The rogue, the cozener, the highwayman and the beggar of Tudor England were all of one mind: to separate the innocent from their money.. If deceit sufficed to do the job, that was all fine and good. If not, the most unsavory characters, then as now, proved willing to help their victims kick the breathing habit..
When we romanticize the Elizabethan age, with its court splendor and epic derring-do, we risk glossing over the myriad deeds of the unscrupulous, the shifty, and the vile. Many a modus operandi attracted the attention of magisterial authorities, as noted by Thomas Harman, Esquire in his 1566 tract A Caveat for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds.
Harman describes many a trickster, from the common crowd-weaving cutpurse to the “fresh-water mariner,” or “whipjack” who roamed the countryside and the seaside towns, woefully claiming to have lost their fortunes on ships that failed to appear in port. They begged alms and loans while they waited for vessels that in truth were “drowned in the plain of Salisbury,” that is, ships that never existed.
Sharing the less violent precincts of the miscreants’ landscape were “cony-catchers” of various sorts. “Cony’ in Elizabethan usage signified both a rabbit and an easily-had victim of mischief or mayhem. Harman enumerates “anglers” or “hookers,” who “when they practice their pilfering, it is all by night; for, as they walk a day-times from house to house to demand charity, they vigilantly mark where or in what place they may attain to their prey, casting their eyes up to every window, well noting what they see there.......and that will they be sure to have the next night following.”
Then there were the “priggers of prancers,” Tudor parlance for horse thieves. Harman describes the experience of a friend riding his horse from London to his home in Kent who stopped for a rest in a village along the way,
“Espying a prigger there standing, thinking the same to dwell there, charging this pretty prigging person to walk his horse well.......and at his return, which he said would not be long, he would give him a penny to drink, and so went about his business. This pelting prigger, proud of his prey, walketh his horse up and down til he saw the gentleman out of sight, and leaps into the saddle, and away he goeth amain.........”
The befuddled owner of the horse never saw it again, despite considerable searching.
Such equine thievery seemed to be a sore subject with author Harman: “I had the best gelding stolen out of my pasture that I had, amongst others, while this book was first aprinting.”
Another favorite weapon in the dissembler’s arsenal was to feign madness, which calls to mind the gravedigger’s observation in Hamlet, that young Hamlet’s apparent madness would not be recognized in England, because “there the men are as mad as he.”
In any case, these fakers of lunacy were called “abram-men” and frequently claimed to have been kept in Bedlam (a contraction of “Bethlehem”), London’s prison for the insane, “and not one amongst twenty that ever came in prison for any such cause,” wrote Harman. “Yet will they say how piteously and most extremely they have been beaten and dealt withal.
“...........these beg money. When they come at farmers’ houses, they will demand bacon, either cheese or wool, or anything that is worth money. And if they espy small company within, they will with fierce countenance demand somewhat. Where for fear the maids will give them largely, to be rid of them.”
Under the heading of “The Discovery of the Black Art” Harman refers not to any demonic arts, but to the picking of locks. “....and to this busy trade two persons are required, the charm and the stand. The charm is he that doth the feat, and the stand is he that watcheth.”
Many of these lock-pickers were evidently well-equipped for their trade, for they “have many keys and wrests......they have such cunning in opening a lock, that they will undo the hardest lock though never so well warded, even while a man might turn his back...........Well might it be called the black art, for the Devil cannot do better than they in their faculty.”
Harman does not disguise his awe of the abilities of these tricksters. He knew at least one personally, and challenged the man to open the lock of a desk drawer the writer had been using.
“ ‘Why, sir,’ says he, ‘.....let me come to your desk, and you do turn but five times about, and you shall see my cunning.’ With that I did as he bade me, and ere I had turned five times, his hand was rifling in my desk very orderly.”
Of course, picking locks, stealing horses, and cutting purses were crimes not as ghastly or merciless as murder. But there was no shortage of that darkest of deeds, either.
Thomas Dekker’s 1608 tract, Lantern and Candlelight, describes “Moon-men,” wild, fearsome, nocturnal, but yet “neither absolutely mad nor yet perfectly in their wits.
“The battles these outlaws make are many and very bloody. Whosoever falls into their hands never escapes alive, and so cruel they are in these murders, that nothing can satisfy them but the very heart-blood of those whom they kill.”
Yet Dekker seems to be toying with the reader: he points out in the next breath that he’s referring to the “innocent lambs, sheep, calves, pigs” that the Moon-men steal and eat. Shades of Stephen King, giving morbid fear a false start. Both Dekker and Harman, as writers, seem more attracted to the ways of the sly, the cunning, and the devilishly deceptive than those of the brutally homicidal.
The roads of Tudor England were notoriously dangerous to travel, especially in hours of darkness. Shakespeare used that notoriety to perhaps its best advantage in Macbeth, with the murder of Banquo.. Perhaps a few playgoers in a Jacobean audience nodded at the scene, thinking “There but for the grace of God...........”
Cities could be just as dangerous, as Christopher Marlowe learned at his own expense. The great rival of Shakespeare seemed drawn to the very underworld that eventually did him in, whether he was indeed a government spy or merely another talented if jaded and misanthropic playwright, trying to make his way.
Many a modus operandi attracted the attention of magisterial authorities, as noted by Thomas Harman, Esquire in his 1566 tract A Caveat for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds.