Chapter III: Part 3

Jack Bird was humbly born and as humbly educated. When it is added that he was born in the second half of the seventeenth century, it will rightly be supposed that his education did not include any of the sciences, and that it probably did not go far beyond teaching him to write his own name. He had no use for even that small accomplishment, for he was apprenticed to a baker, and before his indentures were expired had run away and 'listed for a soldier in the foot-guards; being almost immediately sent out to the Low Countries. He served under the Duke of Monmouth at the siege of Maestricht, but found too many masters in the army, and so deserted and made his way to Amsterdam, where he commenced a new career by stealing a piece of silk. He was detected in the act, taken before a magistrate, and condemned to a term of hard labour in the "rasp-house," where he was set to rasping log-wood, and to other severe drudgeries, for the term of twelve months. Unaccustomed to such hard labour, Jack fainted at his tasks, but the labour-master set it down to laziness, and to cure it, chained him in the bottom of an empty cistern by one foot, and caused a number of taps to be turned on, so that the cistern began rapidly to fill and the prisoner to be obliged, as the cistern was deeper than his own height, to work vigorously at a pump fixed in it, lest the water should gain upon, and drown, him. An hour's experience of this ingenious punishment rendered him quite anxious to return to the labour that had before been too much for him.

At the end of his term of bondage he hastened to take leave of Holland and the Hollanders, who had proved themselves such connoisseurs in quaint punishments. In England, justice certainly was more severe, and hanged men who stole quite trivial things, but it did not make people perform such hard labour, and Jack was one of those who would rather die than work. There are many of his kind even now.

Although hard labour was distasteful to our hero, he was by no means satisfied to live as humbly as he had been born, and his thoughts turned lightly to the road, as a likely place on which to pick up a good living without over-exertion. There was the choice of footpad or highwayman, and of course he chose the higher branch of the profession; for a footpad had to pad the hoof and be content, after all, with robbing the comparatively poor; while a highwayman could cut a fine figure on horseback, plunder the best, and be at little personal fatigue in doing so. Many foolish fellows, commencing highwayman, would hire, or even purchase, a horse; not so Jack Bird. "Thorough" was his motto, and he began business by stealing the mount he fancied. At the same time he took excellent good care to go fully armed, for we read that he provided himself with six good pistols and a broadsword. In this fortified condition, and in the dress of a gentleman, he opened his campaign. His first few attempts were highly successful, but he soon learned, in a painful adventure on the Dover Road, between Gravesend and Chatham, that fortune is fickle. There he encountered one Joseph Pinnis, a pilot, who was returning from London, where he had received ten or twelve pounds for piloting a Dutch ship up-river. He had been so unfortunate as to lose both hands during an engagement in the Dutch war, some years earlier, and it seemed to our callous highwayman an easy task to rob him.

Summoned to "Stand and deliver!" the pilot replied, "You see, sir, that I have never a hand, so cannot take my money out of my pocket. Be so kind, therefore, as to take the trouble to search me."

The highwayman, without the slightest misgiving, complied with this very reasonable request, and securing the pilot's purse, began to examine its contents, when he found himself suddenly seized around the waist by the traveller, who appeared to have enormous strength in his arms, even though he had no hands. He succeeded in overthrowing the highwayman, and falling upon him, beat him fearfully about the face with his metal-shod wrists.

Presently some other travellers approached, and, asking the cause of the struggle, Pinnis told them: asking them to take a hand and give the ruffian a further drubbing, and adding that he was almost out of breath with what he had done already.

The travellers then, informed of the whole affair, conducted Bird in custody to a magistrate, who committed him to Maidstone gaol, where he was tried and condemned to death, but was afterwards, for some reason that has escaped the historian, pardoned and set at liberty, to work more outrages upon unarmed and inoffensive folk.

At first, however, the danger and indignity he had passed through, of being so completely vanquished by a handless man, whom he had at first foolishly despised, quite put him out of conceit with himself and the road, and he resolved to abandon an employment which had at first promised so well, only to turn out so ill. But work—real work—was uncongenial as ever, and as he had to exist somehow, it happened that the road called him successfully again, after all.

The first person he encountered in his new series of adventures was a Welsh drover, who proved to be a muscular man, and the very devil of a fellow with that nasty weapon, the quarter-staff. "Once bit, twice shy," murmured Jack, withdrawing swiftly out of reach. "If a villain of a sailor without hands can overthrow me, I shall not venture my carcase within reach of one that has hands, for fear of something worse." So, he pulled a pistol from the armoury he carried in his belt, and from a safe distance shot the drover through the head. He then searched the body and found, to his disgust, only eighteenpence. But he summoned what philosophy he could over this disappointment, and, cynically remarking that "'Tis a price worth killing a man for, any time," rode off without the least remorse.

On another occasion he met the original "Poor Robin," the almanac-writer and humorous prognosticator; and as he did not disdain to exact contributions from the poor, as well as the rich (although "Poor Robin" probably was by no means so poor as his name would imply), he desired the calendar-maker to halt and surrender. As this was the first time Poor Robin had heard such language, and as he had received no hint of this occasion from the stars, he stood and stared, as if himself had been planet-struck.

"Come now," said Jack, "this is no child's play: I am in earnest."

Robin pleaded the poverty to which, he said, his nickname bore witness.

"That," returned Bird, "is a miserable, threadbare excuse, and will not save your bacon."

"But," pleaded the almanac-maker, "as author of those calendars that yearly come out in my name, I have canonised a great many gentlemen of your profession; look in them for their names, and let this be my protection."

But all in vain; Bird ransacked his pockets, and from them extracted fifteen shillings, took a new hat from his head, and requested him, as he had now given him cause, to canonise him also.

"Ay!" exclaimed Poor Robin grimly, "that will I, when you have suffered martyrdom at Tyburn, which will not be long hence."

"Poor Robin's" publications, it may be said, in this connection, are well worth examination. In an age when Lilly, Perkins, and a host of others issued prophetic almanacs, divining future events from the stars, and were extensively believed in, "Poor Robin's" almanac, year by year, made much fun out of those pretensions; fun that sometimes reads curiously modern. Seventeenth-century humour is, as a rule, as flat to the modern taste as champagne opened and left to stand, but much of "Poor Robin's" wit and humour still sparkles. While Perkins, with a provoking solemnity, would give a chronological table of events from the Year One and would proceed by degrees from "Adam, created 1, B.C., 3962," and would continue by way of "Methuselah, born 687, B.C., 2306," to "The Tyrant Oliver began his government, December 16th, 1653"; "Poor Robin" would devote his attention largely to the days when highwaymen were hanged, and would draw farcical conclusions from planetary dispositions. Thus we find him saying:

"Now the effects of the conjunction of Saturn and Mars will much operate: such conjunctions are always attended with remarkable accidents. There was one in the year 1672, and the German Princess rode up Holborn Hill; another in 1673, and Du Vail visited the three-legged tenement at Hyde Park Corner. I might instance in divers other examples, but these shall suffice."

The so-called "German Princess" was an adventuress, really a native of Canterbury, and a daughter of one of the choristers in the Cathedral there, named Moders. She was hanged at Tyburn, in 1678 (not in 1672), and so was Du Vall (not at Hyde Park Corner, and not in 1673).

In his burlesque monthly forecasts of the weather and public events, he evidently reflects upon his serious contemporaries, whose predictions would occasionally go wrong, and who, like our modern "Old Moore," would in consequence grow less cocksure and more cautious, and would then more or less cleverly tell readers to "expect" something or other, together with such eminently safe remarks for February and March as, "Wind and rainstorms are to be looked for by the farmer."

In February 1664, for example, "Poor Robin," in burlesque of this kind of thing, warns his readers to "expect some showers of rain, either this month or the next, or the next after that, or else we shall have a very dry spring.... The twenty-seventh day of this month died Cardinal Mazarine, and if you would know the reason why he died, then, I answer, it was because he could live no longer."

Under June, he declares that, "If the frost nips the fruit trees, there will be no apples." In July, "Fleas will grow troublesome, and will lie with you without leave," and elsewhere we find that "Tyburn shall be a great eye-sore to Highway men and cut-purses," and that "The leafless tree betwixt London and Paddington will this month bear fruit, but it will be only Medlers, and they are stark naught until they are rotten." The which extracts fully illustrate the allusions in the short life of Jack Bird.

Made bold by a long series of successes, Bird procured a good horse and determined never again to stoop to robbing for mere shillings. A meeting with the Earl of ——, rolling along in his carriage, accompanied by his chaplain, and attended by two servants, gave him his first opportunity of putting this excellent determination into practice.

"You must stop, my lord!" exclaimed Bird, threatening him with one pistol, and the coachman with the other.

"The devil I must!" said his lordship; "who the——"—here the chaplain gave a loud cough, and the word was lost in the throaty rasp he produced—"what the——" ("ahem!" from the chaplain) "are you then, fellow, that you bid me pull up on the roadway for you, you——?"

"An honest collector of tolls, your lordship," said Bird: "your purse this instant!"

"So! that is the way of it?" replied his lordship. "I am very little anxious about the small sum I have about me, but I intend you shall fight for it."

Bird then flew into a passion, and swore terribly, after the low fashion then proverbially prevalent among our soldiers in the Low Countries. He waved his pistols excitedly.

"Don't lose your temper," said my lord. "When I said 'fight,' I meant boxing, and not shooting, and I will fight you fairly for all the money I have, against nothing."

"That is an honourable challenge, my lord," replied Bird, "provided none of your servants be near us."

His lordship then commanded them to withdraw to a distance. The chaplain, however, could not endure the thought of the Earl fighting while he was but an idle spectator, and requested the honour of being his patron's champion.

Matters were arranged: the divine stripped off his gown, and in another half a minute the scene resounded with the thuds and grunts of the combatants, as they planted blows home on each other's faces and bodies. In less than a quarter of an hour the chaplain was knocked out of time, with only breath enough remaining to exclaim, "I'll fight no more!" Bird was unquestioned victor. "Now, my lord," said he, turning to the carriage, "if it please your lordship, I will take a turn with you."

"Not I!" earnestly replied the Earl, "for if you can beat my chaplain, you will surely beat me, for we have tried it out before." So saying, he handed the highwayman the sum of twenty guineas he was carrying.

Bird's career was closed by a foolish act. He, in company with a woman, knocked down and robbed a man in Drury Lane. The woman was seized on the spot, but Bird escaped. Going, however, to visit her in prison, he himself was arrested; and, being found guilty, he was executed at Tyburn, March 12th, 1690, aged forty-two.

WILL OGDEN, JACK BRADSHAW, AND TOM REYNOLDS

Will Ogden, who was born in Walnut Tree Alley, Tooley Street, Southwark, now claims our attention. He was a waterman by trade and a highwayman by inclination, so that he presently exchanged the river for the road. But he did not blossom out all at once as a fully-equipped highwayman. He passed a kind of transition period of about two years in the plundering of ships lying in the Pool, between Southwark and Billingsgate, and in the rifling of waterside shops. In these activities he was associated with one Tom Reynolds, a native of Cross Key Alley, Barnaby Street, and admiral of a sludge-barge. Being apprehended in the burglary of a watch-maker's shop, they were lodged in Newgate, and tried and convicted at the Old Bailey; but received a pardon, on what grounds does not appear.

This ended their burgling experiences, and they then agreed to go upon the road, in the humbler, padding form of the highwayman's trade.

Early in their experiences, Ogden one evening met a parson walking home by the light of the moon, and approached him in the character of a distressed seaman walking the highway to the nearest port, where he might chance to get a ship. His dismal story excited the compassion of the parson, who gave him sixpence and passed on.

He had not proceeded far when Ogden, who had hurried round in advance of him by a side lane, approached him again, and renewed his story.

"You are the most impudent beggar I ever met," exclaimed the parson; but Ogden told him he was in very great want, and that the sixpence he had received would not carry him very far. The parson then gave him half-a-crown, which Ogden gratefully accepted, adding: "These are very sad times, and there's horrid robbing abroad; so, if you have any more money about you, you may as well let me have it, as another who don't deserve it so much, and may perhaps even ill-use you, and, binding you hand and foot, make you lie in the cold all night. If you'll give me your money, I'll take care of you, and conduct you safely home."

An offer of this kind, so delicately and yet so significantly framed, had only to be made to be accepted by any prudent man, who did not feel himself equal to knocking that impudent humorist on the head; and so the parson made a virtue of necessity, and, as cheerfully as he could, handed him all his money; about forty shillings.

Ogden then remarked, "I see you have a watch, sir; you may as well let me have that too." Whereupon the watch also changed hands.

As they were thus plodding along two or three men, accomplices of the ingenious Ogden, came out of the wayside bushes; but Ogden calling out their pass-words, "The moon shines bright," they let them proceed. A little further on, the same incident was repeated, by which the parson could clearly see that, had he not met with the gentle and persuasive Ogden, he might in all likelihood have fallen into far worse hands, and have been ill-used and tied up, even as he had been warned.

The clergyman was at last brought safely to his own door, and so greatly appreciated this safe-conduct—though at the loss of some forty shillings and a watch—that he invited Ogden in; but that person was as cautious as ingenious, and declined. He thought the clergyman was laying a trap for him; but he said he had no objection to taking a drink outside. The good parson then brought a bottle of wine, and, drinking to Ogden, gave him the bottle and the glass to help himself, upon which he ran off with both.

A little later, Ogden met a well-known dandy of that time, Beau Medlicott by name. He commanded the Beau to stand and empty his pockets, but instead of doing so, he drew his sword and made some half-hearted passes with it. Ogden thereupon drew his pistols, and the Beau was obliged to yield to superior armament. But Ogden might have left that fashionable person alone, for he had little about him. Like the more or less famous music-hall character, "La-di-da," of whom he must surely have been the ancestor, he was scarcely worth robbing. Of what was that music-hall celebrity possessed?

He'd a penny papah collah round his throat, la-di-da;
A penny papah flowah in his coat, la-di-da;
In his mouth a penny pick, in his hand a penny stick,
And a penny in his pocket, la-di-da, la-di-da,
And a penny in his pocket, la-di-da!

The contents of Beau Medlicott's pockets were pitiful enough to draw tears of rage from any self-respecting highwayman: consisting only of two half-crowns; and one of them was a brass counterfeit!

Ogden very rightly gave that cheap toff a good thrashing.

Reynolds does not appear in the stories just narrated; but in addition to another ally, Bradshaw by name, said to have been a grandson of that Serjeant Bradshaw who was one of the regicides, he now appears lurking in the woods on Shooter's Hill, one night in 1714, for whatever fortune might be pleased to send them. It was poor sport that evening, for only a servant-girl, one Cecilia Fowley, came along the road, carrying her box; but these low-down footpads despised nothing, and were ready to rob any one.

It was not worth the while of the three, they thought, to rush out of their lurking-place for the sake of one servant-girl, and so they deputed Bradshaw for the job. He accordingly sprang into the road, seized the box, and broke it into fragments. It contained the girl's clothes, "and fifteen shillings, being all her wages for three months' service." (Servants were cheap then, it seems.)

Turning over these things, Bradshaw turned out a hammer, which the girl seized, and suddenly dealt him a blow with it upon the temple, followed by another with the claw of the hammer upon his neck, which tore his throat open. He fell down in the road, and died there.

At that moment, up came a gentleman, to whom the girl narrated the circumstances. He searched the dead man's pockets, and found in them a large sum of money and a whistle. Putting the whistle to his mouth, he blew upon it—a rash enough thing to do—and thereupon Ogden and Reynolds leapt out from the wayside coverts. Finding, however, that something disastrous had happened, and that it was a stranger who had whistled them, they fled.

Odgen and Reynolds at a later date met a tallyman, who was a well-known trader in St. Giles, and demanded his money. "Money!" he exclaimed; he was merely a poor man, who had the greatest difficulty in earning his daily bread.

"Thou spawn of h—ll!" exclaimed Ogden, in a violent passion—or, at least, an excellent imitation of it—"have pity on thee, shall I? No, sirrah, I know thee too well, and I would almost as soon be kind to a bailiff or an informing constable, as to you. A tallyman and a rogue are terms of similar import. Every Friday you set up a tenter in the Marshalsea Court, upon which you rack and stretch poor prisoners like English broadcloth, beyond the staple of the wool, till the threads crack; which causes them, with the least wet, to shrink, and presently to wear threadbare. I say that you, and all your calling, are worse rogues than ever were hanged at Tyburn."

After this abominable abuse, Ogden went over his pockets, stripped him naked, and bound him hand and foot, and left him in a ditch, "to ruminate on his former villainies." By which it would seem quite evident that tallymen shared the hatred felt for attorneys.

Ogden and Reynolds were the particular friends of Thomas Jones and John Richardson, the one a butler and the other a footman, in the employ of a gentleman living at Eltham. They instructed the footman and the butler in their own business, and it was not long before they took to robbing on Blackheath, whenever their master was away from home. On one of these occasions, they plundered a gentleman, and left him bound on the heath, and, their master coming home unexpectedly, found him there, and after the manner of a Good Samaritan, took him to his own house, and gave him a glass of wine, to recruit his spirits. The butler no sooner appeared, than the ill-used traveller, much to the astonishment of himself and his master, recognised him as one of the men who had attacked and robbed him. The guilty pair were eventually hanged at Rochester, on April 2nd, 1714.

Ogden and Reynolds ended at last at Kingston, on April 23rd, 1714; Ogden himself dying with an air of complete indifference. He threw a handful of small change among the crowd, with the remark: "Gentlemen, here is a poor Will's farewell."

JACK OVET

Jack Ovet was born at Nottingham, and after serving his time as apprentice to a shoemaker, took up that useful employment for a livelihood. But he soon grew tired of his awl and his cobblers'-wax, and disregarding the old saw which advises cobblers (and, no doubt, also boot and shoe makers) to "stick to their last," deserted his last and his bench, and took to the highway. A shoemaker newly emancipated from his useful, but not romantic, trade does not impress us as a figure of romance; but that is merely prejudice; and really he started off at score, and at his first essay robbed a gentleman of twenty of the best, without a moment's hesitation. The dispute as to whom the guineas should belong took place on the road to London from his native Nottingham, so you will perceive how quickly Ovet fell into his stride. Ovet argued that the guineas were rightly his, "by the law of capture"; thus following the theory of the poet who put the law of ownership in property so neatly in declaring it:

His to take who has the power,
And his to keep who can.

"Yours, you impudent scoundrel!" bellowed the traveller; "if I had not been taken unawares, we would have seen about that."

Ovet, already prepared to take the ancient traditional line of chivalric consideration, said he would fight fairly for the money. "Here it is again, and whoever is best man, let him keep it." The enraged traveller agreed to this proposal, and they fell to fighting with swords, with the result that the gentleman was mortally wounded, and Ovet went off with the purse.

Our ex-shoemaker was a quarrelsome fellow, and soon after this killed another man in a heated dispute, but escaped capture. Skulking in remote places, afraid of being taken at a disadvantage, he soon found himself short of money, and waylaid a train of pack-horses. Cutting open their packs, he discovered a number of guineas among the goods, and finally went off with a hundred and eighty, and three dozen silver knives, forks, and spoons.

One day Jack Ovet, drinking at a wayside inn, overheard a soapboiler and a carrier consulting how the carrier could most securely carry a hundred pounds to a friend in the country. It was finally decided to convey the money in a barrel of soap. The carrier was highly pleased with the notion, and laughingly remarked that if any rogue were to rob his waggon, "the devil's cunning must be in him if he looks for any money in the soap-barrel."

Jack Ovet, later in the day, overtook him upon the road and commanded him to stop, else he would shoot both him and his horses.

"I must make bold to borrow a little money out of your waggon," he said; "therefore, if you have any, direct me to it, that I may not lose any time, which, you know, is always precious."

The carrier, quite unmoved in his fancied security, replied that he had none, and if he did not believe him, he might, if he would, search every box and bundle in his waggon.

Ovet then, simulating a violent passion, began to toss down every box, parcel, and barrel in the waggon, until at last, coming to the soap-barrel, he flung it down with all his force, so that it broke in pieces, the money-bag appearing in midst of the soap scattered on the road.

Then, jumping down, he exclaimed, "Is not he that sells this soap a cheating villain, to put this bag of lead into it, to make the barrel weigh heavier? However, that he may not succeed in his roguery, I'll take it and sell it in the next house I come to, for it will wet my whistle to the tune of two or three shillings."

So saying, he was making off, when the poor carrier cried out, "Hold, hold, sir! that is not lead. It is a bag with a hundred pounds in it, for which I must be accountable."

"No, no," returned Ovet, "this can't be money; but if it is, tell the owner that I'll be answerable for it, if he'll come to me."

"To you! Where, then, sir, may one find you?"

"Why, truly," rejoined Ovet, with a chuckle, "that's a question soon asked, but not so soon answered. The best answer I can give you is that you'll probably find me in a gaol before night, and then perhaps you may have what I have taken, and forty pounds more."

The highwaymen were generally susceptible creatures, and Ovet not less so than his brethren. One day, robbing the Worcester stage-coach, filled on that occasion with young women, he was violently smitten with one in particular.

"Madam," he declared, "your charms have softened my temper. Cast not your eyes down, nor cover your face with those modest blushes; and, believe me, what I have taken from necessity is only borrowed, and shall be honourably restored, if you will let me know where you may be found."

The young woman gave him her address, and a week later, overcome by the most violent passion, he wrote her a love-letter in which, in the most bombastic and ridiculous style, he expressed his love. "Although I had the cruelty to rob you of twenty guineas," he concluded, "you committed at the same time a greater robbery, by taking my heart. Do, I implore you, direct a favourable answer."

But this was the discouraging reply:

"SIR,—

"Yours I received with as great dissatisfaction as when you
robbed me. I admire your impudence in offering yourself to me as
a husband, when I am sensible it would not be long ere you made
me a hempen widow. Perhaps some foolish girl or another may be
so bewitched as to go in white, to beg the favour of marrying you
under the gallows; but, indeed, I shall neither venture there,
nor in a church, to marry one of your profession, whose vows are
treacherous, and whose smiles, words, and actions, like small
rivulets, through a thousand turnings of loose passions, at last
arrive at the dead sea of sin.

"Should you, therefore, dissolve your eyes into tears; were every
accent in your speech a sigh; had you all the spells and magic
charms of love, I should seal up my ears. You have already broken
your word, in not sending what you villainously took from me;
but, not valuing that, let me tell you, for fear you should have
too great a conceit of yourself, that you are the first, to my
recollection, whom I ever hated; and, sealing my hatred with the
hopes of quickly reading your dying speech, in case you die in
London, I presume to subscribe myself."

"Yours, never to command."

Soon after this harrowing dismissal, Jack Ovet was taken, tried, and executed, ending in May 1708, in the thirty-second year of his age.

JOHN HALL, RICHARD LOW, AND STEPHEN BUNCE

John Hall, born in 1675 of poor parents in Bishop's Head Court, off Gray's Inn Lane, was one of those late seventeenth and very early eighteenth-century evil-doers, who anticipated the sordid career of the modern thief, without any redeeming qualities. A chimney-sweep by trade, he was, among other things, a highwayman, but he more often padded the hoof upon the highway than rode along it, and he would turn his hand, according to what he deemed the necessities of the moment, to pocket-picking, shop-lifting, or ringing the changes, with equal facility. At the same time, he was not altogether a fortunate malefactor. As a pickpocket, he was frequently detected and, we learn, "treated in the usual manner, by ducking in the horsepond," by those who did not want the trouble of prosecuting him. Happening upon more vindictive persons, he was arrested, time after time, and thrown into Bridewell and often whipped. Which was the more desirable, to be flung into a horsepond, or be whipped, it must be left to individual tastes to decide. It depends largely, no doubt, upon the comparative filthiness of the pond and the kind of lash in use by the brawny warders of Bridewell.

He was eminently versatile, but the public has ever looked with suspicion upon versatility; and perhaps for this, among other reasons, his name is scarcely famous: only notorious in a small way as a jack-of-all-trades, except honest ones, and a great master in no particular one.

He was, it may be at once granted, industrious enough in his perverted way, and was for always frequenting churches, fairs, markets, and public assemblies: he had also generally a confederate at hand, to whom he would swiftly pass on the swag, to be himself found empty-handed when searched, and with nothing on him to prove his guilt; quite in the modern style.

He had, as a shoplifter, the same painfully chequered fortunes that studded his pocket-picking career with deplorable incidents. In January 1682 he was convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing a pair of shoes, and was whipped at the cart's tail. A little later, still smarting from that correction, he was back at the same trade, and in the long span of eighteen years suffered a series of duckings, whippings, and the distressing indignities that are the common rewards of clumsy rogues, sufficient to have cured many an one. But Jack Hall was clearly an "habitual." The delight of sport gilded his occupation, and salved his moral and physical hurts; and, after all, although he was a more than commonly blundering criminal, it was in itself no mean feat in those severe times to follow the course he steered, and yet for so long to keep his neck out of the noose.

After eighteen years of miscellaneous villainy, he was convicted of breaking into the house of one Jonathan Bretail, and for this was sentenced to be hanged. With so lengthy a record as this, he was fortunate indeed in receiving a pardon conditional upon his being transported within six months to the American colonies. Fortunate colonies! But he escaped at the last moment from the convict ship, and England therefore did not lose her Hall.

Having tried many kinds of petty robbery with no very great or continued success, and being too well known as a pickpocket and shoplifter, against whom every pocket was buttoned, all tills locked, and goods carefully secured, he struck out a new line; robbing country waggons and stealing portmanteaus off coaches. But even here, in this arduous branch of a thief's varied business, ill-luck malevolently pursued him; for he was caught in the act and convicted in 1702. This brought him a period of two years' enforced seclusion in Bridewell, and the painful and disfiguring sentence of branding in the cheek, by which all men might know him on sight for a convicted felon, and be warned accordingly. This inevitable carrying his own condemnation with him wherever he went severely handicapped him when he was again at liberty; and it was probably for this reason that he returned to burglary, which, conducted at night-time, might reasonably offer inducements to a man with a scarred face.

With Stephen Bunce, Dick Low, and others, he broke into the shop of a baker named Clare, at Hackney, soon after midnight. They proceeded at once to the bakehouse, where they surprised the journeyman and apprentice at work, and, tying them neck and heels, threw them into the kneading-trough. One stood guard over them with a drawn sword, while the others went upstairs to rob the house.

The elderly Mr. Clare was awakened from sleep and bidden disclose where his money lay, but he stoutly refused, in spite of all their threats, until Hall seized a little girl, the baker's granddaughter. "D——n me!" he said, "if I won't bake the child in a pie and eat it, if the old rogue won't be civil."

Mr. Clare seems to have been alarmed by this extravagant threat. Perhaps the flaming "F" for felon, or "T" for thief, on Hall's cheek, made him appear exceptionally terrible. At any rate, Mr. Clare then revealed his hoard of gold, which amounted to between seventy and eighty guineas; and with that, very satisfied, the midnight band departed.

Although this daring raid was naturally the subject of much excited comment, the robbers were not captured, and they were presently bold enough to break into the house of a man named Saunders, a chairman in the same locality. Saunders was informed that Hall was one of the thieves, and, knowing him well by sight, he pursued him and his gang at three o'clock in the morning, accompanied by a watchman. The gang fired at their pursuers, and the watchman fell, wounded in the thigh. Hall escaped altogether, and although some of his accomplices were captured, they were acquitted, from lack of sufficient evidence.

In 1705 Hall was again in trouble, under the alias of "Price," but was acquitted on the charge of housebreaking then brought against him. He was similarly fortunate in October 1706, when he was charged in company with Arthur Chambers with being concerned in stealing a handkerchief. Such a trivial theft would seem hardly to need collaboration.

Later on, he was again in custody, but meanly obtained his liberty by turning evidence against two accomplices.

Finally, in 1707 he was arrested with his old pals, Stephen Bunce and Dick Low, for a burglary committed at the house of Captain Guyon, near Stepney. All three were convicted, and suffered in company at Tyburn, on December 7th, 1707.

Dick Low was a not very distinguished person, and indeed his name, except in association with Hall and Bunce, is utterly unworthy of record in these annals. He was more expert at stealing from shops and emptying tills than in any other branch of the thieving profession, and would have made an expert area-sneak had areas been then in existence. Unfortunately they came in about a century later. But he was an expert at the "running-smobble," which consisted in two or three confederates planning to rob a shop after dark: one going in with an exaggerated pretence of drunkenness and creating a disturbance; while the others would enter on the excuse of seeing what the matter could be, and then, turning out the lights, clearing out the till, and laying hands on any light articles of value that might be within reach. One of them would come provided with pepper, or handfuls of mud and throw it in the faces of the shopkeeper and his assistants, when they began to cry "Stop, thief!"

For the rest, Dick Low was a violent, sullen brute, often, like his two allies, in Newgate, and when there generally in the bilboes for savage assaults on his fellow-prisoners.

Stephen Bunce, or Bunch, began his iniquities as soon as he could toddle, and, according to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Pureney, the Ordinary of Newgate, was old in crime while he was yet an infant in years. Another biographer picturesquely says he was "born a thief," which, as his parents were the inevitably "poor but honest" folk of the conventional type of biography, seems an extreme criticism.

The depravity of Stephen Bunce was, however, so precocious that, as a child, he would go and play with the children of a charcoal-man, who lived near his native London alley, for the express purpose of filling his pockets with the charcoal, and then selling it, for hot codlins, to a woman who kept an apple-stall. One day, when the codlins were more than ever tempting and the charcoal not so easily to be stolen, he asked the woman for some apples on trust, but she refused, and Stephen resolved upon revenge.

On the next opportunity, pocketing a larger quantity of charcoal than usual, he filled the holes in it with gunpowder and then stopping them with black sealing-wax, sold the charcoal to the unsuspecting woman, who presently replenished her fire with it, with the natural result that her brazier was blown to pieces and herself almost frightened out of her wits.

Graduating in crime as he grew up, Stephen naturally worked his way through picking and stealing at the coffee-houses to practising on the road. "Amongst others of his notorious pranks, he often played several comical tricks, the most remarkable whereof is this, _viz._: One day being upon some prospect in Essex, and destitute of money, as he was coming along a footpath from Brentwood to London, he espied over the hedges a gentleman mounted upon a very fine gelding, valued at above forty pounds. Bunce presently gets the length of two or three fields before the gentleman, and going over a stile at the turning of a lane, he there lays himself down by a ditch-side, with his ear close to the ground, till the gentleman was come up with him. Seeing him lie in that posture, he asked him the meaning of it.

"Bunce, in a sort of admiration, holding up his hands, as much as to say, 'Don't disturb me,' gave no answer for some time, and then, rising, said, 'Sir, I have heard much talk of fairies, but could never believe there were any till now; for, upon my word, under this spot of ground there is such a fine harmony of melodious tunes playing, upon all sorts of charming instruments, so ravishing to the ears, that a man with the great transports thereof (providing they were continually to play) could lie here for ever.'

"The gentleman, eager to hear these fine raptures, alights from his gelding, and lays his ear to the ground, with his face towards Bunce, but told him he could hear nothing.

"'Oh! sir,' replied Bunce, 'lay the other ear to it.' With that the gentleman very attentively lays his other ear to the ground, to hear these harmonious sounds, and his back being then towards Bunce, he presently mounts the gelding, and rid as fast as he could away.

"When being come within a quarter of a mile of Romford, he alights and turns the gelding loose, thinking if the gentleman used any inn in that town, the gelding would make to it; and it did accordingly run into the 'Red Lion.' At the same time, the ostler happened to come out, and, seeing the gelding running in without a rider, cried out, 'O! master, master; here's Mr. What-d'ye-call-him's gelding come without him' (calling him by his name).

"Bunce being just by, takes the advantage of hearing what the gentleman's name was, and replied that he was engaged with some gentleman at Brentwood, desiring the innkeeper to send him £10, and had sent his gelding for pledge, as designing to be there himself in two or three hours' time.

"'Ay, ay,' quoth the innkeeper, a hundred pounds was at his service, if he had sent for it, and accordingly gave Bunch £10, with which he came up to London.

"About four or five hours later, the gentleman came up to the inn, puffing and blowing, in his jack-boots, asking the innkeeper if he had seen any one with his gelding.

"The innkeeper bid him not fret, for his man had left his gelding there, and he had given him £10, according to his desire.

"'Rat him for a dog,' quoth the gentleman, 'he's none of my man; but I'm glad he's left my gelding here and raised no more money than that upon him. However, it shall be a warning to me for ever, alighting from my horse to hear fairies play upon musick.'"

"MR." AVERY AND DICK ADAMS

Then there was Avery, who appears in the chronicles as "Mr." Avery. He had in his youth been apprenticed to a bricklayer, and followed that trade when out of his indentures. He also followed that of a highwayman, and it is recorded, in sub-acid manner, that he worked so hard at it that it killed him at last, against his will: which is an oblique way of saying that it finally brought him to Tyburn tree.

Questing one day up and down the road, like the ravens in search of food, he met an honest tradesman. They rode together for some time, when Avery asked him what trade he followed. The man replied that he was a fishmonger, and, with a polite show of interest, asked Avery's trade.

"Why," said the highwayman, "I am a limb of St. Peter also."

"What!" exclaimed the other, astonished, "are you a fishmonger too? Indeed, I don't understand your meaning, sir."

Whereupon Avery, pulling out his pistol, coolly observed: "My meaning may soon be comprehended, for there's not a finger upon my hand but will catch gold or silver, without any bait at all." So, taking all the unfortunate man possessed, and cutting the girth and bridle of his horse, to delay any likelihood of pursuit, he rode off for London.

On another occasion he met an exciseman on Finchley Common. The exciseman would not deliver his money until Avery had shot his horse dead and threatened to do the like to him. Then, daunted by Avery's terribly high words, and almost frightened out of his wits to hear what dreadful volleys of oaths came out of his mouth, he stopped it as soon as he could with twelve pounds, saying: "Here, take what I have, for if there be a devil, certainly thou art one."

"It may be so," replied Avery, "but yet much of a devil though I am, I see an exciseman is not so good a bait to catch him as some people would make out."

"No, he is not," returned the exciseman; "the hangman is the only bait to catch such devils as you."

It was ill work, as a rule, exchanging insults with a highway gentleman, but Avery, content with the main thing, rode off unmoved. He was hanged at last, at Tyburn, January 31st, 1713.

Dick Adams, who derived from Gloucestershire and at an early age was in the service of a respectable Duchess (their Graces, you know, were not all what they might have been, in the way of personal character, in the seventeenth century), at last found his way into the Life Guards, but as his pay did not suffice to support his extravagance, he sometimes collected upon the highway. With some of his companions of the road, he on one occasion robbed a gentleman of a gold watch and a purse of a hundred and twenty guineas. Now observe how the greedy are made to suffer for their greediness! Not content with their fine booty, he must needs covet the gentleman's coat; and so cantered after him, saying: "Sir, you have got a very fine coat on; I must make bold to exchange with you;" and off the coat had to come, and the traveller went angry away. Presently however, as he was riding along in that shabby misfit, he thought he heard something jingling in a pocket; something that sounded very differently from the jingling of his horse's bridle. Thrusting in his hand, he, to his astonishment, found his watch and all his money that Adams in his hurry had forgotten to remove out of the pockets of his own coat when this exchange, which certainly proved, after all, to be no robbery, was made.

We may dwell a moment upon the rage of Adams and his party, when they came to the next hedgeside inn and sat down to examine their gains, which had thus vanished away, like the early dews of morning.

It is pleasant to read of honest men occasionally coming to their own again, and of incidents of painful retribution. Such an incident as that recorded above deserves a fellow, and we find it in the painful adventure in which Tom Taylor was the luckless sufferer. We do not hear much of Tom Taylor, who was, indeed, more of a pickpocket than a highwayman. We do learn, however, that he was the son of a clergyman, and that "he was executed along with Moll Jones." Clearly, Tom Taylor was an undesirable and the companion of undesirables. He was accustomed to dress himself in smart clothes and attend theatres and public entertainments, and there—an unsuspected fine gentleman—to pick pockets. On one such occasion he emptied a gentleman's pocket of forty guineas, and we are told that, in a disguise, he seated himself the next night beside the same person, who recognised him but made no sign, having this time come prepared. He had, in fact, baited his pocket with a handful of guineas, which set up a pleasant jingling and made poor Tom's mouth water. Poor Tom, we say advisedly, bearing in mind the sequel. He began presently to "dive" for those guineas and found, to his dismay, that the gentleman had really in the truest sense, "baited" his pocket, for it had been sewn all round with fish-hooks, and the wretched Taylor's hand was held fast.

Having in vain attempted to disentangle himself, he said to the gentleman: "Sir, by a mistake, I have somehow put my hand into your pocket, instead of into my own"; but, without taking the least notice, that merciless person rose from his seat and made for the "Rose" tavern, Tom helplessly along with him, his hand all the while remaining in the pocket. Arrived there, it was no difficult matter to make him cry "Mercy!" and to induce him to send for one of his comrades, to bail him out, so to say. It cost the unfortunate Tom Taylor eighty guineas to get free again. The account of these things then concludes on the proper note of poetic justice: "Nor was the gentleman satisfied with this, but caned him in a most unmerciful manner, and then turned him out to the mob, who ducked him in a pond, and broke one of his legs."

The succeeding chapters of Tom Taylor's chequered career do not concern us, but we learn, without surprise, that this ferocious buffeting and bruising—to say nothing of the fish-hooks—determined him to abandon the "diving" trade.

JONATHAN WILD

To cheat that arch-rogue and cunning friend and betrayer of rogues, Jonathan Wild, out of a place in these pages would be too mean an action. He towers above the ordinary run of bad men as a very giant in wickedness. Although he was himself no highwayman, he was friend of and associate with all of their trade, and as such has a right here.

Jonathan Wild was a native of Wolverhampton, the son, according to some, of a carpenter; but, by more trustworthy records, his father was a wig-maker. He was born about 1682. His father apprenticed him to a Birmingham buckle-maker. While at Birmingham he married, but, deserting his wife and child, he made for London, and was for a short period a gentleman's servant. Returning for a brief space to the buckle-making trade, he soon found himself in debt, and then, by what was a natural transition in those times, lodged in the Poultry Compter. The Compter (it is also styled the Wood Street Compter) was something over and above a prison for debtors and others: and was indeed nothing less than an academy and forcing-house of villainies, where incipient scoundrels were brought on early in season, like cucumbers under glass. It was not singular in this, for all the prisons of that age shared the like well-earned reputation. Something of the horrors of imprisonment for debt, as then practised, may be judged by the fact that Wild was here for four years; but for a portion of the time he had the advantage over his fellow-prisoners of being appointed assistant-gaoler. Wild never at any time lacked address and tact, and these qualities here stood him in good stead.

It was in this abode of despair that he first met Mary Milliner, who was ever afterwards associated with him. She was already old in crime, though not in years, and was his initiator into the first practical rogueries he knew. But he was a criminal by instinct, and needed only introductions to the world of crime. Once shown the methods in vogue, he not only became a master in their use, but speedily improved upon them, to the wonderment and admiration of all the cross-coves in London.

Released at length from durance, he and Mary Milliner set up a vile establishment in Lewkenor's Lane, and later took a low public-house, a resort of the padding-culls of the City—the sign of the "Cock," in Cock Alley, Cripplegate.

Wild had also made acquaintance, while in the Wood Street Compter, of a deep-dyed scoundrel, a certain Charles Hitchen, an ex-City marshal, who had lost his post through irregular practices, and had become an associate with and director of thieves, and an expert blackmailer. Hitchen was his early instructor in the curious art of acting as intermediary between the thieves and those persons who had been robbed of goods, or had had their pockets picked of watches and other valuable jewellery; but Wild was a genius in his own way, with a talent for organisation never equalled in his line, before or since, except perhaps by Moll Cutpurse, who flourished a century earlier. Moll, however, was ever staunch to her friends and accomplices, but Wild was always ready to sell his intimates and to send them to the cart, if it were made worth his while. So their careers run parallel for only a little distance and then widely separate.

Wild in a very little time broke with Hitchen. He left his instructor far behind, and did business on so Napoleonic a scale that he speedily aroused the furious jealousy of his sometime associate, who, unable to contain himself at the thought of Wild, once his pupil, taking nearly all his profitable business away, published a singular pamphlet, intended to expose the trade. This was styled "The Regulator; or, a Discovery of Thieves, Thief-takers, and Locks": "locks" being receivers of stolen property. It had not the desired effect of spoiling his rival's trade; and Jonathan continued to thrive amazingly. As a broker and go-between in nearly all the felonies of his time committed in and immediately around London, he speedily came to the front, and he was exceptional in that he most adroitly and astonishingly doubled the parts of Receiver-General of stolen property and self-styled "Thief-catcher-General of Great Britain and Ireland."

It might at the first blush, and indeed even after long consideration, seem impossible to pose with success at one and the same time as the friend and the enemy of all who get their living on the cross, but Jonathan Wild achieved the apparently impossible and flourished exceedingly on the amazing paradox.