Stop, Thief! by Peter Linebaugh

Author:Peter Linebaugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The seven towns around Otmoor were Charlton, Fencot and Murcot, Oddington, Beckley, Horton, Studley, and Noke. They were small; Noke had fewer than a hundred inhabitants, while Beckley had 370 in 1831. The Moor Court at Beckley in 1687 defined the relation of the towns to the moor as they had been defined in the Domesday Book: “That ye Comon of Ot more shall belong to none but ye Inhabitants of ye seven Townes belonging to Otmore for commoning any manner of Cattle there.” Commons were of three kinds. First, the common or open fields of each village, which rotated year to year. Second, common rights on them. Town wastes provided a third type, in this case, Otmoor. The only gentleman residing in the area was Croke, and it was he who indefatigably fought to enclose the moor for more than fifty years.

John and Barbara Hammond also have described the protracted struggle to enclose Otmoor.28 It began with the proposal in 1801 by the Duke of Marlborough to drain and allot enclosures of over four thousand acres in Otmoor. When, according to law, notices were affixed on the parish church doors announcing the proposal, they were taken down “by a Mob at each place.” The next application was made in 1815. Again it was found impracticable to affix the notices “owing to large Mobs, armed with every description of offensive weapons.” The humbler people began to bestir themselves. No records of any manor enjoying rights of common could be found; “the custom of usage without stint, in fact, pointed to some grant before the memory of man.” The bill was passed despite these discoveries, which “made it unlikely that any lord of the manor had ever had absolute right of soil.” The enclosers had Atlantic experience. Croke had been employed by the government in 1801 as a judge in a vice admiralty court in Nova Scotia, attaining a reputation as a narrow-minded Tory. He argued that only proprietors, those who owned their own house, had common right, while “the poor, as such, had no right to the common whatever.”29

In 1830 the dam that had been part of the drainage effort broke, and the farmers took the law into their own hands and cut the embankments. Twenty-two farmers were indicted and acquitted. This made a profound impression on the cottagers, and for a week parties of enthusiasts paraded the moor and cut down its fences. One of Croke’s sons appeared with a pistol, but the moormen wrested it from him and gave him a thrashing. Assembling by the light of the full moon, blackening their faces, and dressing in women’s clothing, the commoners stepped forth to destroy the fences, the hedges, the bridges, the gates—every part of the infrastructure of enclosure.

The high sheriff, the Oxfordshire militia, and Lord Churchill’s Yeomanry Cavalry were summoned. Yet the inhabitants were not overawed. They determined to perambulate the bounds of Otmoor in full force, in accordance with old custom. On Monday, September 6, five hundred

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