thought proper to demand, whether venison, wine, money, or other
necessaries for their debauched feasts, would by letter threaten plunder
and destroying with fire and sword, whomever they thought proper.

These villainies being carried on with a high hand for some time in the
years 1722 and 1723, their insolence grew at last so intolerable as to
oblige the Legislature to make a new law against all who thus went armed
and disguised, and associated themselves together by the name of Blacks,
or entered into any other confederacies to support and assist one
another in doing injuries and violences to the persons and properties of
the king's subjects.

By this law it was enacted that after the first day of June, 1723,
whatever persons armed with offensive weapons, and having their faces
blacked, or otherwise disguised, should appear in any forest, park or
grounds enclosed with any wall or fence, wherein deer were kept, or any
warren where hares or conies are kept, or in any highway, heath or down,
or unlawfully hunt, kill or steal any red or fallow deer, or rob any
warren, or steal fish of any pond, or kill or wound cattle, or set fire
to any house or outhouses, stack, etc., or cut down or any otherway
destroy trees planted for shelter or profit, or shall maliciously shoot
at any person, or send a letter demanding money or other valuable
things, shall rescue any person in custody of any officer for any such
offences, or by gifts or promise, procure any one to join with them,
shall be deemed guilty of felony without benefit of clergy, and shall
suffer pains of death as felons so convicted.

Nor was even this thought sufficient to remedy those evils, which the
idle follies of some rash persons had brought about, but a retrospect
was also by the same Act had to offences heretofore committed, and all
persons who had committed any crimes punishable by this Act, after the
second of February, 1722, were commanded to render themselves before the
24th of July, 1723, to some Justice of his Majesty's Court of King's
Bench, or to some Justice of the Peace for the county where they lived,
and there make a full and exact confession of the crimes of such a
nature which they had committed, the times when, and the places where,
and persons with whom, together with an account of such persons' places
of abode as had with them been guilty as aforesaid, in order to their
being thereupon apprehended, and brought to judgment according to Law,
on