Black act


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the English statute 9 George I, which makes it a felony to appear armed in any park or warren, etc., or to hunt or steal deer, etc., with the face blackened or disguised. Subsequent acts inflicting heavy penalties for malicious injuries to cattle and machinery have been called black acts.

See also: Black

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, published 1913 by G. & C. Merriam Co.
References in classic literature ?
Tom Platt caught a Maine man in the black act and knocked him over the gunwale with an oar, and Manuel served a fellow-countryman in the same way.
Lalamusa Municipal Committee chairman/PPP leader Nadeem Asghar Kaira termed the new bill a black act that would be resisted by the political forces.
He said that PML-N's mandate was stolen in the last election and this act would go into national history as black act. He flayed the government's lackluster welcome to the Chinese foreign minister.
Thompson's analysis, in Whigs and Hunters, of England's late eighteenth century Black Act, which imposed the death penalty for certain property offenses, reveals the law to reflect deep power imbalances within the society and a desire for social control on the part of the elites.
She picked up on his reference to the only sense of containment in the landscape being the "encircling sky" - and she found out about the so-called Black Act of 1723.
2) The Making also introduced an important discussion of constitutionalism, one that Thompson would revisit in Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, and reflect on in his interview with Michael Merrill.
In reprisal, the 1723 Black Act measure criminalized any sojourn, without benefit of clergy, into wooded regions while in disguise or blackened face.
This black act shrouded what should have been another memorable day when, at Gleneagles in Scotland, the leaders of the world's eight most poweful states pledged pounds 30bn to help Africa's poorest fight their way out of poverty.
A third major black act, Ms Dynamite, will also play in the London concert at Hyde Park.
Thompson's classic study, Whigs and Hunters (1975), tells the story of the Black Act of 1723, "an act for the more effectual punishing of wicked and evil-disposed persons going armed in disguise" (1975: 270).
Thompson, for instance, the "hegemony of the eighteenth-century gentry and aristocracy was expressed, above all, not in military force, not in the mystifications of a priesthood or of the press, not even in economic coercion, but in the rituals of the study of the Justices of the Peace, in the quarter-sessions, in the pomp of the Assizes and in the theatre of Tyburn." Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1976), 262.
Although it is tempting to see the notorious Black Act of 1723 being a major influence on views on trespass, it was more likely an over-reaction to a regional rather than a widespread problem.(11) Further, as it dealt primarily with poaching, and especially rather violent poaching, it is only marginally relevant to trespass by stock.