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
