‘The Wild West of England’: Exmoor in the Nineteenth Century

This online talk for Devon History Society examines Enclosure, Stag-hunting, and New Popular Perceptions of Exmoor in the Nineteenth Century with Professor of Social History at the University of Exeter, Henry French.

Historians have recently drawn parallels between the ideas that were used to defend land enclosure campaigns in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and Ireland, and those applied to the expansion of colonies. In both, the ‘wasteful’ under-exploitation of land by indigenous populations was used as a moral justifications for its appropriation for capitalist agriculture.

This talk focuses on the reclamation campaigns in former royal forest of Exmoor after it was sold by the Crown in 1818. It shows how advocates of agricultural 'improvement' certainly described the moor and its inhabitants as 'wild' and in need of 'civilisation'. However, the paper argues that these ideas were largely replaced after 1870 by public discussions that defended the moor's ‘wildness’, particularly as it was represented by its surviving Red Deer. The most powerful advocates of this new perspective were the supporters of stag hunting, whose very successful media campaign turned the hunt into a tourist attraction. The paper suggests we should see these attitudes not as a resistance to the 'modernity' of 19th-century society, but as a different version of it.

Host or Publisher Devon History Society