Samuel observes that it was in studying the social and economic history of poaching that oral sources proved most revelatory. His interviews showed that the relatively small number of poachers who appeared in court records in the late 19th century were not the most prolific but the worst at getting away with it. In the years before the Great War, poaching was organised and knitted into the local economy and seasonal patterns of labour. Gangs of poachers took orders, traded door to door, and sold on to fences who supplied butchers in Oxford’s covered market. A retired practitioner, a longtime antagonist of the local gamekeepers, trained lurchers for the gangs. Amateurs, in it perhaps partly for the thrill, were not considered ‘real’ poachers by the pros.

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