Of those persons who were comprehended under the title of coney-catchers (that is, cheats, in opposition to those who used violence), the number in all parts of the kingdom in the time of Elizabeth was estimated at not less than ten thousand.* In the country they attended every wake and fair, for the purposes of duping the unwary,-plundered out-houses and poultry-yards, and "found linen upon every hedge;" and as they moved about in formidable bands, it was seldom safe for the country constables to apprehend them. But London was their great mart and centre of attraction, and the places where they chiefly swarmed were the Savoy and the brick-kilns near Islington. Not less than twenty-two different kinds of coney-catchers are summed up by Holinshed. During the reigns of James and Charles, however, they seem to have not only increased in numbers, but to have carried the principle of the subdivision of labour still further out. They used a cant language for professional communication, resembling that of the gipsies, whom they soon supplanted; and in this, as well as in many other particulars, in reading the accounts of the various tricks and stratagems of the rogues of the seventeenth century, we seem to be reading the history of the frauds of London in the nineteenth. In fact, much as we may admire the dexterity of modern thimble-rigging and swindling, scarcely a single stroke of it is of recent origin; every trick was practised with equal adroitness so early as the good old days of Elizabeth, The cut-purses used instruments of the finest steel, made by the choicest workmen of Italy; and they had numerous schools in London, where the rising generation were regularly trained in every species of fraud. One way in which children were taught to pick a pocket adroitly is said to be still practised in the metropolis. A pocket or purse was suspended from the ceiling, and hung round with small bells, and the young learner was required to finger and empty it without ringing the slightest alarm. All the common knaveries of the town were the same with which we are still familiar. Rustic squires and blunt-witted franklins, coming on a visit to London, were frequently fleeced, or even worse handled, and sent home to horrify their firesides with tales of metropolitan iniquity. They had gazed at some London marvel, and their purses had vanished the while as if at the touch of fairy-fingers. They had been hailed by city kinsmen of whom they had never heard, and to whom they were persuaded to intrust their property; but these cousins had cozened them, and disappeared with their goods. Rings and gems of price had glittered in their path, and, just as they picked them up, some by-stander claimed a share in the spoil, and was bought off by a considerable sum of money; and then the golden gaud became brass, and the diamond worthless chrystal. Kind gentlewomen, pitying their ignorance of the town, had directed them to comfortable lodgings; but, at midnight, the window had softly opened,-hooks and pincers had entered,-and their clothes had risen and departed. With a blanket wrapped round them, they had stolen at an early hour to the inn at which their horses had been left, intending to mount and flee; but their cousins of yesterday had been before them, and had carried off their cattle by some plausible tale or token.* While the streets of London, and even the inferior towns, were filled with prowling sharpers of this sort, the highways were equally infested with robbers. They scoured the country in bands that mustered from ten to forty men, some armed with chacing-staves, that is, poles twelve or thirteen feet long, shod with a steel spike; and others with bows and arrows, or with guns, and almost all with pistols. It was therefore unsafe for "true men" to travel except in numbers, and well armed; and whoever was about to undertake a journey had to wait until a tolerably strong caravan had mustered for the same route. The robbers were often disguised as well as armed; they concealed their faces with vizors; they carried false beards and wigs in their pockets, and even false tails for their horses, and thus, in a twinkling, the appearance of man and steed could be so altered that they confronted the officers of justice without suspicion. Among the chief places of danger from highwaymen were Salisbury Plain and Gadshill in Kent; the latter place having been long of such repute in this way that Shakspeare selected it for the scene of Falstaff's highway achievements. Another description of miscreants mentioned in the accounts of this period went about the streets of London with figs and raisins in their pockets, with which they allured children to their houses; they then cropped the hair of their victims, and otherwise so altered their appearance that their parents could not recognise them, after which they shipped them off to the plantations, there to be sold for slaves. The civil wars and the discomfiture of the royal cause produced a plentiful harvest of dashing highwaymen, the impoverished followers of the fallen king, who endeavoured to retrieve upon the road what they had lost in the field; and many a gentle and well-born cavalier, who had honourably distinguished himself at Marston Moor or Naseby, had his exit at Tyburn. In their new species of campaigning they comforted themselves with the thought that they were only continuing the war upon a different scale, and resuming what had once been their own; in conformity with which notion, while they scrupulously abstained from molesting any of the royal party, they pounced upon a Roundhead with peculiar satisfaction. It is gratifying to add, that the robbers of England at this time were distinguished by their superior humanity in comparison with those of • Decker's Gull's Horn-Book.-Ellis's Collect.-Greene's Notable Discovery of Cozenage. + MSS. Lansdowne Collection, No, 63, Howel's Letters. other countries, seldom inflicting wounds or death except in cases of desperate resistance.* Among the numerous strange characters of this period who had made themselves obnoxious to the law, and were obliged to show false colours, were the Jesuits, or seminary priests. These men were wont to assume as many shapes as Proteus to escape detection. Sometimes they exhibited the gay attire and fashionable bearing of a gallant; and it would appear that the part was admirably played by these reverend masqueraders. "If about Bloomsbury or Holborn," says an author of this period, "thou meet a good, snug fellow, in a gold-laced suit, a cloak lined thorough with velvet, one that hath good store of coin in his purse, rings on his fingers, a watch in his pocket, which he will value at above twenty pounds, a very broadlaced band, a stiletto by his side, a man at his heels, willing (upon small acquaintance) to intrude himself into thy company, and still desiring further to insinuate with thee, then take heed of a Jesuit of the prouder sort of priests."+ One great scheme of the Jesuits of this period was to drive the puritans into all kinds of religious extravagance, in hope that the reaction would produce a national return to the church of Rome; and, in furtherance of this plan, they assumed the dress, grimace, and manners of ultra-puritanism, while they out-canted and out-preached even Hugh Peters himself. A member of the brotherhood lurking about Clerkenwell, in writing to a correspondent, during the earlier part of the reign of Charles I., thus alludes to the insidious proceeding: "I cannot but laugh to see how some of our own coat have accoutred themselves: you would scarce know them if you saw them; and 'tis admirable how, in speech and gesture, they act the puritans." The increase of learning and the multiplication of books had made authorship a regular profession; but success as yet was only to be won through the favour and countenance of persons of rank, and authors were obliged to address their patrons with the most crawling adulation, as well as to submit to many gross indignities. Literary tricks and knaveries were also common so early as the beginning of this period. One of these was practised by a set of literary pedlars, who went about the country with some worthless pamphlet, headed by an epistle dedicatory, into which they inserted successively the names of all the principal persons of the county through which they travelled, extracting from each, in return, a present of three or four angels.§ When the civil wars commenced, and diurnals, as the newspapers were then called, were much in request, the writers of these not only sold themselves to one or other party, but even to individuals, whose deeds they exclusively trumpeted. A mercenary partisan of this stamp • Lives of English Highwaymen.-Life of Captain Hind. The Foot out of the Snare, by John Gee. Lon. 1624. Letter of a Jesuit, in Echard's Hist. of England, ii. 54. Decker's English Villanies, eight times pressed to death by the Printers, &c., 1649. Chap. iv. Life of Colonel Hutchinson, is thus briefly described in Pepys's Diary. "I found Muddiman, a good scholar, an arch rogue, and owns that though he writes new books for the parliament, yet he did declare that he did it only to get money, and did talk very basely of many of them." The extent and confusion of such a Babel as London had now become seemed to stun the intellects of King James; and besides the proclamations he was accustomed to issue against the building of additional houses, as Elizabeth had done before him, and as was also done by his son and by the government of the commonwealth, he applied himself in various other ways to reform what he considered a serious political evil. He prohibited the Scots from repairing to London, and threatened the skippers who brought them with fine and confiscation. He tried to persuade the English nobles and landed gentlemen to reside upon their estates, telling them that in the country they were like ships in a river, that showed like something; while, in London, they were like ships at sea, that showed like nothing. But his most sapient scheme to thin the city population was, to plant whole colonies of Londoners upon the waste lands of Scotland,-a munificent boon to the English, as he thought, by which the advantages of the union of the two kingdoms would be reciprocated. But all these schemes were useless; the torrent swelled and strengthened every hour, and the London population continued to increase in a ratio that far exceeded all former precedent. As yet, however, this increase was not accompanied with those general improvements so necessary for the comfort of civic life. The greater part of the houses were still sheds of wood, or of wood and brick, the wretchedness of which was only brought into strong relief by the stately buildings that here and there intervened; the streets were crooked and narrow, and generally overshadowed by a perpetual twilight, from the abutments overhead, that rose, story above story, until they almost closed upon each other; and, being unpaved, they were damp and dirty even in dry weather, and, in rainy, were almost knee-deep with mud. These discomforts were peculiarly striking to foreigners, who seem to have regarded London as the valley of the shadow of death. They complained of the universal coughing that resounded through every place of concourse, and they considered consumption to be a national disease of the English, produced by the wet and dirty streets of their metropolis. The 'expedients that had been for some time adopted to counteract these nuisances were worthy of Asiatic barbarians. Kites and ravens were cherished on account of their usefulness in devouring the filth of the streets, and bonfires were frequently kindled to avert a visit of the plague.* People of rank and fashion at this time lived in the Strand, Drury Lane, and the neighbourhood of Moryson.-Stow.-Character of England in Lord Somers's Tracts, vol, vii, Covent Garden, which was as yet only an inclosed field; merchants resided between Temple Bar and the Exchange; bullies, broken spendthrifts, and criminals of every shade, congregated in Whitefriars (Alsatia), which still possessed the right of sanctuary, and the avenues of which were watched by scouts who, on the approach of the messengers of justice, sounded a horn, and raised the cry of "An arrest !" to warn the Alsatians for flight or resistance. The obscure narrow lanes branching from Cannon Street towards the river were clustered with those secret and proscribed buildings called "the tents of Kedar" by their frequenters, but conventicles by the world in general: Leukner's Lane and its precincts were the favourite haunts of the profligate; and the "devilish Ranters," as honest Bunyan justly terms them, held their satanic orgies in Whitechapel and Charter-house Lane. As for places of lounge and recreation, Hyde Park and Spring Garden afforded pleasant retreats to the citizens from the dirt and din of the streets; but, under the commonwealth, the use of the Park was restricted by a tax of one shilling levied upon every coach, at entrance, and sixpence for every horse, while the Garden, as already mentioned, was shut up. But the chief place of common resort was the middle aisle of St. Paul's; the hours of public concourse there being from eleven to twelve at noon, and after dinner from three to six in the evening. Shadwell's Comedy of The Squire of Alsatia. VOL. III. | Here lords, merchants, and men of all professions,the fashionable, the busy, and the idle, were wont to meet and mingle; and he who had no companion might amuse or edify himself with the numerous placards and intimations suspended from the pillars. But the chief of the "Paul's walkers" were the political quid nuncs, who must have found something congenial in the gloom of this stately piazza. "These newsmongers, as they called them," says Osborne, in his Letters to his Son, "did not only take the boldness to weigh the public, but most intrinsic actions of the state, which some courtier or other did betray to them." The elbowing of crowds and the rivers of mud were not the only obstacles to be encountered in the streets of London. If the peaceful pedestrian eschewed a quarrel by universal concession, and gave the wall to every comer, he might still run the risk of being tossed by a half-baited bull, or hugged by a runaway bear. A sudden rush and encountering between the factions of Templars and 'prentices, or of butchers and weavers, might sweep him at unawares into the throng of battle, where, although he espoused neither party, he might get well cudgelled by both. If he sought to avoid all these mischances by the expensive protection of a coach, he might suddenly find himself and his vehicle sprawling in the kennel, through the rude wantonness of the mob. This last pastime had become a favourite with the London rabble, who 4 N called coaches hell-carts, and delighted in upsetting them.* In the hatred of everything aristocratic, which took possession of the multitude after the commencement of the civil war, noblemen, when they made their appearance in public, were cursed and reviled, and apt to be mobbed; and several who belonged to this once privileged class were obliged to set armed guards over their houses, even though they had espoused the parliamentary cause. Such was a day in the metropolis; but the night was confusion worse confounded. After the twilight had deepened into darkness, the peaceful citizens been housed, and the throngs of links and torches given place to the solitary twinklings of the watchmen's lanterns, Alsatia disgorged its refugees, and the taverns their inmates: the sons of Belial, "flown with insolence and wine," took possession of the lanes and corners of streets; stray passengers were insulted, wounded, and often killed; and the roofs of rich citizens were untiled for the purposes of plunder. It was unsafe to walk in the streets of London after nine o'clock. A set of midnight ruffians also, peculiar to this period, went under the names of Roaring Boys, Bonaventors, and Privadors. These-the successors of the Swashbucklers of the sixteenth, and forerunners of the Mohawks of the eighteenth century—are described as "persons prodigal, and of great expense, who, having run themselves into debt, were constrained to run into factions, to defend themselves from danger of the law."+ In such a state of things the sword of justice required to be something more than a metaphor; and a sheriff's officer, in making a civil arrest, had frequently to be backed by a possé of well-armed followers. The night-watchmen and constables also, having such a dangerous commission, were very strict in enforcing it, and their partisans were not more than necessary against those midnight roysters who broke the peace with rapier and dagger. Often, indeed, a city gallant was unceremoniously knocked on the head in brawling with the watch, instead of being simply punished with fine or imprisonment. To this circumstance Osborne quaintly alludes, when he admonishes his son to give good words to the city guardians, "many," says he, " being quick in memory, who, out of scorn to be catechised by a constable, have summed up their days at the end of a watchman's bill." We will now notice some of the popular superstitions of the time. The blank created by the banishment of religion in the earlier part of this period required still to be filled with something spiritual, and jugglers and hobgoblins usurped the vacancy. Men who defied all sacred sanctions could quake at some unexpected but natural phenomenon; and the appearance of a comet in 1618 actually frightened the English court into a tem + Character of England, in Somers's Tracts. + First Fourteen Years of King James's Reign, in Lord Somers's Tracts, vol. ii. porary fit of gravity. Such omens as the falling of a portrait from the wall, the croaking of a raven, the crossing of a hare in one's path, the upsetting of salt, the unexpected crowing of a cock, could disturb the most swaggering cavalier. As for the learned of this period, their favourite mode of divination was by what was called the Sortes Vir giliana, or the opening at hazard of a copy of Virgil's Eneid, and reading a revelation of futu rity in the first passage that struck the eye. From this general tendency of all classes, divination be came a thriving trade, and almost every street had its cunning man, or cunning woman, who divined for the wise by astrological calculations, and for the ignorant by the oracle of the sieve and sheers. Sometimes, as in the cases of Dr. Forman and Mrs. Turner, the forbidden traffic of fortune-telling was a cover to the worse trades of pandering and po:soning. When the civil wars commenced, and every hour was fraught with some great event, this natural eagerness to anticipate the future became so intense, that the stars were more eagerly studied than the diurnals, and cavaliers and roundheads thronged to the astrologers to learn the events of the succeeding week.* Another favourite superstition of the period was, the exorcising of devils; when the possessed person began to spout Latin and other learned languages of which he was wholly ignorant, the Romish priest took the field against this erudite demon in full pontificals, and armed with holy water and the book of exorcisms. This piece of jugglery was a favourite practice of the popish clergy, and was one of the ways they took to recover their esteem with the multitude; when the unclean spirit refused to be dislodged by any other form of conjuration than that which they employed, the circumstance was adduced as an incontrovertible evidence that the church of Rome was the true church. Such practices, however, were not wholly confined to the Romish clergy: the Puritans took the alarm, and set up for exorcists in turn; and, as nervous diseases were abundant among them, they sometimes crowded round the bed of some crazy hypochondriac who was supposed to be possessed by a devil, and whom they stunned with prayers and adjurations. This popu lar belief in demon-possession had not even the merit of poetical dignity to apologise for its absurdities: the following names of some of the ejected devils may suffice to show of how prosaic and grovelling a character it was in all respects:Lusty Dick and Hob, and Corner Cap and Puff, Purr and Flibberdigibbet, Wilkin and Smolkin, Lusty Jolly Jenkin, Pudding of Thame, Pour Dieu, Bonjour and Maho. † It would have been fortunate for humanity if the credulity of the period had gone no farther; but the belief in witches, after the accession of James, became the master-superstition of the age. James had a personal quarrel against the whole race of witches: during his matrimonial voyage to Denmark they had baptized a cat, by which they had raised a storm that almost wrecked his ship; and when he became king of England he was as proud of being Malleus Maleficarum, as Defender of the Faith. He wrote, reasoned, and declaimed upon witchcraft; his courtiers and clergy, sufficiently apt for superstition, echoed the alarm, and the judges revived the application of the dormant statutes that had been enacted against sorceries and enchantments. And now commenced the only warfare of the pacific James,-his warfare against old women, which was waged with great fury during the whole of his reign, and signalized by abundance of slaughter. The methods, too, of detecting the crime were strikingly characteristic of the age. If the impotent fury of a trembling beldame vented itself in imprecations against her persecutors, and if they afterwards sustained any calamity in goods or person, this was proof that the woman was a witch. If she talked and mumbled to herself, under the dotage of old age, she was holding converse with invisible spirits, and therefore she was a witch. If a boy or girl sickened beyond the skill of some presumptuous village quack, he had only to declare that the patient was bewitched, upon which the child was worried for the name of the culprit, until some one was announced at hap-hazard. In all such cases the proof was sufficient for the condemnation and death of the accused. In process of time, professed witch-finders came into fashion-men who could detect the crime, although the cunning of Satan himself tried to hide it. Independently of witch-marks and imp-teats upon the person, they could discover an old woman's familiar spirit in the cat that slumbered by the fire, the mouse that rustled in the wall, or even the bird that chirruped at the threshold. But the grand test was that of Hopkins, the prince of witch-finders, by which the suspected person was bound hand and foot, and thrown into the water, when, if she sunk, there was of course an end of her, and if she swam, she only escaped the water to be put to death by fire. This miscreant, in the years 1645 and 1646, paraded from county to county like a lord chief justice, and if any magistrate was so humane or hardy as to interfere with his proceedings, he was threatened by Hopkins in the most imperious style. At last the murderer had • We learn from Froissart, Monstrelet, and other old chroniclers, that the devil was best propitiated by some choice piece of profanity; a parody upon the sacraments was therefore the usual way in which the sorcerers of the middle ages invoked his aid. Thus, the host was sometimes administered to a toad, or other loathsome animal. After the Reformation, witches were supposed to desecrate the sacramental bread, and the rite of baptism, for the same purpose. The receipt for converting a peevish crone into a witch is thus happily expressed in the old play of the Witch of Edmouton : his reward according to the strictest poetical justice: he was found guilty by his own ordeal, and subjected to the same doom as his victims. The extent to which his atrocities were carried may be learned from the fact, that in one year he hanged sixty witches in the county of Suffolk alone. While these legal massacres were thus in progress in England, the destruction of witches went on with still greater severity in Scotland, where such tortures were inflicted to extort confession from the wretched victims, that even the death which followed was a relief. Nor did the death of James cool the zeal which his folly had kindled; ou the contrary, the persecution became still more rampant under the Long Parliament, and between three and four thousand persons are said to have been executed for witchcraft between the year 1640 and the Restoration.* As traffic increased and money became more abundant, it was to be expected that the science of good living would be carefully cultivated: cookery accordingly was now studied more than ever, but scarcely, as yet, with any improvements: in fact, the epicurism of the seventeenth century consisted chiefly in extravagant expense and "villanous compounds." The following "receipt to make a herring-pie," extracted from one of the cookerybooks of the time, may satisfy the most craving appetite upon this subject:-"Take salt herrings, being watered; wash them between your hands, and you shall loose the fish from the skin; take off the skin whole, and lay them in a dish; then have a pound of almond-paste ready; mince the herrings and stamp them with the almond-paste, two of the milts or roes, five or six dates, some grated manchet, sugar, sack, rose-water, and saffron; make the composition somewhat stiff, and fill the skins; put butter in the bottom of your pie, lay on the herring, and on them dates, gooseberries, currants, barberries, and butter; close it up, and bake it; being baked, liquor it with butter, verjuice, and sugar." Sometimes, however, the dishes, though equally fanciful, were of a more refined character: thus we read of "an artificial hen made of puff-paste, with her wings displayed, sitting upon eggs of the same materials, where in each of them was enclosed a fat nightingale seasoned with pepper and ambergris." The same artificial taste prevailed in the preparation of the simplest materials of food; butter, cream, and marrow, ambergris, all kinds of spices, sugar, dried fruits, oranges, and lemons entered largely into the composition of almost every dish. Several articles also appear to have been dressed that would scarcely find admission into a modern English kitchen, such as snails, which were stewed or fried in a variety of ways with oil, spices, wine, vinegar, and eggs, and the legs of frogs, which This fact is stated by Dr. Zacchary Gray in his notes to Hudibras, vol. ii. p. 11 (edit. of 1744). The doctor asserts that he had seen a list of their names. See also Howel's State Trials, iv. 818, and Hutchinson's Essay on Witchcraft, p. 82. The Accomplished Cook, by Robert May, 8vo. London, 1685. |