Devon Game Lists - Exeter Flying Post

During the period 1800-1860 Trewman's Exeter Flying Post carried a large number of official advertisements listing Gamekeepers and holders of Game Certificates. This information is presumably obtained from the "registers of gamekeepers and of game certificates taken out as required by the Acts of 24 Geo III, c.43 (1784) and 25 Geo. III, c.50, by which 'every person qualified in respect of property to kill game' and every person 'who shall keep any dog, gun, net or other engine for the taking or destruction of game' was to register and take out a certificate annually. The registers give name and status of gamekeeper, manor to which his deputation related, name of lord or lady of manor, date of deputation and date of certificate; the 'Certificate' book gives name and abode of person registering and date of certificate." (Description from Kent Archives Service's catalogue, quoted here by permission.)

Digital images of the pages of the Flying Post are available online in the 19th Century British Library Newspapers Collection, accessible via Gale Cengage Learning, a service that is accessible via numerous libraries. Gale's indexing and searching facilities provided are somewhat unreliable, presumably due to optical character recognition problems, so the best way of locating a known article is via its document number, as assigned by Gale. The listing below provides such numbers for all the Game Certificate advertisements so far located, and provides links to the transcripts that have been produced. The transcripts vary somewhat in format, since they attempt to mimic the form and layout of the original advertisements, which changed over the years. The total number of entries is approximately 38,000, though many individuals appear in successive lists over a number of years.

Though these transcripts have been produced carefully, they have not been subject to complete independent checking. Each message list has in general been dealt with separately, and (as can be readily seen from the name index that has been produced by simply sorting the consolidated set of names appropriately) little attempt been made to compare lists from different years in an effort to decipher unclear names, leave alone to correct errors in the original published message lists. Each index entry identifies the relevant issue of the Flying Post, and gives the document number of the digital image in the Gale Archive. Names are almost always given in the advertisements in the form "Surname, Forenames", but very occasionally one finds a name of the form "Initials Surname" - our policy is to transcribe the text as is, though this means that such names will be sorted, and hence appear in the index, based on their initials. Note also that the paper's issue numbers are not always properly ordered.

NAME INDEX

This name index covers just the names of persons holding game certificates, not those listed as having made such appointments. Select a letter from those below to go directly to the relevant section of the index.

A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   Y   Z

NAME LISTINGS

Brian Randell, 15 Jun 2014