Historical English crime: 'Stand and deliver!'

Even today, the mention of the word ‘highwayman’ conjures up a certain image – that of a masked, well-dressed man astride a horse, brandishing a pistol and demanding that rich travellers in a stage-coach ‘stand and deliver’ (in other words, hand over whatever cash and assorted valuables they might have on them) somewhere on an open road at some point in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Having made off with the loot, he would of course outwit the authorities if they sent anyone after him. It can be a rather romantic image even though the reality was far from romantic – these were brutal, violent men operating in a brutal, violent era.

In a very real sense, there was nothing new about highway robbery, for thieves who operated on foot – footpads – had been robbing travellers for as long as there had been roads. However, the gun-toting thief on horseback was something new to the seventeenth century. This was a violent age (what with the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil War in this country), and the increased availability and effectiveness of firearms combined with the proliferation of men, often former soldiers, who either lacked or didn’t much care for gainful employment and knew how to use a gun while riding a horse (the latter being vital to ensure a quick getaway). They were helped by the ineptitude of the law enforcement system of the period; in the days before organised policing, the job invariably fell to the parish constable who was usually under-equipped to deal with anything other than minor crime, and who was often thought of as being lazy or incompetent (Shakespeare having set the standard for that particular stereotype with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing).

The mounted thieves started to become known as ‘highwaymen’ in the mid-seventeenth century; they were also known as ‘gentlemen of the road’ on account that many of them dressed smartly enough to pass for gentry even if they were of more humble birth. The famous demand to ‘stand and deliver’ goes back to that time, while the earliest references to the follow-up ‘your money or your life’ are from trial reports dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. The growing print industry produced pamphlets detailing their crimes, which brought them to the attention of the public (this would continue in the eighteenth century with publications like the Newgate Calendar and plays like The Beggar’s Opera, followed by the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the nineteenth century).

One of the earliest highwaymen to become well-known in England was James Hind, who had fought for the Royalists in the Civil War and took to highway robbery during the time of the Protectorate, preying in particular on those associated with the Parliamentarian cause (he once tried, and failed, to rob Oliver Cromwell himself). Others followed, some becoming famous in their time. Claude Duval was a Frenchman who operated just north of Restoration-era London; one of the first highwaymen to dress in fashionable clothes and put on gentlemanly airs, he’s said to have once agreed to only take some of his victim’s money, as opposed to all of it, if the his pretty wife agreed to dance with him by the side of the road (which she did). William Nevison was a former soldier who rode from Kent to York in less than a day (a previously unheard-of feat) in order to establish an alibi, a tale that greatly amused Charles II. Robert Congden was an Old Etonian gentleman-farmer by day and a highwayman by night who held up the Earl of Dorset for a thousand guineas.

Most famous of them all, though, was the Essex publican’s son Dick Turpin, who had started out as a butcher before turning to crime; in addition to being a highwayman he was also a poacher, a burglar and, like many of his fellow-highwaymen, a cold-blooded killer. Such was Turpin’s fame that acts performed by other highwaymen, such as Nevison’s ride to York, ended up being attributed to him. Despite their often-violent behaviour some highwaymen – Turpin in particular – were to a degree idolised in that way in which criminals are sometimes, and somehow, made out to be popular heroes (a point picked up in an episode of Blackadder, wherein Baldrick describes a highwayman as “halfway to being the new Robin Hood … he steals from the rich, but he hasn’t got round to giving it to the poor yet”).

From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the main roads of England became hunting-grounds for the highwaymen and as such very dangerous places – especially the bits that ran through what was then open country on the outskirts of London (although robberies in London itself were not unknown; it was partly concern about highwaymen in Hyde Park that led William III to ensure that Rotten Row, the road between Westminster and Kensington Palace, became the first road in the country to be artificially lit). Highwaymen often chose isolated areas that the main roads passed through; Bagshot Heath, crossed by the roads to both Portsmouth and the West Country, was popular. To the north, Finchley Common on the Great North Road acquired a certain reputation, while to the south on the Dover Road Shooter’s Hill was the venue of choice for hold-ups (it had already got its name from being a place where archery was practiced in the Middle Ages). Many such places had gibbets where the bodies of executed criminals were displayed in metal cages to deter others from a life of crime, and these were well-known to people who often travelled out of London; Samuel Pepys, for example, once mentioned riding past “the man that hangs on Shooter’s Hill”.

Quite a few highwaymen ended up on the gallows, having either been captured in the act or found out later (when people noticed that they’d suddenly started spending a lot more cash than they usually did, for example). Hind was done for treason rather than highway robbery because of his overt support for the Royalist cause, resulting in his being not just hanged but drawn and quartered as well. Congden had shot and killed his first victim when he had tried to resist, while Nevison had killed a constable who’d tried to arrest him; both were hanged for murder. Duval, somewhat unusually it would seem, was actually hanged for no more than highway robbery. Turpin, meanwhile, was arrested for horse theft which was also a capital offence at the time – and although some in the government wanted him to stand trial in London or his native Essex, his trial and subsequent hanging took place at York.

The ‘golden age’ of the highwayman is usually considered as having been the period between the Restoration (1660) and the death of Queen Anne (1714), although Turpin’s ‘career’ post-dates this (he is thought to have turned to crime in the early 1730s, and was hanged in 1739 at the age of 33). Yet there were still some fairly audacious highway robberies being carried out well into the eighteenth century; in 1774, no less a person than the Prime Minister, Lord North, wrote of being “robbed last night as I expected … at the end of Gunnersbury Lane”. For much of the eighteenth century, travellers along England’s roads took to preventative measures – Horace Walpole, the writer (and son of Britain’s first PM), wrote of being “forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going into battle”. When encountered by two highwaymen outside London, the Duke of Montrose shot and killed one of them (the other escaped, with the duke declining to give pursuit on the grounds that enough blood had already been spilled). The subject of whether or not one should shoot a highwayman, regardless of whether or not he’d shot first, is one that Samuel Johnson (who defined ‘highwayman’ in his Dictionary as simply “a robber that plunders on the publick roads”) had few doubts about. Boswell records that, when it came up in conversation, the great man of letters stated: “I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than afterwards swear against him at the Old-Bailey … I am surer I am right in the one case than in the other. I may be mistaken as to the man, when I swear: I cannot be mistaken, if I shoot him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s life, when we are heated by the injury”. Boswell retorted that Johnson “would rather act from the motive of private passion, than that of publick advantage”, to which Johnson replied: “Nay, Sir, when I shoot the highwayman I act from both.”

In such an atmosphere, it became a matter of routine for coachmen, post-boys and the like to travel either armed or accompanied by someone who was, the weapon of choice usually being a brace of pistols – as guns back then were of the muzzle-loading, single-shot variety it paid to have more than one loaded and ready to fire – or a blunderbuss (an early form of shotgun with a flared muzzle, easier to load while on the move but only effective at close range). Rich travellers, particularly those heading along the Great West Road to the fashionable spa town of Bath, took to travelling with as little money or jewellery in their coaches as possible – the wealth could go on ahead, stuffed in the pockets and saddle-bags of a single servant on horseback, preferably carrying a gun of some sort for his own protection.

Sometimes, a lone rider confronted by a highwayman could get the better of him; one story is of a servant carrying his master’s money who, when confronted by a highwayman, said he’d willingly hand over the cash but asked if the highwayman would be so kind as to put a bullet through his hat first, so that he later could show that he’d put up some sort of resistance before standing and delivering. After the highwayman had obligingly fired, the clever servant produced his own pistol who had been concealed in his coat! As the highwayman had only been armed with a single pistol, the servant now had the advantage and took his opponent to the nearest town to hand him over to the authorities (and, presumably, collect any reward that may have been on offer).

Some highwaymen responded by forming gangs, although many of these were short-lived as they invariably fell out over how to divide the spoils. One of the more notable gangs of highwaymen operated in and around Cherhill, a Wiltshire village on the Great West Road, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; being poor men who only owned one set of clothes each (clearly highway robbery was not always lucrative), they became (in)famous for doing their robberies naked so that no-one would be able to identify them by their clothes.

Highway robbery in England died out in the early nineteenth century. Some would assume that it was killed off by the railways, but it would appear there were a number of factors at play. Highway robbery had actually become quite rare by the time that century began, and the last recorded one took place in 1831 (two years after Stephenson built his Rocket). The increase in the turnpike system with its tolled and gated roads had combined in the mid-to-late eighteenth century with the increased enclosure of farmland to limit highwaymen’s activities (there was, quite simply, less open space), and in the early nineteenth century they were limited further by the expansion of cities (especially London) into what had been open countryside. As the cities grew, policing became more effective, and the increased use of banknotes helped too as they were easier to trace than gold coins. The ‘gentleman of the road’ had had his day.

Upstart Crow

I’ve really enjoyed watching the new sitcom Upstart Crow on the BBC iPlayer recently. It’s written by Ben Elton, a man who, although he’s been responsible for some remarkably bad sitcoms (and, let’s be honest, some pretty ropey stand-up as well), has always had one redeeming feature – the fact that, back in the Eighties, he co-wrote Blackadder with Richard Curtis. He’s (finally) returned to Blackadder territory for his new one, which has been done as part of the BBC’s desire to commemorate the quadricentenary (I think that’s the right word) of William Shakespeare’s death. Set in the 1590s, Upstart Crow depicts William Shakespeare as a writer on the cusp of fame – he’s made a bit of a name for himself with some long-winded plays about Henry VI and some poetry – who’s struggling to balance his professional life in London with his home life back in Stratford. He’s played – in a brilliant piece of casting – by David Mitchell. The Bard of Stratford in the style of Mark from Peep Show? Oh yes – and it really works.

Will, as he is called here, is a genius who’s conscious of his humble origins as he tries to break into a profession in which most people went to university. He’s struggling with the first draft of his teenage romance, particularly the meaning of the word ‘wherefore’ when it’s used in the balcony scene, and toys with the idea of killing the main characters off rather than letting them live happily ever after (which is how everyone assumes it’s going to end). This leads into a running gag where his landlady’s daughter keeps badgering him to let her play the female lead, in breach of the laws of the time which only allowed men on the stage (“you know very well that it is illegal for girls to do anything interesting”). It came as no surprise to this Blackadder fan that said landlady’s daughter is called Kate, for this is the name of the young lady who pretends to be a boy in order to get gainful employment under the pseudonym ‘Bob’ in both the Elizabethan and First World War incarnations of that sitcom; brilliantly, Gabrielle Glaister, the actress who played Kate/Bob in Blackadder, makes a brief appearance in Upstart Crow as a judge called ‘Robert Roberts’ who turns out to be a woman.

Like Edmund Blackadder, the Will of Upstart Crow is a man with upward ambition surrounded by fools and enemies. His servant, Bottom, may be a bit smarter than Baldrick but Brian from Spaced goes full panto-villain as the Lord Melchett equivalent Robert Greene – a real person, best known today for his pamphlet in which he complained about an actor from the provinces who thought he could write just as well as the university-educated playwrights (widely perceived as an attack on Shakespeare himself, this is where the phrase ‘upstart crow’ comes from); as with all the best British sitcoms, there’s class conflict and snobbery a-plenty here. Over at the theatre, there’s an actor whose lines all point to a send-up of Ricky Gervais that eventually gets a bit tiresome (how, one wonders, has he offended Mr Elton?). There’s a good turn from Tim Downie as Will’s better-connected and slightly Flashheart-esque friend Kit Marlowe, while Liza Tarbuck and Harry Enfield are on top supporting form as Will’s wife and father back in Stratford (Will’s constantly travelling back and forth between London and his home town; the sixteenth-century spin on commuting jokes does wear a bit thin by the fourth or fifth episode).

There’s so much Shakespeare-related stuff that gets touched on given that this is a six-part series. Did people at the time find those laboured jokes funny? Apparently not (“don’t do comedy, it’s not your strong point”), and they’re not keen on the overly flowery language either. An actor who does the female parts complains about the lack of good lines for men who play women. If you’ve ever wondered, as many an English Lit student probably has, what Shakespeare’s wife thought of all those sonnets which were lovingly dedicated to either another woman or a man, or whether people at the time might have wondered about Shakespeare’s sexual orientation due to the latter (“God’s naughty etchings! Why does everyone presume that just because I wrote 126 love poems to an attractive boy that I must be some kind of bechambered hugger-tugger?”), we have a scenario where this plays out; the same episode has a lovely gag in which it is predicted that, in the future, hardly anyone’s going to bother reading the sonnets in their entirety anyway, although one of them could be popular at weddings.

Cleverly, each episode title is a quote from a Shakespeare play or poem, and each episode ends with Mr and Mrs Shakespeare discussing the events that have just occurred and wondering about whether the sometimes ridiculous scenarios in which Will found himself (writing a play to catch someone’s conscience, getting tricked into wearing silly hose with cross-garters, etc) can be used for future plays. There are Shakespeare-style asides to the audience (although this is only really done to good effect in the later episodes). Elsewhere, the usually ludicrous ‘Shakespeare authorship’ question, always deserving of a good take-down (see Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare for a good one), gets wonderfully turned on its head – for here, Will is secretly writing his mate Kit’s plays for him on the side as well as his own.

There may be a few bits that need ironing out (a couple of running gags that go on for too long, mainly), but for the most part there is much to like about Upstart Crow. Apparently there’s to be a second series. Hooray!

Watching and reading at Christmas

‘Tis the season – for watching Christmas movies. Some are good, some are pretty ropey and a few manage to divide opinion, in some cases on the topic of whether or not they can even be classified as Christmas movies. My own view on this is that if there’s a way in which a given film can be linked to Christmas, however tenuously, then why not? I take a similar view with literature – if a novel or short story has a Christmas link, then it can be a Christmas story.

Maybe I’m getting set in my ways in my late thirties, but over the past few years things have evolved to the point where there are four films, a TV show and three (short) works of literature that have to be seen or read at Christmas time.

Let’s do the films first. We start with two old-school black-and-white classics from the 1940s: Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I tend to prefer the original version of the former which has a lot of charm with the New York department-store Santa called Kris Kringle who seems to be the ‘real’ thing – a role for which Edmund Gwynn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, while Maureen O’Hara (who died earlier this year, aged 95) is on top form playing a career-oriented, divorced single mother which must’ve been very ahead of its time in the 1940s. The court scene at the end, with the judge worried about re-election and the posties using it as an excuse to get rid of all the letters to Father Christmas that they’ve accumulated, is hilarious every time. On doing some background reading for this film, I was surprised to learn that it was originally released in the summer, with the Christmas element being downplayed in the advertising (20^th Century Fox’s logic being that they’d make more money with a summer release).

Less overtly Christmassy is that Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, set in charming small-town America with Jimmy Stewart’s selfless everyman standing up to the bad guy who comes in the form of the Scrooge-esque Mr Potter. George Bailey may get the girl but the rest of his life gets put on hold in a never-ending struggle on behalf of the less fortunate, and it takes a heavenly intervention when he’s at his lowest to show him how much of a positive impact he’s made on many lives. Yes, there’s a lot of ‘life’ before you get to the ‘wonderful’ bit (it’s actually fairly depressing in parts until the last ten minutes), but it really is a lovely film that shows just how much of a difference one person can make.

Moving swiftly to the late twentieth century and changing the tempo somewhat (although the notion of how much of a difference one person can make remains), it’s time for an action movie and, working on the principle that any movie with a link to Christmas can be a Christmas movie, there is indeed such a thing as a Christmas action movie: Die Hard (1988). Like many a Christmas movie protagonist, New York cop John McClane just wants to spend the festive season with his family (which is why he flies out to LA on Christmas Eve), but first of all there’s the small matter of meeting up with his estranged wife at the Nakatomi Corporation’s office party. If you’ve ever been to a work Christmas do that doesn’t quite go according to plan, be thankful that you’ve not had it interrupted by a bunch of heavily armed terrorists and then sit back and enjoy the mayhem as McClane takes them on without wearing any shoes. This film was so big it spawned four sequels, many imitations and redefined Bruce Willis’s career (before this, he was apparently considered more of a comedy actor) as well as marking out Alan Rickman as an actor who plays the baddies very well.

Finally, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and there are many options here with stand-out performances as Ebenezer Scrooge over the years coming from the likes of Alastair Sim and Patrick Stewart. My favourite, though, is the Muppets’ musical version from 1992 which is incredibly faithful to the original source material to the extent of providing much of the narrative word-for-word thanks to having Gonzo as Charles Dickens – a truly inspired piece of casting. Elsewhere, Kermit is Bob Cratchett to Michael Caine’s Scrooge – a rare example of a human character in a Muppet-based film not being overshadowed by the Muppets themselves. I guess I had to have Michael Caine make an appearance somewhere.

While we’re on the subject of A Christmas Carol, the TV show that is required viewing by yours truly is of course Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) which inverts Dickens’s plot; in this, Ebenezer Blackadder is a nice and generous man who gets taken advantage of by everyone except Baldrick. A night-time visit from the Spirit of Christmas inadvertently prompts him to change his ways. This one’s got quite a good cast; as well as Blackadder regulars – Rowan Atkinson et al – do look out for Robbie Coltraine and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles, as the Spirit and Prince Albert respectively.

On the reading front, I have three perennial favourites which I (try to) read each year. Obviously, there’s A Christmas Carol which blends comedy and horror to perform two roles – celebrating Christmas while highlighting the condition of the poor. 172 years after it was written, the name of the main character is still used to refer to anyone who feels a bit cynical or jaded about Christmas. Dickens, who defined how we think of Christmas to the point where most cinematic depiction of London at this time of year tend to involve snow (despite actual white Christmases in London being few and far between) is one of those authors who seems to have a timeless feel, with quite a few of his books feeling surprisingly undated when compared to some of his contemporaries; Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a reading of the first and best of his Christmas stories.

The other two are – not surprising given my literary tastes – detective stories. Both happen to feature a seasonal plot based on finding out who nicked a precious stone which has been found hidden in a festive food item. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on the hunt for whoever stole the eponymous diamond which has been hidden in a Christmas goose which somehow finds its way into Holmes’s possession; after some hat-based deduction, their quest takes them from Baker Street to Covent Garden Market (which I always thought used to be a fruit and veg market, but according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it had traders selling poultry as well). I rather like this one because of the seemingly improbable hat deduction sequence and the confrontation at Covent Garden in which Holmes tricks the trader into revealing where he got the goose from. This story first appeared in 1892 and can be found in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Several decades later, Hercule Poirot – the little Belgian chap with the little grey cells – finds himself staying at an English country house during the festive season in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. He’s there to recover another stolen precious stone – a ruby this time – which turns up in some seasonal food (no prizes for guessing what). Needless to say, Poirot is dealing with a criminal who, rather like Hans Gruber, hasn’t bargained for having a detective on the scene. This is one of Agatha Christie’s later works (it first appeared in 1960 in the short story compilation of the same name) and while the identity of the thief is a bit obvious there’s entertainment to be had with talk of pudding-making (with reference being made to the ‘stir up’ collect which was and presumably still is said at church services on the Sunday before Advent, serving as a signal that that was the day on which the pudding should be made) and a fun sub-plot about a fake murder alongside Christie’s extolling of a traditional Christmas at the sort of venue where a lot of her murders took place.

Ah, Christmas stories. Now, where’s that Blackadder DVD?

'Sausage? Sausage?'

Did you know that there's a museum in London devoted to Samuel Johnson? Dr Johnson's House on Gough Square was where the great lexicographer lived from 1748 to 1759, before he met James Boswell but during the time when he wrote his famous Dictionary of the English Language which was published in 1755. It's a fantastic 300 year-old townhouse located in the maze of alleyways and courtyards north of Fleet Street.

A statue of his cat, Hodge, stands nearby. He was fed on oysters, which in the 18th century weren't the delicacy they are today, and Johnson insisted on buying them himself so that his servant would not come to resent the cat. 

Few people have actually read anything by Johnson nowadays; ironically, the one book concerning one of this country's greatest men of letters that is still widely read is Boswell's biography of him (an assiduous diarist, Boswell took it upon himself to record as many of his friend's witticisms as he could, which came in very handy when he set himself the task of writing his biography). But the number of people who've read Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is itself in all probability dwarfed by the number of people who know that Samuel Johnson was the man who wrote the first dictionary (not actually the first, but definitely the best-researched and most influential prior to the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884) because they saw that episode of Blackadder.

I refer, of course, to the episode in the third series (the Georgian-era one) in which they try to get the Prince Regent to be the patron of the Dictionary. Dr Johnson (played by Robbie Coltraine) is not impressed, and Blackadder, having made up several words in order to wind Johnson up, ends up attempting to re-write the Dictionary after Baldrick inadvertently burns the only copy.

(Before we go any further, I should point out that I am well aware of the extent to which the writers of Blackadder took certain historical liberties; after all, it was a comedy, not a documentary. Johnson's Dictionary was published many decades before the Regency (which Johnson himself did not live to see) while Lord Byron is shown as a contemporary of Johnson's when in reality the former hadn't even been born when the latter died. In other episodes Blackadder, Baldrick and the Prince Regent encounter Pitt the Younger, who also died before the Regency, and are involved in a send-up of The Scarlet Pimpernel which, while the future George IV is a supporting character in said novel, is set some time before he became Regent. But I digress).

One of the attractions at Dr Johnson's House is the Dictionary Room, which houses shelves full of Johnson-related books including several Dictionaries (it is believed that when Johnson lived here, this room was his bedroom; the Dictionary was written upstairs in the Garret). A 1755 original lies opened under glass, while on the table are facsimiles of the two-volume original in which visitors can look up any word of their choosing.

One of the gags in the Blackadder episode is the discovery that Dr Johnson left the word 'sausage' out of his Dictionary. Fans of Blackadder will no doubt be disappointed to learn that in real life, 'sausage' is in fact in there (although 'aardvark' is not). That said, 'sausage' is not where you would expect to find it.

For Johnson had the letters 'u' and 'v' the wrong way round. The order in which these letters come in the alphabet was apparently not standardised until the 19th century. What this means for the word-hunting Blackadder fan is that 'sausage' comes after all of the words beginning with 'sav-', not before. 

After the Dictionary, Johnson set himself the task of editing the works of Shakespeare; his eight-volume critical edition of Shakespeare's plays was published 250 years ago (it proved so popular that the preface was also published separately) and established Johnson as a leading literary critic. Dr Johnson's House is currently housing an exhibition commemorating this, 'Shakespeare in the 18th century: Johnson, Garrick & friends', which will be there until 28th November.