The cawing rooks, the cur’s affrighted yell;
The scenes above the wood, the floods below,
Were mix’d, and none the single sound could know;
“Loud blow the blasts,” they cried, “and call us as they blow.”’
Such an encounter is put into cold arithmetic in an official return like this[357]:—
‘An account of the nineteen persons committed to Warwick Gaol for trial at the Lent Assizes 1829 for shooting and wounding John Slinn at Combe Fields in the County of Warwick whilst endeavouring to apprehend them for destroying game in the night with the result thereof:—
| Above 14 and under 20 years of age. | Above 20 years of age. | Capitally convicted and reprieved with— | Admitted to Evidence. | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transportation for life. | Transportation for 14 years. | Imprisonment with hard labour in House of Correction for 2 years. | |||
| 11 | 8 | 7 | 9 | 1 | 2 |
Seven peasants exiled for life, nine exiled for fourteen years, and two condemned to the worst exile of all. In that village at any rate there were many homes that had reason to remember the day when the pleasures of the rich became the most sacred thing in England.
But the warfare was not conducted only by these methods. For the gentlemen of England, as for the genius who fought Michael and Gabriel in the great battle in the sixth book of Paradise Lost, science did not spread her light in vain. There was a certain joy of adventure in a night skirmish, and a man who saw his wife and children slowly starving, to whom one of those golden birds that was sleeping on its perch the other side of the hedge, night after night, till the day when it should please the squire to send a shot through its purple head, meant comfort and even riches for a week, was not very much afraid of trusting his life and his freedom to his quick ear, his light foot, or at the worst his powerful arm. So the game preservers invented a cold and terrible demon: they strewed their woods with spring guns, that dealt death without warning, death without the excitement of battle, death that could catch the nimblest as he slipped and scrambled through the hiding bracken. The man who fell in an affray fell fighting, his comrades by his side; it was a grim and uncomforted fate to go out slowly and alone, lying desolate in the stained bushes, beneath the unheeding sky. It is not clear when these diabolical engines, as Lord Holland called them, were first introduced, but they were evidently common by 1817, when Curwen made a passionate protest in the House of Commons, and declared, ‘Better the whole race of game was extinct than that it should owe its preservation to such cruel expedients.’[358] Fortunately for England the spring guns, though they scattered murder and wounds freely enough (Peel spoke in 1827 of ‘daily accidents and misfortunes’), did not choose their victims with so nice an eye as a Justice of the Peace, and it was often a gamekeeper or a farm servant who was suddenly tripped up by this lurking death. By 1827 this state of things had become such a scandal that Parliament intervened and passed an Act, introduced in the Lords by Lord Suffield, who had made a previous attempt in 1825, to make the setting of spring guns a misdemeanor.[359]
The Bill did not pass without considerable opposition. Tennyson, who introduced it in the Commons, declared that the feudal nobility in ancient France had never possessed a privilege comparable with this right of killing and maiming, and he said that the fact that Coke of Norfolk[360] and Lord Suffield, both large game preservers, refused to employ them showed that they were not necessary. Members of both Houses of Parliament complained bitterly of the ‘morbid sensibility’ that inspired the proposal, and some of them defended spring guns as a labour-saving machine, speaking of them with the enthusiasm that a manufacturer might bestow on the invention of an Arkwright or a Crompton. One member of the House of Commons, a Colonel French, opposed the Bill with the argument that the honest English country gentleman formed ‘the very subject and essence of the English character,’ while Lord Ellenborough opposed it in the other House on the ground that it was contrary to the principles of the English law, which gave a man protection for his property in proportion to the difficulty with which it could be defended by ordinary means.