SAMA HOOLE: 1381. Wat Tyler at Smithfield: all warrens, waters, parks and woods to be common, so a poor man may take game in the field and fish in the river. Tyler stabbed mid-sentence. Promise withdrawn within the month.

Every rising of the English poor for 500 years asked for the same thing, and it was not the vote. It was the meat in the wood.

1381. Wat Tyler at Smithfield: all warrens, waters, parks and woods to be common, so a poor man may take game in the field and fish in the river. Tyler… pic.twitter.com/lamHEZqpaU

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) September 29, 2026

Every rising of the English poor for 500 years asked for the same thing, and it was not the vote. It was the meat in the wood. 1381. Wat Tyler at Smithfield: all warrens, waters, parks and woods to be common, so a poor man may take game in the field and fish in the river. Tyler stabbed mid-sentence. Promise withdrawn within the month. 1549. Robert Kett under the oak at Norwich, 29 demands. Rivers free to all men for fishing. No man under the rank of knight to keep a dovehouse, because the lord's pigeons ate the village's seed corn. Three thousand rebels killed on Mousehold Heath. Kett hanged from the castle wall. 1607. The Midland Revolt. Thousands out at night with spades, levelling the hedges that had turned common grazing into a landlord's sheepwalk. The demand was the grass the cow stood on. Cut down by mounted gentry at Newton, the leaders hanged and quartered. 1631. The Forest of Dean and the western forests. Commoners under a man calling himself Lady Skimmington tear down the fences of the King's disafforested woods to get their grazing, their firewood and their pigs back. Leaders fined and pilloried. Fences rebuilt. 1649. Winstanley's Diggers on St George's Hill, planting the common and declaring the earth a common treasury for all. Crops trampled, huts burned, cleared by the following spring. 1723. The Waltham Blacks, faces blackened, taking the bishop's deer by night. Parliament answers in four weeks with 50 new hanging offences. Seven hanged at Tyburn before Christmas. 1820s. The poaching war. In some years 1 conviction in 7 in England is under the game laws. Poachers transported to Australia by the shipload for a pheasant. Spring guns legal until 1827. 1880. The first win, in 500 years. The Ground Game Act, 1880, allows a tenant farmer to kill the hares and rabbits eating his own crop. Not the deer. Not the birds. Rabbits, on land he already rented, after five centuries of asking. The ballot took three great reform acts and a century. The rabbit took 499 years, seven risings and a great many hangings, and the deer are still not on the list.

A landowner will hand the poor a vote before he hands them the animal, because a vote can be managed and a man who can feed himself cannot.