11. THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE
THE BLACK ACT
WINDSOR CASTLE, located just west of London, is one of
the great royal residencies of England. In the early eighteenth century, the castle was surrounded by a great forest, full of deer, though little of this remains today. One of the keepers of the forest in 1722, Baptist Nunn, was locked in to a violent conflict. On June 27 he recorded,
Blacks came in the night shot at me 3 times 2 bullets into my chamber window and [ I ] agreed to pay them 5 guineas at Crowthorne on the 30th.
Another entry in Nunn’ s diary read,“ A fresh surprise. One appeared disguised with a message of destruction.”
Who were these mysterious“ Blacks” making threats, shooting at Nunn, and demanding money? The Blacks were groups of local men who had their faces“ blacked” to conceal their appearance at night. They appeared widely across southern England in this period, killing and maiming deer and other animals, burning down haystacks and barns, and destroying fences and fish ponds. On the surface it was sheer lawlessness, but it wasn’ t. Illegal hunting( poaching) deer in lands owned by the king or other members of the aristocracy had been going on for a long time. In the 1640s, during the Civil War, the entire population of deer at Windsor Castle was killed. After the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came to the throne, the deer park was restocked. But the Blacks were not just poaching deer to eat; they also engaged in wanton destruction. To what end? A crucial building block of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the pluralistic nature of interests represented in