Crime and Punishment / 1500-1700
Crime and Punishment: Rural Crimes and Enclosure
Enclosure made rural crime and poaching more common in the Early Modern period.
What To Remember
- Enclosure strengthened landowners and reduced poor people's access to land, food and fuel.
- Poaching meant hunting or fishing illegally, often on enclosed or private land.
- The Game Act of 1671 protected elite hunting rights and made rural survival crimes more serious.
Enclosure
A lot of land was enclosed during the early modern period by powerful landlords.
Poor villagers lost access to large fields and woods that had helped provide grazing, food and wood for fires.
This made rural poverty worse and increased resentment towards landowners.
Poaching
Many poor people continued to hunt rabbits and hares on enclosed fields or to fish in rivers and streams.
Landowners called this poaching because it broke their control over game and land.
The Game Act of 1671 made this kind of hunting illegal for many poorer people and protected the privileges of the wealthy.
Why it mattered
Poaching is useful for GCSE because it shows crime being shaped by class and property.
Landowners saw poaching as theft and a threat to authority, while many poor people saw it as survival or a customary right.
That makes it a social crime: many ordinary people did not think it was morally wrong, even though the law punished it.
Revision Prompt
How did enclosure help cause rural crime?