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Question

Why are Wiltshiremen known as moonrakers?

Question asked on

04 July 2011

Answer

According to legend, the moonrakers were smugglers who hoodwinked local excise officers to disguise their activities. A cache of brandy kegs had been hidden in a dew-pond near Bishop's Cannings, and the smugglers chose a moonlit night to recover the booty. As they were running a rake through the pond to find the kegs the smugglers were disturbed by a pair of excisemen, who demanded an explanation. They were trying to grab, the smugglers assured the excisemen, 'thic gurt yaller cheese', and the excisemen departed, chuckling at the villagers' attempts to rake out the reflection of the moon from the pond.

Although smuggling is thought of as a coastal activity, the Revd A.C. Smith, writing in 1874, speaks of entire villages at the turn of the nineteenth century, in the north Wiltshire downs and around Swindon, where smuggling was the main source of employment, and with links to communities on Salisbury Plain and the Dorset and Hampshire coasts, making use of ancient and little-used trackways. The other point to be borne in mind is that a far wider range of imported goods than liquor and tobacco products were subject to excise duty, and hence smuggling would have served a wider market than it does today.

The Wiltshire dialect poet Edward Slow gives the story under the title of 'The Wiltshire Moonrakers', as the first item in his anthology "Wiltshire Rhymes" (1881), and in both this account and those printed on postcards at the turn of the last century, the kegs fall from a cart into a stream as the donkey balks at the bridge and bolts. A postcard recounting the story is still available in Salisbury, and the outfitter Charles Baker sells a Moonrakers tie.

Finally, it seems that the inhabitants of Aurillac, in the Auvergne, were known contemptuously as pescalunes, or moon-fishers, by the local countrymen.

Bibliography

The Wiltshire Moonrakers [190-]. – postcards, Wiltshire Corporate and Library Services collection, Salisbury.

Gandy, I.: Round about the little steeple (Allen and Unwin, 1960, p. 21

Millson, C.: Tales of old Wiltshire (Countryside Books, 1982; rev. ed. 1995), p. 77.

Slow, E.: Wiltshire rhymes: a series of poems in the Wiltshire dialect, never bevore published (Salisbury: Blake, 1881), pp5-11: ‘The Wiltshire moonrakers’.

Brentnall, H.C.: “French moonrakers”, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 48 no. 170 (June 1939), pp. 466-7, quoting Ajalbert, J: Auvergne (1932).

Smith, Revd A.C.: “On certain Wiltshire traditions, charms and superstitions”, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 14 no. 42 (1874), pp. 326-7.