by Graham Seal
By now it was dark, but a bright moon was rising, intermittently darkened by clouds.2 This ‘poacher’s moon’ made it an ideal night for trapping someone else’s game. In case they met with any interference from the keepers of the Silver Wood game rights, the poachers filled their pockets with fist-sized glass cinders, leftovers of the furnaces. The men snared three rabbits in fields near Blacking Mill, then continued stealthily on towards their ultimate destination.
Silver Wood was owned by a local farmer who leased the shooting rights to retired Rotherham solicitor, Mr Henry Jubb – Justice of the Peace, Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates – and a syndicate of other gentlemen. Jubb hired keepers to protect his rights from the likes of William Sykes and his mates. The head keeper was a man called John Hawkins; he was assisted by Henry Machin and William Lilley. That night, for some reason, perhaps suspecting poaching activity, the keepers brought along another man to help them, a labourer named William Butler. The keepers were heavily armed. Lilley carried knuckle-dusters, a double-barrelled pistol and a ‘teaser’, a stick of wood about 20 inches in length with a heavy wooden ball on a flexible thong attached to one end, with the other end attached to his wrist by a loop of leather. The others were not so lethally equipped but still, they had come out into that crisp October night better prepared for trouble than the poachers.
All four keepers were well hidden in the bushes by 8 pm. About 10 o’clock they heard and saw three of Sykes’s gang netting for rabbits in the field next to the wood. Muttering ‘Now is our time’, Lilley rose and led the keepers through the hedge. The poachers spotted them almost at once. One of them, probably Sykes, called out a warning to his mates: ‘Hey up, lads, they’re here.’ As Lilley advanced towards the poachers, a tall man materialised from the darkness of the hedge and smashed a heavy stick down onto his skull. A hail of furnace cinders battered the heads of Machin and Butler. There was fighting and shouting; even the keepers’ dogs were fighting the poachers’ dogs. The cursing and barking brought the other four poachers running to the aid of their companions and a short but brutal struggle followed.
After a clout on the skull with a cinder furnace or rock the head keeper Hawkins went, he claimed, for help, but not before he saw what Butler also witnessed. Butler had been knocked down twice, remaining on the ground the second time. From this position he saw three of the poachers crashing their sticks down again and again on the unconscious body of Lilley. Dragging himself upright, Butler was making an unsteady escape when the poachers chased after him and beat him to the ground again. Fearing the same fate as Lilley he begged for mercy from William Sykes who was hitting him relentlessly. ‘Don’t pay me any more, and I’ll never come again’, he cried in terror and pain. Just then Woodhouse returned from chasing Machin and caught hold of Sykes, yelling, ‘For God’s sake, don’t kill the man. Come away.’ Sykes dropped his shattered stick, allowing Butler to rise and lurch off into the darkness. Woodhouse and Sykes returned to where Lilley lay. Woodhouse thwacked Lilley’s leg to see if the keeper was alive. Lilley did not move.
This short, savage incident took perhaps five minutes. It eerily echoed the plots of many poaching songs and tales, with the poachers being surprised by well-armed keepers, a vicious, swearing scuffle of desperate men and dogs ending in the death of a poacher or a keeper, followed by the inevitable retribution of the law. In this real-life story it was keeper Lilley who would die of his wounds. He suffered because of the closeness of the community to which both the poachers and the keepers belonged. Sykes and Teale knew Lilley and he knew them. And they knew he could identify them if they did not knock him out before he recognised them.
But Sykes had panicked. Even though it was Teale who struck the blow that first brought Lilley down, Sykes seemingly finished the job. The poachers had then grabbed up their nets, separated the still-snarling dogs and nervously discussed their next move. They thought the police would be upon them before they had time to return home. So rather than go back through the same byways that had brought them, the wily Woodhouse took the gang along an alternative route, leaving the scene of the fracas far behind.
About an hour after the poachers fled, head keeper Hawkins returned with reinforcements. They found Lilley huddled on the frozen ground. According to the various published accounts, Lilley was gravely damaged with multiple skull fractures and eight wounds. They managed to carry him home but he suffered a brain haemorrhage and died the next day.
Although the events in Silver Wood were bloodily sensational, they were only the latest in a long tradition of British poaching that was an amalgam of social protest and economic need, stretching back to the mediaeval era.3 From that time the connection between poaching and popular discontent had been strong. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was sparked by wage cuts and the enforcement of a poll tax. In the scare that followed the ill-fated rebellion, it was discovered that instead of attending church on Sundays and holidays, labourers and other members of the lower orders often hunted game and ‘under such colours they made their assemblies, conferences and conspiracies for to rise and disobey their allegiance’.4 To end these subversive Sunday gatherings a qualification of £40 per annum was set upon the right to hunt game,5 which is the origin of the game laws and their long, unhappy consequences.
At the start of the seventeenth century the £40 qualification was raised to £100 and in 1671 the Game Act made it necessary to actually own land worth more than £100 a year, or to have some prospect of doing so through inheritance. A person so qualified was not limited to hunting on his own land. As one historian of eighteenth century game laws has put it:
For all practical purposes, the qualified sportsman could hunt where he pleased, while the unqualified sportsman could not hunt even on his own land. Thus it was that the game of England became the property not of the owner of the land on which it was found but rather of an entire social class, the English country gentleman.6
In 1770 an Act was passed making anyone convicted of poaching at night liable to six months’ imprisonment and one year’s imprisonment with a public whipping for a second offence.7 By 1800 the increase in poaching and the formation of well-organised gangs to supply the lucrative urban blackmarket for game, a consequence of the rise of the leisured urban middle classes with money to spend on eating out at restaurants, led to an Act designed to treat offenders as rogues and vagabonds and so liable to sentences of hard labour or impressment into the army or navy.8 The effect was simply to stiffen the poachers’ determination to resist arrest and to stimulate the formation of larger gangs. To counter this the Ellenborough Act of 1803 made it a capital felony to offer armed resistance to lawful arrest. The Act had the desired effect until the post-Napoleonic Wars recession and distress of the period after 1815 led to a doubling of poaching convictions in 1816. Parliament responded the next year with legislation for transporting convicted poachers for seven years, even if they had been unarmed at the time of the offence.9
Most of those arrested were rural workers and paupers who poached to survive. While poaching was not usually in itself an overt act of protest, implicit in the activity was the assumption that game was the property of all, an attitude that was part of the same complex of beliefs about common rights that informed enclosure riots,10 gleaning disturbances and other expressions of communal discontent. This attitude also lay beneath the refusal of the rural poor to condemn poaching and those of their considerable numbers who pursued this activity. Looking down from the top of the social spectrum in 1816, one writer observed:
The property which they [the Game Laws] protect is viewed with peculiar jealousy both by those who are precluded from taking it, and those to whom its enjoyment is secured. The former consider it as a common right of which they are unjustly deprived …11
A Cambridgeshire magistrate, when asked his opinion of the rural labourers’ attitude to poaching, replied, ‘they do not consider [it] to be a moral offence’.12 Similar observations would also resound through the Silver Wood affair and its a
ftermath.
Opinions from the bottom of the social order are harder to come by, though a few examples, with their typical appeals to Biblical authority, make the point. An old labourer, quoted by Bovill in his study of English country life between 1780 and 1830, said:
A wonderful lot of working men don’t believe as there’s any harm in poaching. We never read that in the Testament, nor yet in the Bible. We always read there that the wild birds is sent for the poor man as well as the quality.13
The ‘King of the Norfolk Poachers’ expresses identical feelings in his famous autobiography:
I have always had the idea that game was as much mine as anyone else’s. Did not God say that he gave all the beasts and birds for the use of Man, not for the rich alone[?]14
And the same sentiments echo through a Lincolnshire poaching ballad:
And buck and doe, believe it so.
A pheasant or an ’are,
Was sent on earth for ev’ry one
Quite equal for to share. 15
These attitudes were common among the extensive poaching fraternity and those who benefited from their activities. The many British poaching ballads reflect the lack of moral recrimination in popular attitudes towards poaching. Most frequently the game keeper is portrayed as the villainous opponent of the bold, loyal and usually heroic poacher. The heroes are brave-hearted fellows, attacked by keepers and taken to gaol where they are cruelly beaten. In a ballad titled ‘The Keepers and the Poachers’,16 the poacher is overpowered by five keepers and prefers to die rather than inform upon his comrades. The poacher’s dog is wounded ‘out of spite’ by the keeper in another well-known song, ‘The Nottingham Poacher’.17 In ‘Bill Brown’, later to be printed by a local newspaper in the context of the Silver Wood poachers’ trial,18 a burning hatred leads to the dead hero’s friend avenging his death at the hands of the keeper:
I dressed myself up next night in time,
I got to the woods and the clock struck nine;
The reason was and I’ll tell you why,
To find the gamekeeper I’ll go try,
Who shot my friend, and he shall die.
The avenger finally discovers the keeper:
Then I took my piece fast in my hand,
Resolved to fire if Tom did stand;
Tom heard the name and turned him round,
I fired and brought him to the ground;
My hand gave him his deep death wound.
Now revenge, you see, my hopes have crowned,
I’ve shot the man that shot Bill Brown,
Poor Bill no more these eyes will see,
Farewell, dear friend, farewell to ye,
For I’ve crowned his hopes and his memory.
Murdering the keeper who, as in the Silver Wood affray, was well-known to the poachers, is portrayed as justified revenge. No guilt is ascribed to Bill Brown’s avenger; this is an acceptable and explicable act.
Much the same sentiments, though less extremely expressed, are found in ‘The Gallant Poacher’, in which a keeper also kills one member of a small poaching gang. The five remaining members of the poaching gang are imprisoned, still mourning their comrade:
It makes our hearts to mourn;
Our comrades were to prison sent,
It being our enemies’ intent that there they should remain.
But they are released and the last verse is a striking malediction against the keeper:
Now the murderous man who did him kill,
All on the ground his blood did spill,
Must wander far against his will,
And find no resting place.
Destructive things
His conscience stings;
He must wander through the world forlorn,
And ever feel the smarting thorn;
And pointed at with finger scorn,
And die in sad disgrace.
Economic hardship and the need for food often appear in the ballads as motives for poaching. But the most important characteristic of the poaching ballads is the complete absence of recrimination and the explicit justification of poaching game, sheep stealing and even murder. This popular attitude, itself an ancient one, was to play an important role in this tale. So important that it would save the neck of William Sykes.
While they may only have been, at best, dimly conscious of it, William Sykes and his poaching friends were the inheritors of this long tradition of covert common rights.19 The need to fill the bowls and bellies of hungry children, or even just to gain a few spare coppers, was certainly the most immediate motivation for poaching. At least it was in this part of the country,20 which had its own extensive and intense history of confrontation between those who ‘owned’ the game as well as the right to hunt it and those who were in need of it. But need was not the only motive. The appeal of taking something – anything – back from the estates of those who had usurped what had once been the common larder was always present. Although this attitude was not often voiced outside poaching ballads, it lay at the base of the community acceptance of poaching, even when it involved serious violence, as it had in the brief but bloody affray by Silver Wood.
2 The Poacher’s Fate
Amidst a dead stillness the jury took their places …
Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 24 December 1865
After the fight in Silver Wood, Robert Woodhouse led the poachers to safety by way of Herringthorpe. There they split up and scurried back to their various lodgings by whatever routes their fear afforded them. William Sykes went home to Myra and the children, who were used to his nocturnal outings; his late returns were commonplace. Myra knew her husband would be long in returning home that night, and that he would not be coming from the pub. Calming himself William crept into bed, though it is unlikely that he got much sleep, especially as Myra had to be told of the night’s misdeeds Perhaps there were long silences in the darkness between them as the potential consequences of the incident by Silver Wood sank in.
For a few days, nothing was heard. It was almost long enough for William and Myra to believe the incident had never happened. But then the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent published an article titled ‘Desperate Encounter with Poachers near Rotherham’.1 The article reported the incident and the inquest into the death of Lilley but claimed that the surviving keepers were unable to identify any of the poachers. At this stage few were aware that, as a known lawbreaker, Woodhouse had been routinely arrested the morning after the affray. The police searched his home and took him to be identified by keepers Machin and Butler. But they could not, or would not, swear that the burly ex-publican had been one of the desperate men in Silver Wood.
Next day, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph carried the news that the keepers had been well armed but the poachers had not stolen Lilley’s clothing as originally thought. The article also pointed out that
The locality, it is known, has been for some time in previous years the resort of poachers, and within a mile or two of the place there have been several desperate encounters. About a year ago a gamekeeper was at night met by a number of marauders who assailed him most furiously with stones, and he barely escaped falling a victim to their violence.2
The inquest established only the basic facts. Lilley’s father, a farm labourer of Cantley, identified the body as that of his son ‘who he believed was about 34 or 36 years old’. The proceedings were then adjourned to allow for a post-mortem examination.
Another local newspaper, the Sheffield and Rotherham Advertiser had also reported ‘a savage and fatal encounter with a gang of poachers’ in which
The poachers turned savagely on the keeper, one of them instantly felling Lilley with a hedge stake and the others kicking him savagely about the head and body as he lay helpless and insensible on the ground.
The article went on to describe the extensive weaponry carried by Lilley, the disclosure of which ‘created no small sensation’ in the coroner’s court. Lilley was
armed with one of those formidable wea
pons known as a ‘knuckle-duster’, a double-barrelled-pistol, loaded almost to the muzzle, and capped ready for action; and, as if these were not enough, he had in the pocket of his shooting coat a weapon almost indescribable, but in shape somewhat like the jagged ball borne by the figures of Gog and Magog in the London Guildhall. His three companions also carried pistols and other formidable weapons of offence and defence and had with them a savage retriever dog.
The writer also made a direct connection with the origins of the game laws and their ongoing consequences, accurately noting that ‘The game laws are a relic of the barbarous enactments of the Norman conquest’.3
In the meantime, the police, under the supervision of Detective-Inspector Hockaday of Wakefield, were sure they were on to a promising scent. Bone and Bentcliffe’s dogs were well known to the keepers and these two men were brought in on the Thursday. Though he made a statement in which he claimed to have been at home at 9 o’clock on the night of the affray, the police had discovered nets and a gun at Bone’s house. In his statement Bone claimed to have been unemployed for six weeks and that he was the sole breadwinner for his wife and children. ‘I live as I can,’ he said.
Bone denied being in Silver Wood. So did the others. Their lies bought them some time. They were released while the police continued their investigations and the inquest was adjourned for two weeks. During this short period the poachers unwisely met in the Sykes home to discuss their situation. The meeting was bitter and heated. Booth, the oldest, kept saying that the others should not ‘have done so much at him’ and that those whose actions had ended in Lilley’s death should be the ones to ‘suffer’. According to the subsequent evidence Sykes played a leading role in exhorting them all to stick together and admit nothing. Their main trump card was the fact that the surviving keepers had not, and probably would not, name the men they had fought with in the wood if they had not yet done so.
