Red Round Globe Hot Burning by Peter Linebaugh;

Author:Peter Linebaugh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520299467
Publisher: University of California Press

It’s of a famous highway-man a story I will tell;

His name was Willie Brennan, and in Ireland he did dwell;

And on the Kilworth mountains he commenced his wild career,

Where many a wealthy gentleman before him shook with fear.

Brennan on the Moor, Brennan on the Moor,

A brave undaunted robber was bold Brennan on the Moor.

Ballads of social bandits were prevalent in border country as (besides Ireland) between England and Scotland. where the musician, horse thief, and escape artist, Jamie Allen thrived until he was hanged in 1803.5

Parliament with its House of Lords and its House of Commons was the “public sphere” of the den of thieves. We might see market, stall, or street as part of a plebeian public sphere or as an out-of-door urban common, because this is where most of the goose thefts took place. Actually, there is one that did happen on the agrarian common. The case was this. On 15 July 1800, Thomas Purvitt, a soldier, took a goose (value 2 shillings) belonging to Daniel Rogers from the common in Enfield. Daniel Rogers lived on Forty Hill, and the goose was commoned on Forty Green. Rogers had recently bought it and marked its wing with a pair of scissors. He noticed the goose was missing and saw the prisoner with a bloody bag covered with a jacket. He fetched the constable (a butcher), and together they went to the prisoner’s lodging, where they found the marked goose. Purvitt defended himself by saying he was quartered with five other soldiers and that “this was a bag belonging to the regiment that I always fetched our meat in; how the goose came there I do not know.” The jury found him not guilty. Why, we can only conjecture. Knowing Michaelmas was coming up (the trial was on 17 September), the jury perhaps took pity on the soldiers. Perhaps quartered soldiers in time of war could help themselves to “meat” where they found it. Perhaps jurors knew something about commoning that has been lost to us. This was neither the first time soldiers had robbed commonable beasts in Enfield nor the first time that its commons had been the site of significant conflict.

The commons lost a goose, and in the following year the geese lost the commons. An act of Parliament for the enclosure of nearly the entire parish of Enfield, eight thousand acres, was passed in 1801, taking effect in 1803.6 At a stroke, the marsh commons by the river Lea and the arable commons on higher ground were extinguished. Enfield Chase, traditionally the denizen of poachers and squatters, had been enclosed in 1777. Edmonton, the parish to the south, had been enclosed by parliamentary act in 1801. It was a Crown manor, and its tenants, being tenacious of their customs and low rents, held off enclosure for three centuries, until 1801.7

Judging by the evidence of the Proceedings at the Old Bailey, Enfield in the 1790s was an agricultural and pastoral parish intersected by major transportation routes of road and river.

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