In 1723 the English Parliament enacted the Black Act, a statute unique in English history. Purportedly designed to prevent men disguised with black faces from destroying fish, game, and trees in Epping Forest, the statute created approximately 250 capital offences ranging from the theft of a five shilling item or destruction of a fish pond to maliciously shooting into a house. Although it was originally a temporary measure of three years' duration, it would remain on the statute books for more than a hundred.

The Black Act might well have resulted in a great increase in armed crime since, as Dr. Johnson pointed out, "to equal robbery with murder, is to reduce murder to robbery; to confound in common minds the gradations of iniquity, and incite the commission of a great crime to prevent the detection of a less." On the other hand the act, by its uniform brutality, could, as its authors hoped, have resulted in a more docile community with reduced levels of violent and armed crime. Again, since the common law crime of murder and the right to have a firearm were not touched by the act, it might have had no impact at all on armed violence. The aim of this paper is to determine what, if any impact, the Black Act had upon armed crime in England.

Beyond the effect of a draconian statute, this investigation raises the even more basic problem--whether law is necessarily the determining factor in the control of violent crime.