ABSTRACT
The Duke of Grafton spoke for many when he contended that poaching gave rise to idleness, drunkenness, and a disinclination to work by virtue of the poacher's turning night into day and spending his time and money in the beer dens. One prison chaplain summarized the poacher's attitudes: 'game was made for the poor as well as the rich'; and the logic of this argument was stretched to include the murder of keepers through what poachers termed 'acts of self-defence'. As magistrates they combined the roles of judge and jury in summary convictions, and as legislators they were able to impose increasingly harsher laws, especially for night poaching. Unemployed labourers, he explained, preferred the risk of imprisonment to incarceration in the workhouse because 'in goal they cannot hear the cries and screams of their children, nor the complaints of their wives, that is what vexes'.
