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Game Trespass – Frederick Rolfe labourer, Pentney was summonsed by John Bell, Gamekeeper, Narborough with trespassing in the day time on Pentney middle common, in search of game, on 21^st October. – Bell stated that he saw defendant on the common with a pair of rabbits, each of which had a snare round its neck. Some snares had been set near to where defendant was standing. Defendant threw the rabbits away upon p.c. Flint approaching him, and also ran away, but was caught by the officer. – Flint stated that at 5.45 a.m. on the day in question he was with Bell on the common. Saw defendant going to a rabbit snare which was set. He approached witness within 5 or 6 yards, and witness spoke to him, whereupon he ran away. He had a rabbit in each hand, which he threw away. Each rabbit had a snare on its neck. Witness called out to him, and he said: “As long as you know it is me it is no use my running away.” He then returned and took a snare out of his pocket.

Defendant was fined 10/- and 13/- costs, and in default he was sent to Norwich castle for 14 days.

Grimston Petty Sessions, 6 November 1882, report from the Lynn Advertiser.

The Docking Divisional Court records and prison entries show that Prisoner 8901 Frederick Rolfe served his time with hard labour in lieu of payment of a fine of £1 15s 6d, which is at variance with the press report. If the second figure is correct, then his fine and costs would have amounted to about three and a half week’s wages. Fred’s education was listed as Imp., presumably meaning it was imperfect; he was 5 ft 4½ in tall, with brown eyes and his religion was entered as Church of England. He was released on 19 November 1882.

More importantly, this shows that Fred was 20 when he first went to prison. The court record (1882) shows he had no previous offences. Devotees of I Walked by Night will know this is much older than he led them to believe; in the book, Fred refers to himself as a lad and a boy, but in fact does not give his age. However, the blurb on the back of some editions states that he went to prison for the first time at the age of 12. How and when this inaccuracy came about is uncertain, but it has until now gone down as fact and is regularly quoted in historical records, books and academic papers as an example of the treatment of child prisoners.

An entire chapter of I Walked by Night is devoted to Fred’s time in prison and the daily routine and food are described in great detail:

Then came diner, wich was one pint and a half of stirabout, composed of one pint of oatmeal, and half a pint of maze meal put in the oven and baked.

He also recalls the system of rewards-marks for which prisoners could earn money and the very hard work of being on the treadmill from 9am to 12 noon and from 1pm to 4pm. Incidentally, the word ‘Screw’ (meaning a prison warder) comes from how tightly the screw was turned on the treadmill; the tighter it was, the harder the prisoner had to push as he walked on endlessly. Following this, oakum was picked until bed at 8 pm. Fred states that food improved after the first fortnight. This may well be an inaccurate recollection because he says that he was inside for a month when in fact it was only fourteen days. The fear and feeling of humiliation were certainly seared into his memory and he remembers much of the detail, including his cell, the suit covered all over with a broad arrow, the kindness of his turnkey (prison warder) and the role of the Church in trying to reform prisoners. In Fred’s case, prison did not reform him for he came to hate authority and made a vow that he would be as black as they painted him.

Norwich Castle is on a site that has housed prisoners since 1165. From the fourteenth century, its importance as a military building declined and prisoners were kept in the increasingly tumbledown keep. By 1698, there were complaints about the bad state of repair, which made it easy for prisoners to escape. Repairs costing £1,303 0s 1d were put in hand in 1707, the battlements being removed to provide stone for the repairs. The money to finance this was raised from the rates of the Norfolk Hundreds.

Originally, groups of people were literally gathered in hundreds and formed into administrative areas with their own court; even today we still have administrative areas known as ‘Hundreds’. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, a brick building was built within the four walls of the castle for felons and debtors. This included a bathhouse, a hospital and a chapel with a pump house in the yard for the prisoners’ use.

Over the next 160 years, in keeping with society’s changing ideas, various reformers tried to make prisons more humane. During this period the head gaoler paid the County to hold the post; he then earned his living by selling provisions, including wine, to inmates. Families of prisoners were allowed to bring food in, which was fine for those with loved ones and money to support them, but others less fortunate were reduced to begging at the gates and living on donated scraps. The expression ‘life on a shoe string’ came about because debtors used to beg from upper windows by lowering their boots by the laces for people to put coins in. Additional money could be earned from various tasks, such as making laces, garters, purses, nets, etc. At one stage spinning wheels were provided for the prisoners, and gaolers shared any resulting profits. Gaolers also made money from the discharge fee required from those on remand who were found not guilty. They required a fee to release them from irons, so some innocents remained until the money could be raised to pay for their freedom. Gaolers also charged a fee for the curious to go and peer at condemned men and women.

During the nineteenth century prisoners began to be kept by the State, thus they no longer needed daily access to their families and isolation was considered a suitable way for them to reflect on their wrongdoing and to improve discipline. In some prisons this was taken to extremes with prisoners not being allowed to see or speak to each other. However, this was in part stopped when prisoners started to deteriorate mentally.

With the introduction of the treadmill some advocated that the very pointlessness of the task was to make the prisoners reflect, but at Norwich the treadmill ground flour for a local miller, who paid for this service. After 1844, no women or children under 14 were allowed to go on the treadmill, when it was found that pregnant women were miscarrying while walking the endless steps. It is said that the maximum height a prisoner could climb on the treadmill in one day was 12,000 feet, almost the equivalent of the Matterhorn. Prisoners who could not, or would not do this, were given bread and water and kept in their cells, but it was found they were better nourished than those being fed regular meals and then stepping ever onward for six hours a day.

During this period, improvements to all gaols were carried out, but Norwich Castle posed particular problems because of the constraints of the castle building itself. In 1832, the women were moved to Wymondham. Until then both sexes were housed together, which was found difficult to police. In 1887, it was found that whatever alterations were made at the castle, they were still inadequate to house prisoners in humane conditions and the New Prison was subsequently built on Mousehold Heath.

Many years later, Fred wrote:

It is a long time since those days but many is the time I have walked through the Beautifful rooms of Norwich Castle, now that it is a Museum and thought of the weeks I spent there in Prisson, and all of the missery and sufferen that have been endured inside the Walls of that Historick Building.

How amazed he would have been to find that a tape recording plays in the castle of someone reading his description of his time there, using it as an illustration of how cruelly children were treated in those days, even though the museum have not authenticated his true age. The experience certainly left an indelible message and embittered him.

Fred also remembered that on his return to Pentney he was shown no kindness or pity. Had that happened, life might have turned out very differently; instead, villagers gave him dark looks and jeered at him. He recalls meeting John Broad, the same vicar who had encouraged him earlier, on the road soon after he was released:

He stopped me and wanted to know how I liked Prisson. It seamed to me he asked it with a sneer, any how I knew I cut him off pretty quick, and I never entered his Church again.

He also found it difficult to get work:

. . . they wisper to a Master ‘He have been in Prisson’ and blite all his good resilutions.

On Fred’s release from prison, exasperated by his feckless behaviour and the shame he had brought on the family, his father threw him out. As a good churchman, John had relentlessly drilled right from wrong into Fred, or so he thought. Fred took a cottage of his own. It is no longer there, but rubble and brick showing through the soil when the field is ploughed clearly indicate where it stood. Set back a little from the main street, it has, as Fred describes in his book, easy access to the fields and footpaths leading away from the village.

Throughout this time Fred was poaching and while his father may have disapproved, others in the village did not. ‘Hollow meat’ is a term used for poached meat and rather in the way of the highwayman, poor families would occasionally find it discreetly tucked out of view on their doorstep. For the mid-Victorian rural poor who could seldom afford to buy meat, this was a rare treat. Because of this, and the way that they flouted the rules, taking only in the main from the rich, poachers were held in some regard. One of Fred’s finest boasts was that he never killed a pheasant with someone’s name on its tail.

Ted Bradfield, poacher turned gamekeeper in Hunstanton Park, offers a rather different explanation: ‘When moonlit nights came round during the winter months, it was no good – I had to go on the prowl. I never did earn my living out of poaching, but all the same I used to earn a hell of a lot of pocket money.’ He also revealed, ‘. . . poachers have often told me that they mostly take game for the excitement rather than on account of pecuniary benefit, and that the poacher stood alone in the hierarchy of the village.’ Whatever the reason, poaching was rife and certainly not frowned on by ordinary folk.

Many labourers asked a tailor to put a poacher’s pocket inside their sleeved ‘weskits’ so that any rabbits or game they were lucky enough to kill while working in the fields could be carried home in complete secrecy. Poachers had a loop stitched at the top of the pocket on the inside of their coats which held the barrel of a gun, the butt resting in the bottom of the pocket. Usually, poachers’ coats were usually made of velveteen, which was often green.

Catapults were often used to poach and frozen blackberries made excellent bullets as they were eaten, or melted away and left no evidence. Poachers used to produce the game for the first day of the season, as it was not possible in reality to kill them legitimately and ship them to the poulterers in time for the great and good to have them on their dinner tables on the day shooting started. One story goes that a London butcher had scrupulous customers, who would not eat game slaughtered before the official date so the poulterer had live birds poached and sent to him. Immediately after midnight on the first day the season began, he shot them and everybody was happy.

Another tale was of a poacher returning with his night’s takings when he saw a policeman coming towards him, some way away. The postman came right up behind the poacher on his bike and quick as you like, the game was under the parcels and the postie rode past the policeman whistling. The poacher followed on with a cheery, ‘Good morning!’

Victorian women often helped poachers by moving game about under their voluminous skirts, some going so far as to have a specially constructed ‘crinoline’ frame made. Strung about the waist, this harness meant the kill could be hung from the contraption in complete secrecy. Sometimes, too, hooks were placed on the underside of well covers, a cool and secret place to hide ill-gotten gains. Certainly, the poacher was ingenious.

In 60 Years a Fenman (1966), Arthur Randall lets us into some of his secrets: he made ‘hingles’ consisting of long pieces of twine to which horsehair nooses were tied at 3in intervals. The twine was placed on the ground and seed scattered to attract larks, which coming down to feed were entrapped in the horsehair. He did not say whether they were to be sold as singing birds or food, probably the latter. Think how many you would need for larks tongue pie!

In a very old copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1859, there are three recipes using larks. One for a pie requires nine whole larks which have been plucked, gutted and cleaned. How on earth do you pluck such tiny things, never mind truss them, as the second recipe demands? Larks were considered excellent and a great delicacy, either roasted for fifteen minutes over a clear fire, or broiled for ten and served on toast as an entrée. From Michaelmas to February, they were sent to London by the basket, having been netted in vast numbers on the stubble.

Larger hingles, with a single loop on top of a long stick, were used for slipping over a pheasant’s neck as it roosted at night. The very deft could reach up and catch a bird, but here the risk was that if it was not swiftly caught and silenced immediately, it might make a noise and draw the gamekeeper’s attention. Gypsies were reputed to be very good at ‘silent poaching’. Larger hingles were used to catch pheasants: while seeking corn, brandy-soaked raisins or dried peas spread out to tempt them, the birds would put their heads through the hingle, which then jerked up, being on a finely balanced bent wand of hazel.

Boys, many of them spending all day in the fields scaring crows and tending animals to earn a pitifully small wage, were not averse to a little poaching. Ingenuity was the name of the game: lying quietly in a ditch bottom sometimes proved lucky for them, as a rabbit ventured by. Another trick was to take a very prickly bramble stalk and push it down a hole, where you knew a rabbit was hiding. The briar was then turned round and round until the rabbit’s fur was well and truly tangled in the thorns and then it could be gingerly pulled out. Birds were also trapped for the collector and to save damaging any of the plumage, the boys killed their victims by forcing open their beaks and cutting the throat from the inside. They also trapped linnets, goldfinches and male nightingales to be sold as caged songbirds.

Snares were an effective way to catch rabbits, but the problem was that if the gamekeeper spotted the snare, he could then keep watch to see who came back to check on it.

Poachers always cut the buttons off their clothing so they did not become snagged on their nets as they dealt with them quickly in the dark. These were long nets, either a bagged net which was placed along a field edge and had rabbits driven into it, or gate nets covering the gate, usually held on by pebbles resting on top of the gate. A dog was used to drive hares towards the gate and as they reached the net, the stones were disturbed and the net dropped, entangling the hare.

One gamekeeper had two thousand stakes made, each with a twist of barbed wire on the top. These he drove into the ground, so the poachers snagged their nets as they dragged the fields at night for partridges.

In I Walked by Night, Fred recounts how his father disowned him and they did not speak for many years. John and Elizabeth must have been so disappointed in him; each had lost a son of their own, and perhaps placed undue pressure on him to be the model son they so desired. Model son he was not, though. Not only did he disgrace the family with his criminal ways, but he had also got a local girl pregnant.