went into "the formation of an informed, activist, political society in early modern England" (1, 3).1

Specifically, he establishes the presence of a "politics of honor" alongside, but distinct from, the more familiar politics of religious anxiety, constitutional principle, and economic interest (7). He is reluctant, however, to draw any simple lines between the allegiances in the conflicts that he anatomizes and those later during the civil war. They were not predictive in that sense. Nevertheless, he powerfully depicts the tension, volatility, and capacity for violent action that still lay just beneath the surface in early modern England, and of the extent to which the much-studied "state formation" of the Tudor and Stuart Crown remained a fragile achievement. [End Page 90]

Keith Wrightson
Yale University

Footnotes

1. John Walter, Understanding Popular...

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