ABSTRACT
The game laws of eighteenth-century England are not easily understood. They consisted of a long string of statutes stretching back to the Middle Ages. They were rarely repealed, even when superseded, and, as more than one commentator noted, their wording was often obscure. Such laws, however, could only be as effective as their enforcement and the responsibility for this rested on the country gentlemen themselves, in their capacities as lords of the manor and as justices of the peace. The basic unit of game law enforcement was the manor, a feudal jurisdiction which was by no means obsolete in the eighteenth century. Wiltshire, then, was bound to be affected by the two developments which did so much to alter the English countryside after the 1780s: the mechanization of industry and enclosure. The gamekeeper’s public image in the eighteenth century was a far from complimentary one. Fielding’s ‘Black George’ was a murky amalgam of cowardice and avarice.
