Whigs and hunters: the origin of the black act

Table of Contents
Part 1 • Windsor
Windsor Forest
The Windsor Blacks
Offenders and Antagonists
Part 2 • Hampshire
The Hampshire Forests
King John
Awful Examples
The Hunters
Part 3 • Whigs
Enfield and Richmond
The Politics of the Black Act
Consequences and Conclusions
i. People
ii. Forests
iii. The Exercise of Law
iv. The Rule of Law

With Whigs and Hunters, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson plunged into the murky waters of the early eighteenth century to chart the violently conflicting currents that boiled beneath the apparent calm of the time. The subject is the Black Act, a law of unprecedented savagery passed by Parliament in 1723 to deal with ‘wicked and evil-disposed men going armed in disguise’.These men were pillaging the royal forest of deer, conducting a running battle against the forest officers with blackmail, threats and violence These ‘Blacks’, however, were men of some substance; their protest (for such it was) took issue with the equally wholsesale plunder of the forest by Whig nominees to the forest offices. And Robert Walpole, still consolidating his power, took an active part in the prosecution of the ‘Blacks’. The episode is laden with political and social implications, affording us glimpses of considerable popular discontent, political chicanery, judicial inequity, corrupt ambition and crime.

https://www.breviarystuff.org.uk/e-p-thompson-whigs-and-hunters/