Daniel C. Beaver. Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War

Daniel C. Beaver's splendid book offers a new perspective on gentry politics in the first decades of the seventeenth century through an analysis of disturbances in the forests, chases, and parks of southern England. Employing the methods of micro-history, Beaver focuses on the issue of honor as it related to the hunting of deer, a practice requiring royal approval. He bases his argument extensively on a critical reading of Star Chamber records, a series of texts notoriously challenging for historians concerned with royal authority because they contain “artful fictions” (p. 60). Questioning prior scholarship that stresses the local and economic aspects of forest conflict, as well as the more general approach to early modern English politics that locates the emergence of political ideology in the 1630s, Beaver emphasizes the development during the 1610s and 1620s of “a contentious Jacobean forest politics, routinely conceived in terms of a broader commonwealth” (p. 81).

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