Wood-taking and customary practice: William Hunt’s Justices Notebook, 1744-49

By Carl Griffin

Issue 13, Summer 2005 pp 19-24

‘The surviving notebooks of eighteenth century magistrates can be used by historians to investigate the extent to which customary culture was constrained and regulated by law. Wood-gathering may have been essential to the economy of the rural poor, but it remained theft in the eyes of the law. Carl Griffin opens the notebook of William Hunt of West Lavington in Wiltshire and finds that it was a crime that kept the magistrate peculiarly busy’.

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