Pirates, Highwaymen & Thieves: True Crime In 18th Century England | British Outlaws | Real History

foreign [Music] centuries crime was endemic on the open roads robbers robbed with impunity on the high seas Pirates roamed felons robbed burgled and cheated across the country there was no established police force and although the ultimate penalty was death who was there to enforce it in this series I want to explore the world of the British Outlaw the original anti-hero in an age of swashbuckle daring and style and no Outlaw was more glamorous romantic and glorified Than The Highwayman the masked horseback robber who stole Hard Cash and admire his hearts in pursuit of a merry life and a short one [Music] most people think of The Highwayman as an underworld figure Rogue like like Turpin but their Origins lie much earlier with the Fall From Grace of the King's Men and the rise of gentleman robbers in the English Civil War the brutal conflict that erupted in the 1640s as the country tore itself apart a Maelstrom of violence disorder and distrust created the perfect conditions for outlaws to thrive the royalists had lost King Charles was executed great houses were devastated in battle suddenly thousands of experienced military men were unemployed and angry some decided their best chance of survival was to take to the roads we would Now call High women under cromwell's rule reports began to emerge of lawlessness on the roads on a scale never before seen Fantastical stories appeared of Outlaws men whose political beliefs had failed them and who now sought glory in a life of crime these were military-trained Sharpshooters who found themselves on the losing side there had been highway robbery for as long as there had been roads but this well this was something different it became a menace that marked the age and lent a new era of romance to crime for these Outlaws were motivated by principles as much as money former soldiers who clung to a broken sense of Honor mixed with thievery men like Captain James Hind in 1651 hind was dragged out from a London Barber Shop and arrested by heavily armed soldiers a wanted man he had been living under an alias for months until his hiding place was betrayed he was taken to Newgate Prison and clapped in irons hind was a passionate royalist and he had already fought and lost in the name of the crown but he was already well known for a very different reason because hind was the most notorious Outlaw High women in Britain and his Fame was about to explode described as the unparalleled thief the stories about him were almost unbelievable hind was born in Oxfordshire in 1616. he wasn't a nobleman but his family were respected and comfortably well off for the young James education held little appeal So eventually his father apprenticed him to a butcher hoping he would take to an honest trade after falling foul of his master's violent temper once too often the teenager decided to run away and he headed to London to seek his fortune now in the eyes of some the capital was a place that corrupted with Vice and sin but for a man like hind it simply offered the best entertainment around it wasn't long before the young hind fell into Bad Company he was arrested whilst drunk in the arms of a prostitute and thrown into a jail called the poultry copter in this grim and filthy dungeon One inmate stood out from all the rest Thomas Allen an experienced Highwayman and gang leader after their release the two decided to join forces but first the inexperienced hind needed to prove himself a worthy partner as the gang hid he was sent out on his first robbery they chose an ambush site at Shooter's Hill on the outskirts of London and waited until a gentleman and his servant came by traveling alone if hind was nervous he didn't show it with pistols drawn he demanded money and the gentleman in fear of his life handed over 10 pounds a healthy sum for a first attempt but then something unusual happened it was said that hind took pity on the man he had just robbed he put his hand back in the purse took out 20 Shillings and gave it back to the man saying it was for his travel expenses it was an act that marked him out as something different handing back money was a calculated display of gallantry and it peaked Alan's interest Hein quickly became his second in command his reputation was set as a principled and gentlemanly Robber hind had star quality but the politics of Civil War were never far away Hind and Allen's gang had sworn Odes as royalists and began to single out parliamentarians the list of Heinz supposed victims reads like a who's who of the roundhead regime one day as he traveled through Dorset hind spotted a chance to Ambush John Bradshaw the judge who would actually condemned King Charles to death knowing that his name now struck fear into the hearts of men hind put his pistol to Bradshaw's head and demanded his money with particular Venom I fear neither you nor any king-killing son of a alive I have now as much power over you as you lately had over the king judge Bradshaw placed a trembling hand into his pocket and Drew out a mere 40 Shillings in silver the high women was distinctly unimpressed and swore that he'd shoot him through the heart there and then if he didn't find a Coin of another species with his life hanging in the balance the judge handed over a purse full of gold instead after a lecture on the immorality of parliament's cause hind shot all six of the coach horses dead stories like these whether real or imagined were used by writers to question the legitimacy of parliament's authority but there's more because while these robberies of the Great and the good burnished his reputation he also became known as something of a Robin Hood figure a Highwayman with a conscience after running short of money hind held up a farmer who was on his way to Market to buy his wife and 10 children a cow the farmer begged him not to take his meega 40 Shillings as it was all he had and had taken him two years to scrimp together Pine was desperate and took it anyway but the farmer was repaid double and extra a week later when true to his word The Highwayman returned to pay him back it was all good PR but simple Farmers weren't enough to make a legend hind craved infamy in several accounts of his life there's a story of an attack that proved to be the hind gang's undoing on Oliver Cromwell himself they launched their assault as cromwell's coach left Huntington it's unclear if it was meant to be a simple robbery or an assassination but he was heavily guarded and the attack went horribly wrong Thomas Allen and several of his men were captured and executed and hind barely managed to escape with his life he went on the Run riding his horse until it dropped and eventually returning to the anonymity of his old haunts in London in the end hind was betrayed by one of his fellow royalists a former Soldier recognized him and reported him to the Speaker of the House of Commons hind by now had some very powerful enemies he was already well known but now something extraordinary happened he became a celebrity the length and breadth of the country during the Civil War there was a boom in the production of printed material Pine's exploits were published in a rich tapestry of pamphlets ballad songs chat books poems and broadsheets published at a prodigious rate and all claiming to relate his true words and story hind is the first figure to my knowledge who becomes a celebrated criminal the political changes and the war were accompanied by a massive upsurge in print so what we're looking at with hind is two things it's the historical circumstances that make a high woman like Hound possible and it's also the emergence of print culture to a greater degree than before these printed works with something like early tabloids their authors were untroubled with journalistic accuracy and the readers didn't really care either these weren't just morality Tales nor were they Bland official accounts these stories were colorful they were exciting they were designed to entertain in the Press hind embodied the idea of the jovial Cavalier resisting against the dower Puritans while the regime was busy Banning Christmas he's out there enjoying himself it's not through prayer and hard work he's drinking carousing and having Adventures now in the imagination The Highwayman is Gallant he's principled and he's damn good fun from his jail cell hind actually denied many of the stories attributed to him in the pulp press when asked about some of the pamphlets written about him he answered that they were fictions before adding but some Merry Pranks and Revels I have played that I deny not but none of that mattered the regime simply could not let hind become a rallying point for royalist sympathizers they wanted him dead the authorities were having none of it hind wasn't just any royalist Soldier he'd fought alongside the future Charles II right to the end he was taken to Worcester the scene of Charles II's last battle where he was tried and convicted for treason hind would suffer a traitor's death he was hung drawn and quartered his head displayed on a spike above the bridge over the seven despite Heinz gruesome end the horse had already bolted Highwaymen were a menace on the roads but their stories were best sellers technology was on the highwayman's side the printing press made them famous and the Civil War flooded the country with a revolutionary invention that allowed them to flourish the flintlock pistol this Weapon made the highwayman's signature surprise attack much easier what were the advantages of this type of weapon for the high women the flintlock gave The Highwayman the chance to have his weapon all primed and ready to go and then in his coat the best way to really understand the advantages of the flintlock is to look what had to be used before this is a match lock and this is the match hence the match lock and for this to be ready to fire that has to be glowing red there's no way you could load this and then go about your business with it ready to use it's as powerful as anything that came later but if you like it's it's Fire by appointment how does the flintlock work well three key components in a Flintlock the which is this piece here which holds the Flint the frison which is what the spark comes from and the pan so to make this work you would go back to half which is where we are there you would pour powder in the pan and then close the frison and then the final thing to make it go you go back to full and when you pull the trigger that piece of flint flies forward drags down the prison scraping off little bits of metal there's red hot Sparks and then a few Sparks and Flame from the pan goes into the barrel and sets off the main charge what sort of range did they fire over the pistols particularly would have been effective over a short range they were designed to hit a man-sized Target at a range perhaps not that much greater than an arm's length plus a sword [Music] he'll be staggering around now wouldn't he foreign amidst a flood of weapons and desperate men roaming the nation highway robbery became an epidemic each Infamous figure took the myth to a new level and the state wasn't ready the age of The Highwayman had arrived on the lonely 17th century roads you never knew who was lurking in the shadows just outside of the city's towns and Villages England was like the wild west vast sways of Countryside stretched across the landscape there was no police force and out here Law and Order of any description had very little reach people and possessions can simply vanish Highwaymen swarmed around wealth their main hunting grounds were the arterial King's rose that headed out from the major cities especially London carrying the richest members of society a few miles from the capital and you were a Sitting Duck Highwaymen lay and wait around areas like Hounslow Heath Shooters Hill and the great North Road which all became notorious robbery hot spots travel was expensive coach passengers by definition were wealthy and so they were frequently targeted but High women saw everyone on the road as fair game to make matters worse the roads of the period were terrible Deep rutted In Summer and impassable quagmires in winter they were little more than trackways badly maintained and cursed by those who traveled on them the rough Countryside terrain worked to the highwayman's advantage coaches plodded along at around five miles per hour on a good road slower on a poor one Hills were particularly dangerous because coaches were forced to slow down which made them an ideal location for Ambush heathland and forests provided plenty of cover for robbers to hide and urban centers were an ideal location to lie low [Music] after the death of Cromwell the English Republic fell apart and in 1660 Charles II was brought to England to take the throne the time of disgruntled royalist Highwaymen running Riot around the countryside came to an end they had been Valiant losers in the New Order but the monarchy was back jubilant royalists returned home triumphant with the new king they were extravagant and hedonistic and they brought someone with them Claude Duval the man who gave Highwaymen sex appeal he was from Normandy and worked as a footman to an exiled English aristocrat butman were expected to be good shots and Keen Horseman with a reputation for halter and insolence being a footman was a great training for being a high woman because you were based essentially an armed guard to protect the noble family that you worked for you were chosen for your height and good looks so the kind of Glamor was written into it very fast Runners sure shots because they were trained to fire I mean it was almost like training someone to be a high woman restoration Aristocrats were a bunch of dissolute hedonists their French style fashion was elaborately decadent and debauchery was positively encouraged all of which rubbed off on their Entourage Duval would have been described as a popinjay for his fashionable French clothes and he soon gained a reputation for fine living he was an insatiable Drinker womanizer and gambler but this was a lifestyle that he simply couldn't afford now for a man with an ego like duvals getting a proper job was simply out of the question so instead he turned Highwayman unlike hind Duval wasn't interested in politics he robbed simply to keep the party going he became a thief with style to match his daring with Duval panash was added to The Highwayman Legend soon enough Duval found his way to the top of the nation's Wanted list with a reward of 20 pounds offered for his capture he robbed Travelers and Royal officials anyone with money that came his way this was a high women with no pretense to any social Mission he doesn't seem to have had any Scruples about robbing from the poor Robin Hood he was not on one occasion Duval and an accomplice came across two gentlemen and their servants engaging them in conversation they then robbed every penny from the servants without even bothering to search their wealthy employers [Applause] but there was a particular theme in the tales of Duval's career that really made his name and that was his pursuit of women he gained a reputation for gallantry particularly for returning keepsakes or trinkets to women after he'd robbed them he was as keen on stealing their heart as their money this Persona is perfectly captured in an 1860 painting by William frith of an encounter on Hounslow Heath with Duval it was your money or your wife Duval's gang held up a coach carrying a gentleman and his wife with the enormous sum of 400 pounds on board as the gang approached the lady played a tune on her flagellate to show she wasn't scared Duval was intrigued after complimenting the man on his wife's musical skills he asked if she danced as well as she played and if the Gent would allow her to dance with him surrounded by pistols it's perhaps unsurprising that the husband promptly agreed leaping down from his horse Duval and the lady danced the coup rant together while his cronies play music to accompany them of course Duval is as skilled with his feet as he is with his blade and when the dance is over he hands his dancing partner back into the coach Duval then takes a hundred pounds from her husband as payment for the music but excuses him from the remaining 300 pounds for being a good sport the incident really sums up what two valves all about there's swashbuckle and ladies going weak at the knees when do vowels around but that's exactly what he brought the idea of The Highwayman romance a bit of Dash and sexual threesome foreign 's hedonistic lifestyle that brought him down to celebrate a successful robbery he stopped off at the pub the Frenchman had a reputation for being handy with sword and Pistol but by the time a bailiff arrived to arrest him he was legless too drunk to resist he was thrown into Newgate jail to await his fate at his trial well-placed ladies of the Court tried to intervene for a reprieve but it was to no avail Claude Duval was found guilty and sentenced to hang Duval rode to The Gallows in 1670 watched by thousands of women from duchesses to prostitutes he was 27. foreign for the poor he was an iconic figure a rock star criminal a glamorous gangster through Duval they could escape the status of their birth even if in fantasy for the nobility he added a touch of danger and excitement to their world it would have been a thrill to have been robbed by him writers recounting Duval's Adventures often did so to express concern about the restoration Elite that they were dissolute and robbing the public to pay for their excess some thought they were less interested in ruling than womanizing and gambling there was also the feeling that courtly manners were becoming feminized and even worse French all of which was a nasty foreign Corruption of Good Old English morality one of the interesting things about Claude Duval is that he kind of reflects the society that produced him he likes women and gambling and dancing and presumably all the other vices of the court of Charles II and so he's he's a focus for criticism of Charles II's Court frith's painting of Duval captures the moment of a hold up in a way that instantly mythologizes it Duvall is at the center being all Gallant whilst his less respectable Sidekicks do the rest he's got the clothes the style and the mask foreign [Music] were noted for dressing like the wealthy gentleman of the day this was partly out of vanity but partly to blend in with the well-to-do passengers crime was considered the province of the poor so dressing this way was intended to a lay suspicion every Highwayman had a different approach to disguise some accounts mentioned that some Highwaymen pulled their periwigs down to cover their eyes or more bizarrely tucked their tails into their mouths others wore their hats pulled down low or full speeds or simply did nothing at all a risky and cocky approach the famous tricorn hat arrived around 1700 but what about that iconic black mask well we know that some Highwaymen did wear a mask but by far the most common disguise was a simple scarf as important as choosing their disguise was selecting the right victims the best operators carefully gathered Intelligence on Prime targets in 1674 an obscure Highwayman named Francis Jackson recorded his adventures in a confessional pamphlet if Jackson hoped it would give him a reprieve he was wrong and he was hanged but it's valued to us today is that he's left us a kind of highwayman's manual a how-to guide for robbery on the road in his book Jackson explains how high women had a spy Network working throughout the coaching Inns and taverns that dotted the landscape everyone was involved from the landlords to the stable hands each getting a cut of the profit for a good tip-off he also explained how high women employed deception and confidence tricks building false familiarity with potential victims ingratiating themselves into fellow Travelers company before attacking and Jackson also had advice for those who got caught Mercy From the Bench there must be a plausible account given how you fell into this course of life fetching a deep sigh saying that you were well born but by reason of your family falling into Decay you were exposed to Great want and rather than shamefully beg for you knew not how to labor you were constrained to take this course for a subsistence that it is your first fault which you are heartily sorry for and will never attempt the like again most interestingly of all I think he also has advice for travelers Never Say Goodbye and never reveal your destination in case a Highwayman is listening also never travel on a Sunday because the roads are deserted and the authorities won't help robbery itself the riskiest part of the Venture for all concerned to minimize the risks Highwaymen often worked in gangs and they developed strategies to make robberies go smoothly sometimes they simply chatted to the driver before pulling a gun but if that wasn't an option there was the direct approach an ambush one of the gang would approach directly from the front with pistol drawn to hold up the driver attacking head-on shielded him from the passengers inside who might be armed and it allowed him to make sure the driver surrendered a second High women would head for the passengers he might approach from directly behind the coach minimizing the chance of getting shot from the rear or side window he would then threaten or Charm the passengers guttural threats of violence alternating with witty provocations both intended to coerce victims into handing over their goods without resistance then the gang made their escape to prevent pursuit or out of spite they would sometimes cut the bridles or kill the horses finally they would flee into a busy City or head to a Friendly Inn and establish an alibi escape and evading the law were vital skills in highway robbery in Highwayman Legend the greatest of all Escape Tales belonged to the robbers of the great North Road and they don't come any more Sensational than those of John neverson years before Dick Turpin he became famous for his ingenious and daring escapes this is the Peak District in Derbyshire John nevison's stomping ground it's the ideal environment for Highwaymen [Music] in reality neverson was a bit of a thug he operated protection rackets on the routes to the markets down south he took money not from wealthy Aristocrats but from Drovers from butchers from shopkeepers he was also a horse thief and a murderer killing a parish Constable sent to arrest him neverson was a hard man he was also a survivor like many high women stories it's unclear what's true and what is just a good yawn but never since Legend was full of incredible Escape routines in 1674 he broke out of Wakefield jail before charges could be brought a few years later he was sentenced to transportation and hopped ship before it left the docks he wasn't done yet according to the new gate calendar in 1681 the law caught up with him again and he was sent to Leicester jail but this time escaped seemed impossible his escapades were well known and it was reported that he was so elaborately Shackled that he could scarcely move to get out of this one he'd need a plan with a new level of cunning and a little bit of help from his friends the first step was to get out of the closely guarded cell he did this by feigning a deadly sickness and calling for his friends to pay their last respect one of whom was a physician on his arrival his friend declared that neverson had the plague and he would infect the whole prison wardens included if he was not isolated neverson was moved and Unshackled and the guards kept their distance then he brought in an artist who set about painting the Fatal symptoms of plague all over his body his physician friend then gave him a sleeping draft and they claimed he was dead after a cursory examination from his jailers who were too scared to get close his friends were allowed to come and claim his body and take it away in a coffin he was soon up on his feet however only this time as a Highwayman robbing as his own ghost which made him even more terrifying to his victims but there was another Highwayman on the North Road with an escape story that became even more famous known as Swift Nicks a shadowy figure nicknamed for being as fast as the Devil Himself The Story Goes that he relieved a debt collector of 500 pounds near Rochester one morning but he was worried that the victim would be able to identify him in court now a lesser man might have killed The Collector but Swift Nix decided on a more elaborate Alibi he decided to ride the 230 miles to York in one day a feat then considered impossible after hatching his plan he sped off tearing through Chelmsford and Cambridge before airing up the great North Road riding several horses into the ground he arrived in York around 7 30 and changing into his finest clothes he finally arrived breathless at its destination a Bowling Green swiftnick stepped onto the green and exchanged pleasantries with the mayor who had later swear that he'd been his guest that evening and couldn't possibly have been in Kent that very morning this story was later attributed to Dick Turpin riding black Bess but the original was Swift Knicks okay but all of these stories whether true or not tell us what people wanted to see in their Highwaymen they needed to be Charming generous and clever you'd have thought that a game of bowls was a way of staying out of jail there was little to actually stop Highwaymen plying their trade the state was small and its ability to control the population was limited which meant it reacted to crimes but did not try to prevent them fear of brutal punishment was supposed to keep criminals in check law enforcement was a localized line paid amateurs whose job it was to keep the peace and occasionally arrest villains if they didn't look too dangerous in London Watchmen were tasked with keeping some sense of Peace in the disorderly City watch when were hired by the parish to walk around at night like the constables they're seen as pretty and effectual quite often paid off quite often old men you know it's a job you give to someone who's retiring kind of thing and so they're they're they're all in most cases they're seen as laughably inefficient perhaps the main hindrance to a Highwayman early on seems to have been the Hue and cry a potty of regular citizens gathered by their victims to hunt them down eventually though it was a change in the law that posed the biggest threat to Highwaymen as the 18th century dawned by this time it was acknowledged that things had got completely out of control but the aristocracy who ran the state had no interest in founding a police force it had more than a little whiff of French tyranny and expense about it Justice was about making the legal penalties stronger rather than prevention they wanted to use the law to bring down the Knights of the road the high women's act came into force in 1693 and you've got relatively wealthy people being robbed in inaccessible places by men on Horseback so the getaway was pretty easy and the detection was pretty unlikely so they offered rewards to people who apprehended High women the other section of course was to try and turn criminals against criminals get grasses so if you are convicted of a robbery and therefore you were pressing the death penalty yourself if you were prepared to turn Queen's evidence and drop at least two of your Confederates you would receive a pardon for the robberies that you had committed any private citizen could bring in a Highwayman if they dared but taking them to court wasn't simple it was their victims who had to pay for a prosecution and provide evidence for many it simply wasn't worth it these were not men to cross lightly when one Highwayman couldn't get a ring off his victim's hand he cut off her finger when another swallowed her jewelry to keep it safe so the robber cut her open and when their identity was threatened they could be particularly ruthless on one occasion a local woman witnessed the robbery and called out that she recognized the robbers and that she would report them they turned around and cut out her tongue but there were also some instructive accounts of victims fighting back against their attackers including an incident with two Highwaymen of the Surrey Village of Ripley their victims alerted the local population who chased their attackers across a Village Green into the middle of a game of cricket now one of the attackers managed to escape but the other was beaten into submission with cricket bat and stumps whatever the truth about their methods as the 1700s progressed Highwayman stories became an increasingly popular form of entertainment as their Fame grew so did the sense of romance around the idea of who they were and what they stood for in 1714 Captain Alexander Smith's book The Complete history of the lives and robberies of the most notorious Highwaymen caused the sensation it set the bar for colorful and slightly dubious accounts of the big names in highway robbery but whilst the public might find them romantic the elite weren't so Keen they represented a threat to the social order not only were they attacking property with impunity without any regard to the rank of their victims but the robberies were giving them wealth and pretensions of status to satirists there was a delicious irony to the howls of outrage about Highwaymen for them politicians in the Georgian government were even worse thieves in 1728 John gay penned the Beggars Opera using a Highwayman called MC Heath as a central character in his stage satire MC Heath was the theatrical incarnation of the gentleman robber but he wasn't the villain of the peace he was moral he was noble and it was set against the rapaciousness of the elite his character was used to dissect the hypocrisy of the ruling classes who were losing more at the gambling tables than they were on the roads then there was the corruption in John Gay's eyes High women were more honest thieves than the government the ruling class were committing robberies of their own but they were getting away with it prime minister Robert Walpole Spirited Away thousands of pounds and when the chancellor the Earl of Macclesfield took a hundred thousand pounds in bribes all he got was a fine The Highwaymen epidemic was a sign of the times Britain was becoming a modern state Commerce and capitalism were accelerating rapidly leaving the old order behind High women have been said to symbolize this process as upwardly mobile ruthless and heavily profit-oriented Highwaymen stole because they wanted the money to support their lifestyle and didn't want to work for it but there was still a sense that there were good and bad thieves in England criminality had its own hierarchy and right at the top were Highwaymen many even considered themselves gentlemen none more so than James McLean he was the son of a wealthy Scottish clergyman with connections not quite a gentleman but not far off he was raised to become a merchant but early on it was clear that he had a better eye for fine clothes than business McLean was also a hopeless Gambler and footed away a considerable inheritance eternally on the scrounge he then moved to London to find himself a rich wife he quickly married a tradesman's daughter and used her 500 pound Dowry to set up a Grocer's shop for a while it looked like he'd turned his life around [Music] when his wife died it quickly became clear that she had been the one running the business McLean was clueless so he sold up and packed his kids off to their grandparents with his remaining funds he then bought expensive clothes began to mingle in High Society in an attempt to bag himself a wealthy wife but he had no luck and soon the money ran out McLean had become desperate when he met a man named William Plunkett now he was an apothecary and a fellow bankrupt and he suggested that they start up a new business together setting up shop as Highwaymen Plunkett recognized that McLean's gentlemanly pretensions might actually come in handy expressing sympathy for his plight Plunkett urged McLean to join him on the roads I thought McLean thou had spirit and resolution with some knowledge of the world a brave man cannot want he has a right to live and need not want the conveniences of Life while the dull plodding busy knaves carry cash in their pockets we must draw upon them to supply our wants they need only impudence and getting the better of a few silly Scruples there's scarce courage necessary their ruse was simple but effective while McLean mingled with the Great and the good plunket posed as his footman which gave him access below stairs where he could get information from the staff and so with McLean listening upstairs and plunk it downstairs loose lips would provide juicy targets McLean though was a bit of a coward during a hold up Plunkett sent him to stop the driver of a coach while he searched the passengers but McLean's courage failed him trembling with fear he tried several times but just couldn't do it and plunk it had to step in but eventually McLean got the hang of it until one incident made them the Talk of the Town in Hyde Park they held up the coach of Horus Walpole the prime minister's son and Gothic novelist who soon found himself in a horror story of his own the ever nervous McLean was collecting the passengers valuables when his gun went off by accident nearly blowing off walpole's head and severely scorching the shocked man's cheek after profuse apologies McLean gathered the goods and they scarvered true to his gentlemanly credentials the mortified McLean wrote to Walpole the next day to apologize and to try and sell him his own belongings back McLean became known as the gentleman Highwayman and by reputation he was courteous to a fault finally he got to live as he'd always seen himself a high flyer mixing with the very best people in society and then inevitably it all went wrong the blundering duo robbed the Salisbury Stagecoach relieving Lord Eglinton of his purse and Blunderbuss and a wealthy passenger named Josiah Higdon of his clothes and expensive Fabrics McLean then tried to sell some of the stolen goods firstly he went to a lacemaker with some of Josiah Higdon's Golden Lace but unluckily for him it was exactly the same lacemaker who had just sold it to Higdon after narrowly escaping that encounter McLean was arrested Higdon recognized his stolen property in the local shop where McLean had eventually sold it and unbelievably had left his name and address he'd been caught red-handed Plunkett fled never to be seen again McLean was sent to jail where he became a celebrity inmate three thousand people paid his jailers to visit him including several of the aristocratic Circle he had been so desperate to court being unable to tell a common criminal apart from a gentleman posed a threat to the social order and McLean's story was used as a dire warning but status was important to criminals whilst in jail McLean apparently wrote A Treatise published after his death that attempted to distinguish the types of crime he committed from those of other mere criminals the highway robbers were considered a new gentleman of the road in order to be a high woman you had to have the accoutrements the act of a horse he had to be able to feed the horse he had to have a saddle well I suppose you could Nick those but more often are not you inherited those because you came from that sort of class and you had to be able to ride and not everyone can ride a horse but the Gentry could or the well-off of better off could Highwaymen were no doubt at the top of the criminal hierarchy they got to ride at the front of the cart to execution at tyburn a Highwayman McLean insisted would only ever rob the rich whereas the lowly foot pad had little nobility in his work standing at tybone tree McLean faced his end as he had carried out his career his last words as he saw the Gallows oh Jesus all of the colorful tales of the high women age were later Taken and distilled into the story of one man Dick Turpin popular culture down the centuries would embellish and exalt his Legend through entertaining Yarns but lurking behind the Glamorous Turpin of myth was a real man with a far darkest story [Music] turken's real life was probably more typical of the average Highwayman he was a braggart a bully and a coward violence was his modus operandi not gallantry like the royalist Robert James Hind he trained as a butcher with a shop in Essex Butchery was a respectable profession with feeling the pinch in Changing Times turpin's downwards spiral began when he started selling meat for a dodgy gang of poachers when the law got involved he left his business and joined his suppliers the Gregory gang soon however even poaching became too risky so ironically they turned to something that they thought would be safer armed robbery there was no glamor or Panache to these Outlaws the gang was ruthless with a reputation for violence torture and rape far from The Cheeky and respected thieves of popular fiction they were housebreakers who preyed on the defenseless and they were perfectly prepared to carry out their threats beating burning and slashing their victims the gang turned to house Roderick and in early 1735 this gang attacks an isolated farmhouse in edgeware which was in a village on the outskirts of London which involves torturing a 70 year old man who's the householder to get him to reveal where valuables in the house are hidden this involves sitting on the fire bare buttocked whipping him while this is going on one of the leaders of the gang is upstairs raping among the pistol Point uh this is these are not folk Heroes the gang was eventually brought down by a justice of the peace and Turpin fled but one of their members had been captured and confessed everything and he even gave a description of Turpin now a wanted man Richard Turpin a butcher by trade is a tall fresh-colored man very marked with a small pox about 26 years of age about five feet nine inches high whereas a blue gray coat and a light natural wig after a Time on the Run Turpin ended up in Epping Forest a busy route from London it provided the perfect location for his transformation into a Highwayman and an ideal hiding place for a man with a price on his head for a short time Turpin and his small gang of Associates were prolific thieves but inevitably they got greedy Turpin spotted a horse that he thought looked much finer than his own and forced the owner to hand it over at gunpoint it was to be his downfall the horse was an expensive racehorse named white stockings for the white marks on its lower legs and it wasn't long before the horse and Turpin were Tracked Down they were found at a pub in White Chapel a local Constable was summoned in a posse raised to set an ambush in the ensuing melee one of his gang was shot and mortally wounded accounts differ as to who pulled the trigger and why some Reports say that Turpin fired in order to silence his colleague others say he was trying to free him either way his luck was running out as the news tightened turpin's notoriety came back to haunt him eager to claim the large reward on his head a forest Keeper's servant Thomas Morris set out to capture him but Turpin wasn't going to go quietly and he shot Morris dead the reward was raised to 200 pounds Turpin resurfaced in Yorkshire and changed his name to John Palmer he then became a horse dealer the 18th century equivalent of a second-hand car salesman and of course all of Palmer's horses were stolen for a few years he Blended in gaining a measure of respectability and friendship in the local area but then after a hunting trip with some locals the man everyone knew was John Palmer made a bizarre and fatal mistake to the utter bewilderment of The Hunting Party he took out his pistol and blew the head of one of his landlord's chickens then when a neighbor complained Palmer threatened to do the same to him a constable was summoned and John Palmer was sent to the local jail the authorities began to suspect that there was more to this strange John Palmer chap no one knew anything about him before he arrived a few years earlier or how he earned a living from his accent he clearly wasn't local inquiries were made in Lincolnshire where John Palmer had lived before and sure enough they recognized the man he'd been arrested for the theft of livestock and horses and had since escaped realizing they had a bigger case on their hands they bought him here to York jail this is but they still didn't know his true identity in 1739 The Man known as John Palmer wrote a letter to his brother-in-law Pompa rivernell back in Essex asking for his help but when Riven all looked at the letter he claimed not to know anyone from York and refused to pay the postal charge by a bewildering coincidence the letter was seen by a man called James Smith the very man who had taught Richard Turpin how to write recognizing the handwriting he went straight to the authorities John Palmer had been rumbled a dioca size is in 1739 Richard Turpin was put on trial for horse theft despite repeated denials of the trial John Palmer was identified as Dick Turpin and he was found guilty when asked by the judge why he had failed to bring any character witnesses to his defense Turpin said that he had been told that his trial would be moved to Essex and that he was unable to bring anyone here where he was a stranger it seemed he never even expected it to get this far foreign Turpin was condemned as a simple horse thief and he was hanged here at York Racecourse and in an irony that can't have escaped him the hangman was a fellow Highwayman who'd been spared The Noose for carrying out the day's executions [Music] perhaps the only act that Turpin carried out that was anything close to the legend was when he was standing on the cart with the Noose around his neck and he stamped his shaking leg until it was still and then he jumped off into Oblivion before he could be pushed during his life Turpin was reviled by walpole's weak Administration he was ammunition for their opponents who suggested that they were not being tough enough on Law and Order but the public would remember men like Turpin differently as memories of the real man faded the myth took over a few decades after his death Turpin reappeared in song as a much rehabilitated character why [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign it's such a fantastic song but it's one of so many about Highwayman why was it so popular well people just love to have their own Rogue their own super villains especially their own local one and someone to stand up to Authority when you look at it as a historian it's very clear that the myth and the reality are not the same and in real life these people were very unpleasant they were violent armed robbers often when these ballads were originally sold they were telling the news they told the truth so they would say what actually happened to these characters usually hung but as soon as these songs got into the mouths of the people the stories were very different and usually they'd get away scot-free the songs took these Legends around the country and if you had a fantastic story coupled with a really catchy tune then that's just going to spread like wildfire in the early 1800s captivated by the old Tales of Highwayman was a young writer called William Harrison Ainsworth it was largely through his writing the Dick Turpin and all Highwaymen came to be the heavily romanticized mythical robes we know today through ainsworth's 1834 novel Rookwood Turpin became associated with blackbests and the famous Escape ride to York he was remodeled with the virtues of an 1830s gentleman fit for a new age an icon of englishness and manly Imperial Pride with Ainsworth Highwaymen were transformed from the exciting but ultimately doomed criminal to the fantasy Hero Of boyzone Adventures but the fictional Highwayman could only become a proper hero because the real theme was no longer around to spoil the Illusion by the 1800s mounted robbers had long since ceased to be a threat to society [Music] the age of The Highwaymen was over the world around them had changed closure of fields and open Countryside had limited their movement faster coaches traveled on smoother roads which were in turn policed by mounted patrols Railways were perhaps the final nail in their coffin as the wealthy simply ceased to travel by Road writers seized upon the idea of Highwayman as lovable and misunderstood Rogues who did as they liked and did it with style and they developed these ideas just as The Highwaymen were Fading Into the past they became the star attraction of Penny dreadful's cheap theater shows and children's toys and one day ainsworth's story would find its ultimate expression on Hollywood's silver screens as the prospect of violence disappeared so did the darker and savory aspects of the highwayman's story as Victorian Heroes Highwaymen became fancy dress Outlaws with straightened out morals and a firm sense of social justice they also brought a hint of danger rebellion and free spirit to a very straight-laced age but they were Outlaws who had accompany us on adventures rather than steal our wallets and it was a potent mix the real thing may have gone but in our imagination they were here to stay next time from the highways to the high seas the British Outlaw turns to piracy their plunderings threaten a fledgling Maritime Empire and the Bloody exploits of swashbucklers like Captain Kidd and Blackbeard make them into the most hunted Renegades in history [Music] [Music] of all the Renegades in Britain's age of Outlaws Pirates were the most pursued hunted down on the high seas their bloody exploits would be followed by an appalled but enthralled public [Music] in May 1701 The Corpse of a convicted pirate was brought down river from execution dock to the lower reaches of the Thames here at Tilbury point the body was tired to preserve it and then hung in Chains above the shoreline the body was that of Captain William Kidd whose exploits and downfall had so captivated the country kids corpse was displayed here as a dire warning to all seafarers entering the great Port of London to resist the Temptations of piracy kid was the product of an era of feverish Mercantile expansion powered by a vast network of seaborne trade by plundering This Global movement of Commodities and riches Pirates became the Most Wanted Outlaws in the world flamboyant names like Blackbeard Calico Jack and black Bart pirate captains would become infamous Beyond the Seas and through ballads plays and books they would be transformed into Legend and that transformation from reality to Mythic Outlaw is one of the most enduring historical puzzles of the period I'm going to take to the Seas to explore just how this change happened and examine the devastating impact of these swashbuckling adventurers Captain kids corpse would rot away here over several years until the birds had picked his carcass clean but this warning went unheeded for the Golden Age of piracy was only just beginning [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] who would come to be seen as heralding an age of piracy Captain Kidd had never set out to be a Pirate At All by the late 1690s with the escalation of the nine years war against France kid is a highly experienced sailor saw the opportunity to make his fortune not as a pirate but as a privateer [Music] piracy was outright robbery on the high seas but privateers were mercenaries issued with a license by the government to loot the merchant ships flying the colors of England's enemies at Sea their license was issued in the form of a letter of Mark and reprisal and this one dated the 11th of December 1695 is kids own privateering commission granted and signed by no less than the king of England himself William III foreign but this wasn't quite as it seemed because there was a second commission this one to hunt down pirates in the Indian Ocean whose plundering was seriously disrupting trade with the East now this Venture was cooked up by a shady Syndicate of some of the most powerful men in England who would all share from The Spoils of kids Enterprise and with the King himself due to get a 10 share in the profits the stakes were very high failure was not an option and yet kids Misfortune was to begin almost as soon as he set sail as his ship the adventure Galley slipped down the Thames here at Greenwich kid armed with a newfound arrogance from having an actual Royal commission believing himself Above the Law refused to dip his flag and fire a salute at a royal yacht as he passed which was against all custom and when outraged the captain of the yacht fired a shot as a reminder kids crew responded with a surprising display of impudence they climbed the yards and slapped their backsides in this step the response was harsher than they could have ever expected because of kids failure to salute the captain of the naval yacht retaliated by boarding his ship and press ganging most of his carefully hand-picked men into Naval service [Music] kids set course for Madagascar known to be the great pirate bolt hole of the Indian Ocean for its good Anchorage and strategic position on important Mughal trade routes from India then being exploited by Europe's Maritime powers we're talking about an age of tremendous Colonial rivalry France Spain Holland and England all endeavoring to create colonies and to conquer land and so you've got a lot of merchant ships of different nations competing to get more money out of the Caribbean or India and from the Far East and Pirates aren't fools they gather where the trade routes are narrowing and they can pounce within sight of Madagascar kids suffered a major setback when a third of his crew perished with cholera and the only new recruits he could find turned out to be former Pirates men who had already turned to piracy and expected kid to do the same kids bad luck persisted sister after several more months without plunder or prizes and facing the very real Prospect of returning home empty-handed kid made the grave decision to leave the Indian Ocean and head for the Red Sea a rich area full of Mughal merchants and Wealthy pilgrims traveling to and from Mecca kids presence there all but announced that he had turned to piracy foreign [Music] devastating raid on an Indian Mughal Fleet by a pirate named Captain Henry Avery two years before the East India company whose Monopoly on trade with the Indian subcontinent depended on the continuing patronage of the vastly rich Mughal Empire was extremely wary of it happening again but kids crew now put increasing pressure on him to take prizes no matter what flag they sailed under in desperation kid attacked a Mughal Merchant Convoy technically his first foray into piracy but when he was repelled tensions between kid and his crew spilled over the ship's Gunner William Moore claimed that he had brought the crew to ruin and desolation upon which kid picked up a heavy iron hooped bucket and brought it down on Moore's head with such ferocity that he fractured his skull and more later died at multi-law allowed captains a degree of leeway in the use of violence but this was murder kid remained unrepentant though confident that his good friends in England would save him from prosecution and still feeling empowered by his letter of Mark from the key he now grew more and more Reckless in January 1698 after some minor successes kid took his Greatest Prize a 400 ton Armenian ship called the quader merchant which was sailing with French passes for which kid had a license to attack however when he discovered that its cargo was owned by a Mughal nobleman he tried to hand the ship back but his crew refused wishing to avoid a full Mutiny kid relented and kept his new prize but when news reached London various Naval commanders were sent out to pursue and seize the said kid in his accomplices for the notorious piracies that they had committed now a wanted man with several English Men of War in Pursuit and with the East India Company baying for his blood kid made sail for Boston where his friend Lord belamont the governor of New York had promised him safe Refuge but Kidd was sailing into a trap that would land him in the dock this here is a letter from Lord belamont which he had sent to Captain Kidd Lord belamont had financed old kids Expeditions and they've been friendly with each other you can see in the language of the letter here he's saying do not be discouraged by the false reports of ill men don't believe what people are telling you okay yes you may be assured of my having interest employed to do you all the service that I can he's going to do everything he can to help him but actually he was luring Captain Kidd to Boston to get him arrested Lord belamont did not want to be associated with piracy at all whatsoever okay so he used that previous friendship to get kid but unfortunately when he arrived in Boston he was then thrown in prison do we think kid was was a bit gullible here was he was he just relying on a sense of trust that existed before I think kid was desperate at this point to be honest I think he knew that unbeknownst to him somehow he had been accused of piracy when he did not believe he was a pirate and so he was going to take any means he could to try to protect himself it seems clear to me that kid hasn't been unfairly labeled as a pirate he was clearly a pirate he attacked the ships of a Nation when he didn't have a license to do so I think kid was a pirate but I think above everything else he was a scapegoat and this is because just a few years before a pirate named Henry Avery had disrupted trade between the Moguls and the East India Company and then just a couple years later Captain Kidd does the same thing the Moguls then threatened to cut off all trade which would have practically bankrupted the East India Company Britain had to make kid an example to the Moguls that yes they would take care of piracy in the most brutal fashion so they could show the world exactly what would happen to a pirate if they threatened trade and the British economy so what we have here is an indication of just how much of a show trial this was this lengthy document that I'm holding is the actual trial transcription verbatim of Captain kid's trial and this sold out because it sold so many copies wow at this point pretty much everybody knew who Captain Kidd was because his crimes had been reported in newspapers for several years on both sides of the Atlantic um people were fascinated with pirates because these were Maritime Outlaws committing their crimes thousands of miles away it didn't clear allegiance to their formal countries they were these people who had social Mobility uh that nobody else had and people wouldn't be able to see them until their execution [Music] what was the scene like at kids execution well actually I could show you that Sam because there's a picture here in the new gate calendar so this here is a pirate being executed at execution dock this is how Captain Kidd would have been executed you can see the Noose is around his neck here's the crowd of people and here we have the admiralty Marshall sitting on his horse and in his hand you can see right here the silver ore of the admiralty um the silver ore was always present at these executions I've actually got the silver ore that was used trial and execution let's have a look there it is so there it is as you can see it's got all the symbols that's definitely the Tudor Arms This is the garnet and Coronet of James Stewart the Duke of York that and very clearly the fouled anchor which was the symbol of the admiralty yes a very powerful symbol of Maritime Authority it was yes uh definitely a ever see it would know exactly what it meant [Music] however there's one further and even more compelling artifact from kids Darkest Days and it's this a letter from Captain Kidd to Sir Robert Harley the leader of the Tories its kids lost desperate attempt to save himself from the Noose and what's particularly interesting are these few lines that in my late proceedings in the Indies I have lodged goods and treasure to the value of one hundred thousand pounds which I desire the government may have the benefit of it's a massive bribe and the promise of an enormous stash of loot this is kids real Legacy the founding myth of buried pirate treasure [Music] the secret location of kids treasure if it ever existed has never been found even though there continue to be claims of its Discovery up to this very day kid had highlighted not only the easy seduction of piracy but also how privateers quickly became a hindrance and were shut down by the government when they ceased to serve the interests of the nation and its expanding Empire the government's attitude attitude the exploits of a kid because they damaged British trade and Britain's future was going to be a great Maritime Nation this was accepted already this was the way that a small island could get Global power um so obviously piracy which people had winked at before because it simply damaged the Spanish or other people that people didn't really care about um now it was a problem and it had to be suppressed but far from suppressing the pirate Menace kids very public humiliation only served to heighten the fascination with these Maritime Outlaws and in particular it now rekindled a feverish interest in The elusive Captain Henry Avery the one pirate who had got away foreign Avery had made the most profitable pirate raid in history when in September 1695 he captured the gang isawai a heavily armed Mughal trading ship carrying over 600 000 pounds worth of precious metal and jewels the equivalent of 52 million pounds in today's money for his actions a bounty of a thousand pounds had been put on his head leading to the first worldwide Manhunt in recorded history but unlike Captain Kidd Avery slipped the net and rumors abounded for years that he had ended up in a pirate Republic called libertalia [Music] as The Story Goes libertalia was a place where people were equal and goods were shared and laws were fair and the Pirates blew a white flag as opposed to a Black Flag to show that you know there was no threat and people were free under this flag and stories like that of course are a great threat to society back home which is tremendously unequal and very harsh fugitive Outlaws had always caught the public imagination and Avery was no exception stories of his big prize his Vanishing act and his pirate Utopia passed between deckhands across the oceans and returned to England in the form of popular ballads and this one was purportedly penned by Avery himself now this is the course I intended for to steer my false-hearted nation to you I declare if Avery was indeed the author of this ballad then he was not only fueling his own infamy but spreading sedition s were very dangerous things they were banned in periods of political unrest because you could turn a poplars like that by singing ballots it doesn't seem likely to us today well it's particularly appealed to the lower classes they were very accessible they were sold on the streets and they were just printed on single sheets of paper on one side and if you couldn't read very well or The Ballad manga would sing The Ballad in order to attract a crowd and and make their sales for the price of a few pennies or nothing at all people remember it you were up to date with the latest news [Music] the sword shall maintain me as long as I live whilst Pirates clearly had Mass Appeal what was now surprising was that amongst the chattering classes swashbucklers like Avery and tales of his remarkable disappearance became the fashionable new topic and it was a play based on Avery which did much to Foster The Legend of the pirate as a brave outlaw the successful pirate opened at the theater Royal Drury Lane in 1712 set as a tragic comedy It cast Avery as a self-styled king of the Pirates and features a rum bunch of incompetence hotly debating the virtues of piracy come on though sir I'll oppose you with his fault is he not extremely violent and intempered with his desires granted a hero should be though that a moderate desire for power that unquenchable appetite for rule that has long been dignified by the slaves of tyrants but he is no Tyrant therefore his virtue in him to desire power the public absolutely loved it much to the irritation of the critics one of whom was outraged by the way that it glamorized villainy in making a swabber a mere deckhand into the hero of a tragedy notwithstanding all you've said he is still only an overgrown Thief why the worst you Hypocrites of order can say and it is to his Immortal honor is that he has left the pale of custom and is a royal outlaw but for one member of the audience the writer and journalist Daniel Defoe the play was proof enough of the pirate's broad cultural appeal foreign with his customary journalistic chutzpur Defoe was to capitalize on the pirate's appeal and their ambiguous morality not only in Robinson Crusoe but in several of his books making him in effect the first pirate novelist but there was another book published in this period which surpassed all others in chronicling the lives and exploits of the Pirates of the great golden age now I was brought up on stories of real pirates and they were all inspired by this book as titles go it's pretty difficult to beat a general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious Pirates this was the pirate brilliantly packaged and neatly presented and the public absolutely loved it the book tapped into a growing Vogue for criminal biography but its author a captain Charles Johnson remains a mystery figure as elusive as many of the Pirates themselves Johnson displayed such a detailed knowledge of the life and language of the sea that it was thought by many that he must have been a retired sea captain that he'd perhaps attended pirate trials or even interviewed pirate crewman but there has also been a long-standing and far more intriguing belief that Johnson was merely a pseudonym for our old friend Daniel Defoe within that slim volume are the detailed lives of 20 or so celebrated Pirates and it has become a sort of Touchstone for piracy and it's been used as the basis really for the golden Asia Pirates and what I found fascinating over the years as I've done research in different areas is it all checks out the capture of ships and and what the various Pirates did with the crew and did with the ships totally authentic [Music] and one of the most surprising details of Johnson's book is it's a count of a democratic code of conduct or the pirate's code as it was generally known the Pirates Code provided rules for discipline for the fair division of plundered Loot and it even set aside specific sums of money for injuries sustained to different parts of the body for example in Pirate currency the most highly valued part of your body was your right arm for which you received 600 of these Pieces Of Eight your left arm was valued at 100 less and your legs at a hundred less again bizarrely a finger and an eye were equally valued at a hundred pieces but I suspect that you had to make your own eye patch foreign had a very harsh life they worked for long hours for years for very low pay when Tales came back about Pirates running their ships on more democratic lines they joined decisions and decisions in common and shared their suppliers this would never have happened on a Navy ship for a merchant ship and this is egalitarian so a pirate crew could easily find its numbers swelled by Sailors desperate to escape an oppressive ship and more than happy to switch Allegiance and sail under the Black Flag and The Lure of the Black Flag was to become far greater following the end of the war of the Spanish succession in 1713 which not only saw Atlantic trade resume but also witnessed thousands of British seamen relieved of military duty the result was a large number of idle but highly trained Sailors at a time of considerable seaborne trade as all of the European Maritime Powers sought to expand their colonial empires now a great deal of money could be made transporting goods on this network but if you knew that Network you could of course just steal it which is why peacetime provided so many opportunities for the maritime outlaw this was especially so in the seas around the West Indies with its lucrative trade in sugar and more notoriously slaves there are ships all over the place Merchant ships waiting to be plundered so you had in the Bahamas um a whole lot of unemployed semen adventurers out of work privateers and Pirates all waiting for Action it became so full of people looting and raping and whatever that it became in a way what we call now a failed state [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] the war of the Spanish succession Nassau in the Bahamas had been utterly ransacked and left in Ruins by 1715 still ungoverned and undefended it had become a pirate Haven by the following year the pirate population outnumbered Nassau's law-abiding citizens by ten to one it had become in effect a pirate Republic a sprawling encampment of carousing fornicating Sailors funding their profligate Lifestyles with plunder it seemed as though Captain Avery's mythical Pirate Kingdom had come alive [Music] [Applause] [Music] one of the rising ring leaders of this new encampment of Renegades was a tall robust Englishman from Bristol named Edward Teach by March 1717 teach had formed a company of 70 men aboard his Six-Gun Sloop and had begun to cultivate a formidable reputation [Music] his flag was soon the most feared on the horizon and with his main of course dark locks he now went by the catchy new name of Blackbeard the skull and crossbones has been a symbol of death since the Middle Ages and in this great period the Pirates adopted it as their own menacing symbol with each Captain having his own version and unsurprisingly for Blackbeard who was obsessed with his image his flag had it all if ever there was a symbol to strike fear into the heart of your victim then this was it a skeleton holds an hourglass in one hand to show you that your time is running out and a spear in the other threatening to draw blood from your heart if you if you not surrender and if this wasn't enough Blackbeard added horns and clove and feet to his skeleton to signify that he was in League with the Devil sailors during the early 18th century were almost universally superstitious and aside from the sight of Blackbeard's flag the sight of the man himself was enough to cause the cruise of merchant ships to surrender [Music] thank you his reputation rests entirely on his appearance which was vividly recorded in Captain Johnson's book this beard was black which he suffered to grow of an extravagant length as to breadth it came up to his eyes he was accustomed to twist it with ribbons in small tails and turned them about his ears in time of action he wore a sling over his shoulders with three abrasive pistols hanging in holsters like bandoliers and stuck lighted matches under his hat which appearing on each side of his face his eyes naturally looking Fierce and wild made him altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a Fury from hell to look more frightful Blackbeard was ruthless on one occasion when a victim didn't voluntarily offer up the ring on his finger and simply cut it off ring an all and he wasn't above maiming his own crew we also know that he shot his second mate Israel hands in the knee just to remind him who was boss [Music] if Blackbeard looked like a walking Arsenal then it was for a very good reason Flintlock pistols like this only fired a single shot and they were also notoriously unreliable at Sea so if your pistol failed to fire because of a damp charge you could go straight on to the next one and then when both were used up you still had your Cutlass one of the most important articles of the pirate's code was to keep your pistols and cutless clean and fit for service especially in the run-up to an attack they would all be on deck waving cutlasses firing in the air and as they came alongside they would also throw primitive form of hound grenade onto the deck of the merchant ship which caused chaos and send over a grapple rope and haul themselves alongside by which stage normally the Petrified crew not used to battle just said we surrender foreign of Terror lasted two years tormenting the American Eastern Seaboard from the Caribbean to North Carolina he plundered sugar rum and loot from a series of English Merchant vessels [Applause] [Music] but following his ruthless blockade of Charlestown Harbor in May 1718 the governor of Virginia issued a warrant for Blackbeard's arrest with a reward of a hundred pounds for his capture dead or alive foreign Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl was dispatched to hunt him down and eventually tracked him to the shallows of Ocracoke Inlet [Music] Blackbeard raised a bottle of liquor in salutation and declared that Maynard and his crew were cowardly puppies before calling out to them damnation sees my soul if I give you quarters or take any from you Blackbeard was ready for a fight the ensuing battle was brief and bloodthirsty as the ships closed in Blackbeard's men hurled bottle grenades and using grappling hooks and boarding axes they clambered on board but Maynard had hidden most of his crew below deck and they now took the Pirates by surprise engaging in Furious hand-to-hand combat with Blackbeard coming up against Maynard himself holding his Cutlass Aloft Blackbeard lunged with such ferocity that he sheared off Maynard's blade near the hilt but coming for him again Blackbeard was surrounded and hit from all sides riddled with shot and cut to Ribbons Blackbeard then suffered a terrible wound to his neck from a Scotsman wielding a broadsword well dunlad said Blackbeard before staggering but cocking his pistol again I'll do better said the Scotsman before hacking away at his neck again deeply killing that great man dead on his own deck with their Captain's fighting Spirit Blackbeard's men fought on but was soon overcome as proof of Blackbeard's death and in order to collect the reward of a hundred pounds Maynard called for Blackbeard's head to be severed [Music] hung up on the Bell spread the rest of Blackbeard's corpse was then thrown overboard whereupon hitting the water according to Legend it then swam several times around the Sloop searching for its own severed head before sinking without Trace foreign because of his fearsome reputation Blackbeard's death was seen as a major coup in the war against piracy and in propaganda terms as significant as the trial and hanging of Captain Kidd ing Blackbeard gone there were still some 2 000 Pirates roving the Seas the colonies were facing what amounted to an imperial crisis foreign we've got the golden age pirate rampaging across the Caribbean they're disrupting trade with Colonial Governors are complaining to London you've got to do something about it the governor of Jamaica is saying I can't send a ship in or out without it being captured by Pirates and one of the things the authorities do they get onto the admiralty and they say send more ships to the Caribbean so it actually becomes part of the brief of the Navy to suppress the Pirates the naval ships that were sent out tended to be what are called sixth rate ships they were 40 guns or so and they were powerful vessels but they were quite big they weren't able to go into shallow Esters and Bays the Pirates uh selected mostly what are called sloops they were relatively shallow draft compared to the naval ships so they could sneak in and out of estuaries and bays and channels that the naval ships couldn't get into foreign the naval ships if there are only four to cover the entire Caribbean and there were what two to three hundred pirate ships operating in that same area the naval ships couldn't be everywhere at once so the Navy had a difficult job and in a way the Pirates had the advantage [Music] does the government soon realized it would take more than deploying a few more naval ships in 1717 under the new King George the first one of the measures taken to quell the pirate Menace was the issue of a Royal Proclamation an act of grace in which the king promised that any pirate who voluntarily surrendered himself to British authorities within a year would receive his most gracious pardon one of the Pirates who took advantage of this amnesty albeit briefly was Captain John Rackham whose colorful cotton clothes earned him the equally colorful nickname of Calico Jack Calico Jack achieved lasting Fame not for his actions which amounted to seizing a handful of vessels in the Seas of Jamaica but for his association with two of his crew members which became one of the most beguiling and frankly suspect episodes of the entire golden age of piracy foreign it was whilst taking advantage of the pirate amnesty and frequenting the taverns of Nassau that Calico Jack met and courted a bold young Irish woman named Anne Bonnie and with his return to piracy soon after he took her to Sea and she joined his crew dressing in men's clothes now here the story takes a rather brilliant turn when Calico Jack slew Revenge captured a merchant ship he acquired a young sailor by the name of Mark Reed now Anne Bonnie who was serving on Jack's crew dressed in men's clothes took a bit of a fancy to this young sailor and in a quiet moment alone revealed to him that she was in fact a woman upon which Mark Reed revealed that he was also a woman named Mary thank you [Music] in late 1720 a merchant sea captain named Jonathan Barnett with a commission to hunt down Pirates took Calico Jack and his crew by surprise whilst they enjoyed a rum party anchored of Jamaica Jack and his men were too drunk to fight and fled to the hold leaving only Bonnie and Reed to resist the two women flew at barnet's men like Furies firing their pistols wielding their cutlasses and axes and shouting obscenities as they went but they were unable to Rouse their crew who tamely gave up with Calico Jack himself calling for quarter Calico Jack's female crew members would end up behind bars but their exploits have posed questions ever since and for leading folk musician Martha tilston their story has provided the inspiration for a new composition which he has asked me to perform with her Martha it's really exciting that you've written a ballad about Pirates because ballads were the way that the activities of the Pirates which happened thousands of miles away were brought home and sold to the masses you're part of a long tradition well I imagine it was totally fascinating for people to hear this especially for women who maybe we're not in a situation where they're having a particularly adventurous life on living a life that was very sort of stuck at home to read about that as a way of escaping or to hear about it so you'd pass the story around but it would have spread I think the news and the story would have spread because a good story spread through music and storytelling at that time you've written a duet so there's a male voice the voice of the Jailer who's taking Anne Bonnie off to her cell yeah and then Anne Bonnie and Mary Read singing I wanted to get the male and female I think what what was beautiful about the lady pirates is they're out in this fairly male world but it was there was a good female presence there and it's nice to put that across and also the voice of the law and the outlaw I guess so let's give it a go okay [Music] I'll step aside I'm and Bonnie I am a lady pirate and there's more beside me out on the sea all dressed in my life [Music] on the edge of life we're living and we'll take if you're not giving then we'll slip away into the Velvet night foreign [Music] just as well and you all hang just as well but you thought that we never could tell but you didn't hide your shape so well throwing like a barrel over the ocean and we had to pins [Music] sing my name through history [Music] there's something really romantic and very attractive about the idea of these female pirates out and were they dressed up as men or not and why were they dressed up as men and I mean for me my instinct when I sort of read about it I heard about it um was that that's just going to be easy to climb the rigging if they haven't got scared I can imagine that when they were taking over other ships or when they're in battle that sort of to not obviously be a woman might be advantageous I can't imagine they hid the fact that they were women for that amount of time on a ship with loads of men I mean that's the thing I think that really stands out for me I mean I like to think that all of the men knew they were women and yeah for sure they would I can't imagine how you do it but also why would you do it Calico Jack was her lover so I mean how would she keep that from the whole ship common did a ship one day out on the stormy seas and off the men will joined us there was one young Mary Reed she was dressed in manly face we became a Savage pair we rode the waves [Music] and we had your pins [Music] through history [Music] legislation passed since Captain Kidd's trial meant that admiralty law could now be administered in the colonies that the accused did not need to be sent back to England unsurprisingly Jack and his men were found guilty at the ensuing trial and was sentenced to death now in prison Jack was allowed to see Anne one last time but far from pitying him she brazenly reprimanded him for their capture had you fought like a man she scowled you need not have been hanged like a dog it was at the point of their sentencing that Bonnie and Reed's story took its last and most dramatic twist when the judge passed sentence he asked them if they had anything to say the ladies replied my Lord we plead our bellies they claimed that they were pregnant the judge ordered a physical examination to be undertaken and both women were indeed found to be pregnant and both were granted a stay of execution foreign however this was no happy resolution as she contracted a fever soon after the trial and died in prison as for Anne Bonnie there's no historical evidence that she was executed or released like Captain Henry Avery she simply vanished foreign [Music] following his execution Calico Jack's body like that of Captain Kidd was hanged in Chains as a warning to others on a Sandy spit of Port Royal in Jamaica now known as rackham's key but plenty of others would follow him to the gibbit [Music] thank you [Music] Nassau in the Bahamas which had been a pirate Republic of Lawless Riot and drunken revelry had been brought under control with the appointment of Captain Woods Rogers as the Island's Governor he continued to offer that Royal pardon and set about rebuilding the Island's defenses foreign [Music] ERS is a key figure in the war against the Pirates he was a tough and Resolute sea captain he had orders to drive the pirates from their lodgement and he goes out there with a fleet of ships gets a hostile reception but he establishes order he captures some Pirates and he then sets up a show trial which he presides over nine of them are hanged on the beach in front of the fort of Nassau and this sent a signal really across the Caribbean that there's a man in Nassau now who's in charge who's restoring order and in effect it was an example to other Colonial Governors that if you're tough with the Pirates you can get rid of them following the clamp down in the Caribbean many of the Pirates set off across the Atlantic for other less well-potrolled Waters [Music] and it was to the slave coast of West Africa that they headed it was in these Waters just two years before that one sailor had risen to prominence a pirate Captain to Eclipse all others in what was to be the final flourish of this age of plunder [Music] his name was Bartholomew Roberts an outspoken and disciplined man who swore the Welsh complexion would lead to him being remembered as black Bart like many sailors of his generation but had faced a dilemma when his ship had been captured by Pirates and he had reluctantly turned pirate but that reluctance was then blown out of the water when his crew elected him captive since I have dipped my hands in muddy water he surmised it's better to be a commander than a common man foreign over the course of three years from 1719 black Bart had wrought Havoc among Merchant shipping on both sides of the Atlantic and by the time he reached the shores of Africa in June 1721 he was in command of a flotilla of three vessels in addition to his Flagship the Royal Fortune foreign Ty of his combined crew that Black Bart's Little Fleet seemed like a proper Navy especially when you consider the way that he further formalized the pirate's code amongst his articles or rules he stipulated that no one was to game at cards or dice for money anyone found seducing women or bringing them on board disguised would suffer death oh and the lights and candles had to be out by 8pm so that's no fun no women and you all had to be tucked up early Bartholomew Roberts was in a way the most Resolute and unbending of all Pirates he was another puritanical character I should think completely terrifying to meet those who did put up a fight with Bartholomew Roberts had a really bad time and were usually eliminated in horrible ways I mean not just cutting off ears and noses but um he would hang them up in the rigging and use them for target practice and this was simply in order that the word would get around you don't mess around with Bartholomew Roberts black Bart proved so elusive that those in Pursuit began to think he was invincible Beyond capture even pistol proof as his own crew described him however there was one man Captain Challenger Ogle of HMS swallow who had been tracking Bart for some eight months and he was soon to find his Quarry in his sights El Ahoy black Bart was enjoying a breakfast of strong tea because he abhorred liquor and Salma Gundy a pirate specialty of pickled herring boiled eggs meat and vegetables but for a man normally so disciplined and astute black Bart had finally been caught out [Music] through his telescope he saw that the approaching ship was using the old ruz DE gaire of flying false flags and he quickly ordered his men to ready themselves for battle black Bart perhaps sensing that the Fatal hour was upon Him decided to go out in style and dressed gallantly for the engagement as Captain Johnson's General history of the Pirates records Roberts himself made a gallant figure being dressed in a rich Crimson damask waistcoat and breeches a red feather in his hat a gold chain round his neck with a cross hanging to it a sword in his hand and two pairs of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling flung over his shoulders according to the fashion of pirates Bart's plan was a characteristically bold one if he was to stand any chance of Escape he would need to force that naval ship onto a new course but that involved sailing directly towards her which would expose his ship to cannon fire the two ships closed on each other and exchanged broadsides ogles chipped the swallow remained unscathed but black Bart lost its missing Mast though on it sailed heading out into Open Sea however as the noise subsided and the smoke cleared after that first broadside the Helmsman noticed Bart slumped on deck on a pile of rigging not realizing he was injured he swore at him to get up and fight like a man but Bartholomew Roberts was dead his throat had been ripped out by grape shot and before his body could be seized and taken as a trophy his faithful crew wrapped it in a sail weighed it down with shot and consigned it to the Deep second broadside brought the Royal Fortune's main Mast down upon which black thoughts crew with their Spirits sunken their Captain gone called for quarter for his success Captain Ogle was awarded a Knighthood the only British naval officer to be honored specifically for his actions against Pirates the battle Black Bart's death and the subsequent trial of his remaining crewman at Cape Coast Castle on the coast of Ghana was to prove the turning point in the war against Pirates foreign and this is their death warrant a small piece of paper that would Herald the end of an era ye and each of you are a judged and sentenced to be carried back to the place from whence you came from thence to the place of execution without the gates of this Castle and there within the flood marks to be hanged by the neck until you are dead dead dead [Music] like Captain Kidd some 20 years before these 52 dead Pirates swaying out across the Atlantic were a stark reminder of The Perils of piracy it was the greatest Slaughter of pirates ever carried out by the admiralty and in a stroke it brought this brief and bloody age to a dramatic finale foreign short career had amounted to capturing over 470 vessels and plundering riches worth a total of around 20 million pounds in today's money when the rewards so greatly outweighed the risks it's no wonder that so many sailors embrace the life of piracy in his book Captain Johnson devotes more space to black Bart than to any of his contemporaries and it includes a quote from Bart himself that for me serves as a mantra for all Pirates in an honest service says he there is low wages and hard labor in this plenty and say shitty pleasure and ease Liberty and power a merry life and a short one shall be my motto now what's that if not the Faustian pact of all Outlaws as George and Britain's Imperial and Mercantile Ambitions marched on so its Navy grew in size and strength bolstered by vast numbers of sailors who only a few years earlier might have easily joined the ranks of the Pirates they may have been a bunch of common Outlaws but these Pirates had shaken the very foundations of a fledgling Empire that would spread across the world once their Lawless Reign Over The Seas was ended foreign and these Maritime Renegades left a powerful Legacy ordinary men and women forging new identities and a dangerous vision of Freedom far removed from the authoritarian social order of George and Britain to The Establishment they were enemies of mankind but to the public they became folk Heroes and have remained so ever since it would seem that in this short but Sensational period in our history it was the pirate and not Britannia who really ruled the waves [Music] next time Outlaws come closer to home in the teeming cities of George and Britain and with no established police force the thief the robber and the cheat could live beyond the law Rogues like Jack Shepherd who no prison would hold and Deacon Brody the original Jekyll and Hyde [Music] crime was endemic in the 18th century on the open roads robbers robbed with impunity on the high seas Pirates roamed and closer to home robes threatened the lives and livelihoods of ordinary citizens nowhere was safe least of all towns and cities where from their own underworld felons robbed burgled and cheated from the lowest to the highest from the likable Rogue to the seemingly respectable gentleman there was contempt for the rule of law men like Thomas Benson MP a sheriff turned Outlaw Deacon Brody the original Jekyll and Hyde and Jack Shepherd the most Artful one of them all for a time they evaded the law but the law was closing in this was the last age of the outlaw [Music] the most famous Rogue of the age was an orphaned Apprentice Jack shepherd and a very likable Rogue he was too Jack would go on to be the most written about and celebrated criminal of the last 300 years the legend of Jack Shepherd was forged one September Day in 1724 when he escaped from The Condemned cell in Newgate Prison the most secure prison in the land no prison no matter how secure seemed able to contain him he was admired by men and adored by women Jack Shepherd was famous in his lifetime and for three centuries after he inspired books operas and films he was the rock star of his age a lovable Rogue he was Jack the lad foreign Jack was brought up in poverty by his mother but he was fortunate to get a carpenter's apprenticeship it was an opening that would serve him well carpentry was a good safe trade because London was growing all the time there was never a shortage of customers London was also the largest city in Europe through its port and Merchant houses a river of valuable Commodities and money flowed it was a good place to earn an honest living but it was the perfect place for a life of crime in London's dense network of thoroughfares the very rich rubbed shoulders with the desperately poor contemporary accounts tell us that Jack never finished his apprenticeship his father had been an honest man and Jack May well have followed suit if he'd not been fond rather too fond of a drop of Ale and of the company of women one fateful night he was drinking in the black lion in Drury Lane and we know that he then met Elizabeth Lyon known to all as Edgeworth Bess [Music] Bess was a prostitute and Petty Thief who frequented the taverns of the town later writers would suggest that Jack had been LED astray by Bess Jack Shepard's story follows a very common narrative thread in the 18th century where it's the woman that leads the slightly innocent man into sin so he wants to buy her presence he wants to impress her he wants to take her out carousing and so she maybe introduces him to someone who fenced some Goods that she suggests he might steal Lovestruck Jack was eager to please and as an apprentice Carpenter he had every opportunity to pilfer from the houses of the well to do when no one seemed to notice the quick and nimble Jack small items he brought home to Curry favor with the ample Bess Jack now embarked on a new career as a pickpocket and burglar with Bess as his ideal fence Jack's elder brother Thomas had already been branded on the hand as a thief now Jack was following after because of his trade Jack knew how window and door locks worked and he also knew how the window bars that were so common in London were fitted so it was easy work for him to remove the bars Rob the house and then replace them very clever Jack Shepard and his brother then set out on a short but disastrous crime spree cash from a public house a large Hall of linen from a Drapers then Faithfully a house robbery in Drury Lane [Music] and then things started to go wrong Jack's brother was caught with the swag or hesitate to say red-handed but now fearing for his own skin and hoping to receive leniency he blamed it all on Edgeworth best and Jack his own brother Jack was soon arrested and taken to Saint giles's roundhouse near Charing Cross Saint giles's roundhouse was just a local lock-up and clearly inadequate for keeping Jack in for long he was to be detained just for one night and questioned in the morning Jack had to act quickly that night he broke through the timber ceiling onto the roof the noise of his escape and the falling roof tiles attracted a small crowd and then displaying the typical coolness that later endeared him to all of London he joined the crowd and distracted them saying he could see the shadow of the prisoner escaping over the rooftops and then He Slipped Away Jack was agile in mind and body his escape and his daring made him the perfect model as the 18th century anti-hero it was April 1724 Jack was just 22 years old and the chain of events that would make Jack famous dead famous had just begun within a few weeks on the 19th of May Shepard was arrested for a second time he was caught picking a pocket in Leicester Fields modern day Leicester Square Jack was put in Saint Anne's roundhouse where he was visited by Bess and then she too was arrested as his accomplice and thrown in jail with him Jack and Bess appeared before magistrates and was sent to new prison in Clark and well manacled and held in cells with iron bars escaping from there would be a different proposition altogether and yet within days both of them were free using a smuggled file they cut through the manacles then Jack managed to work a bar loose in the cell window with a rope of knotted bed clothes he first lowered Bess and then escaped himself this small small light boy really carries his a plump I think is the kind way to describe her she was described as a blousie and carrying her somehow over the wall out the window down the wall through the yard up and over again and it's definitely part of his Mystique that he he does it with you know he does it with her their audacious Escape hit the newspapers broadsides and ballads proclaimed Jack's name Jack daring and Gallant was the Talk of the Town plays about Jack Shepherd would become one of the most popular entertainments of the next two centuries and he would be immortalized as The Artful Dodger in dickens's Oliver Twist no matter how popular Jack now was he soon made an unfortunate enemy it was known that most of London's criminal underworld was controlled by one man Jonathan Wilde Wilde was an apparently respectable man who moved in influential circles he used his connections to lead a double life by running criminal gangs and bringing thieves to Justice Jonathan Wilde called himself Thief Decker General it wasn't an official position but he got a lot of official backing because he could produce the results I mean Jonathan was a complete Rogue and a villain he was the Moriarty of crime in fact Arthur Conan Doyle and the Australian home story is referred to Moriarty and called him Jonathan Wilde he ran gangs he fenced stolen goods he shopped rival gang members and of course I suppose from the authorities point of view okay he's destroyed one gang so actually let's get rid of all that lot on the other hand he'd increased his own power probably increased his own Manpower and had a larger share in the takings the justice system relied on men like wild he even had an office in the old bayley as well as a house a few doors down at number 68. Jonathan Wilde seemed to be the Puppet Master for the courts of justice and the criminal underworld and everything was going his way until he picked on a thief and burglar Young Jack Shepherd Jack Shepherd held it as a point of Pride that he had never dealt with Jonathan Wilde and that was part of the reason he was popular on the Streets of London because he held himself apart from the kind of criminal fraternity that the wild represented even though Bess and blueskin Blake and others of his kind of other accomplices were involved with wild Jack always was proud not to have been Jonathan Wilde was determined to catch Shepard and seeing Bess as the weak link he played her with drink and she foolishly LED wild to Jack successful as Jack was it escaping unfortunately he was equally as successful at getting caught Jack never seemed to wander far from his usual haunts in this part of town if he was not womanizing he was drinking and most of the time it was both at the same time one day he'd been burgling again this time with his friend and fellow criminal Joseph blueskin Blake now where did Wild men find Jack why had blueskin Blake's mother's Brandy shop Jack was sent to Newgate a much more serious proposition being the most secure prison in London to be tried at the old bayley next door they all barely consisted of a single open-air courtroom I mean part of it undercover where the judge would sit and so on but the majority of the space was just open exposed and open air but the reason was twofold one it was thought and you were less likely to catch disease and the other thing of course was open Justice and public Justice in terms of people being able to see the procedures see people being tried found guilty are not guilty but Justice being done but convictions and false convictions often carried rewards it was a corruptable system and no one knew how to corrupt it better than the devious Jonathan Wilde Wilde exerted a powerful hold on criminals across London if they didn't cooperate he simply had them arrested and claimed the reward and if he needed any witnesses to secure a conviction or he knew plenty of people who tell a convincing tale for a little bit of cash a lot of people are wild shocked um well we're guilty criminals anyway um so you didn't need to fabricate false evidence against them they often came lead and with it themselves but it would but it was certainly it was certainly true that there was unease within the legal profession and this and the senior Judiciary uh that in fact we might be getting a lot of miscarriages of Justice as a result of our overall lines on paid and well-paid informants [Music] on the 12th of August 1724 Jack faced two charges of theft and one of burglary the serious Prospect has even quite minor crimes against property were punishable by Death on the first two charges of theft he was acquitted for lack of evidence but the third for burglary was recorded as plainly proved Jack was sentenced to hang Jack Shepherd and Jonathan Wilde were now inextricably linked each would lead to the downfall of the other [Music] Jack was a condemned man wild appeared to have had the upper hand Jack was still allowed visitors including his supposed wife Bess the woman whose weakness for drink had landed him in this trouble on the day that the official warrant arrived naming Friday the 4th of September as the day that Shepherd would be turned off as the slang would have it our Jack escaped again and this time from Newgate itself foreign over the intervening three weeks Jack had managed to loosen a bar and using Bess and her friend Paul maggot to distract the guards he changed into women's clothing and coolly walked out of the most secure prison in the land Jack's Freedom was short-lived only nine days again Wilde tracked him down arrested him and brought him back to Newgate this time high up in the building to a cell called The Castle it was considered escape proof here he was bound hand and foot and Shackled to the floor jack was now famous throughout London his charm and daring escapes made him a hero at Newgate he was a one-man tourist trade as many paid to see the living legend that was Jack Shepherd to his admiring fans and to the jailers he would then display the tricks he used to escape his chains to discover more about Jack's techniques I've come to London's Guild Hall library to meet Peter Ross a leading expert on Jack Shepherd we know from an account of when people came into his cell he was very willing to demonstrate how he got his cuffs off he didn't repeatedly he was caught in himself with his caps off he would have got out of them by slipping his hand through the Handcuff itself so that's what he was doing and he was willing to demonstrate that to anybody who would be willing to watch him do it it sounds almost implausible that you could just slip off manacle so he must have been a real escapologist he was he was exactly he was an escapologist these chains are from the Metropolitan police's black Museum by late Victorian times many wanted to believe these were the genuine articles What's significant about these particular cuffs is they have a lock on them and we think it's probable that Jack Shepherd's cuffs did not have a lock on them and that he would have been fixed into them with a rivet by a blacksmith who would have been at Newgate Prison so he did pick locks because you know he picked the lock uh that fixed him to the floor of the cell but in this case he had no problem slipping his hands out it's so clear that people just want to have artifacts relating to this person particularly artifacts like handcuffs and manacles because they represent the law they want they want a hero who can escape Authority yes it's something about the uh the 1720s the fact that the government was very oppressive the fact that people in London were fixed in their jobs apprentices were controlled the whole of society was controlled so if you see somebody who's sort of not really anti-society but is against the government in some way by escaping from the government escaping from Authority then regression becomes a popular hero the next chapter in Jack's Legend was down to a stroke of luck while he was in prison blue skin Blake had been double crossed by wild and convicted of robbery on his evidence in a fit of rage Blake rushed it wild with a blade and slashed his throat a riot ensued high up in the castle Jack took advantage of this Mayhem it's his handcuffs and still in leg irons attempted to wriggle up the chimney he managed to burrow into the chimney with an iron bar he found there and climb up through the chimney and out through five or six bolted rooms onto a roof eventually at the edge of the prison where he saw he could climb down he realized he had nothing like a rope to climb down with so he retraced his steps back to his cell gathered up his blankets and then went back to the roof where he lowered himself onto the house of one William bird who was fast asleep Jack was away and free he bribed a Shoemaker to break his chains and stole some fine clothes and dressed as a gentleman for two weeks he lived life to the full you have to wonder why doesn't he just leave why doesn't he do what one of his accomplices did and make a new life in the United States why doesn't he go and live in the country why doesn't he just escaped London he doesn't seem to have the idea of possibility of a different life he's so grounded in that underworld of Covent Garden of pickpockets of Sharps and Flash women that he can't ever imagine living outside it after a night's drinking it said that he even took two floozies in the cab past Newgate to show them where he'd escaped from now he had a final night that night but in the morning he had far more than a hangover to contend with [Music] back was found in a Local Tavern a few hours later blind drunk and dressed in a handsome suit of black with a fine ring on his finger unfortunately for him the people that found him were the officers of the law back in Newgate the Great and the good bribed their way in to meet him and even the king sent Sir James Thornhill his personal Portrait Painter to capture Jack's image Jack's last journey was along what is now Oxford Street but then Oxford Road 200 000 people that's a third of London turned out to see him he was their hero people waved women called his name on the day of Jack's execution he's taken in a cart from Newgate to tyburn which is modern Marble Arch along the Oxford Road people drank his health as he passed them outside pubs he drank some Brandy the roads would have been crowded with people coming out to see their hero die at Marble Arch was The tyburn Gallows a triangle of wood known as the tyburn tree and it was here where our Jack was hanged foreign experience for the crowd because his slim boyish frame which had been such an asset for breaking and entering and escaping now condemned him to a slow death by strangulation for 15 minutes his body ride and kicked before he died [Music] although Jack's crimes look quite modest to Modern Eyes the legal system of the time came down hard on all forms of robbery or burglary in fact any theft of over five Shillings could be punishable by Death in order to deter people from property theft when detection was unlikely when prevention was equally unlikely deterrence was considered to be the Beyond end-all and deterrence was not it wasn't that you hanged people for the most serious offenses you hanged people for the set for the offenses that were easiest to commit and what about Jonathan Wilde Jackson nemesis Legend and Broad cheat had it that Wilde turned up to watch Jack die but in truth he'd been too weakened by blue skin Blake's attack to venture Outdoors as his health failed Wilde's grip on his criminal Empire began to weaken previously terrified Witnesses came forward to accuse him and it was only a matter of time before he too was in the dock of all his vile and devious crimes it was finally the simple theft of some lace that had him convicted and sent to the Gallows as a loyal public servant he pleaded for a reprieve but reprieved there was none on his journey to the Gallows he was pilted with rotten fruit such was the desire to see Wild executed that tickets were actually sold for the best seats at his execution this is a satirical copy sending up this Macabre trade here at the top of the image of a very worried looking Jonathan Wilde and underneath it is the invitation to all the thieves pickpockets family felons in Great Britain and Ireland you are hereby desire to accompany your worthy friend the pious Mr Jonathan Wilde to ye Triple Tree where he is to make his last exit when it finally came to it Wilde was strung up alongside three of his associates wild was the last to die Jonathan Wilde's body was cut down by his family and buried quietly in a nearby churchyard but he would not rest in peace this is the huntarian the Museum of the College of Surgeons or surgeons and Barbers as it would have been in the 18th century it's full of strange and disturbing relics of The Human Condition and ladies and gentlemen allow me to introduce you to Mr Jonathan Wilde Thief taker General and yes it is he in an opportunistic fact of which he may or may not have approved his body was exhumed and sold to the Royal College of Surgeons and he has been their guest ever since not that far from the old bayley where he plied his deadly trade while All That Remains of wild is his skeleton the legend of Jack Shepherd continued to live and grow in plays operas and ballads for the next 300 years Hogarth was said to have based his Idol Apprentice Engravings on Jack shepherd and a century after his death a novel about Jack by William Harrison Ainsworth was the publishing sensation of Victorian England outselling books by a chap called Dickens yes Ainsworth did romanticize it a bit but Jack had been orphaned at four and life had been very difficult both for him and for his mother and yet he lived life to the full he enjoyed a good party and he died as he lived with wit charm and Panache a real working-class hero Jack Shepherd was a legend in his own Lifetime and long after a popular ballad told his story in the slang of the criminal underworld [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so that was fantastic but the interesting thing for me is the language what's what's going on there we take the first line it says in the box of a stone jug I was born and that means he's basically saying I was born in a prison cell okay and was that true not at all it sounds great so we've got um these incredible stories which are basically made up but sung in this in this funny language as well but it's it's the um the boisterousness of it which so appeals to me because you want to sing it to someone else and I suppose that's how it spread that's what made the difference between which song survived and which didn't and if it had a great tune then that would definitely help it to spread across the country you could really imagine people standing on street corners singing that one they certainly did what you get a sense of I think with these songs is that a really exciting story is much more important than a true story and of course the most Fantastical story is that brilliant one about Mary tuft yes the woman who gave birth the rabbit the woman who gave birth to rabbits and we believe it all it's got this brilliant line this song the weakest woman sometimes made the wise this man deceived so I think it's one we should play out on excellent let's go over it [Music] most true it is [Music] Believe It or Not Alexander Pope the greatest poet of the age and translator of humor was the author of this body ballad to the rabbit breeder of godalming in the annals of all rogary there's nothing to compare with this one of the greatest frauds of all time if Jack Shepherd was the most widely loved villain of the age then Mary Toft the rabbit woman was the most curious Criminal Case of the century she was is famous for being sent to prison for giving birth to rabbits yes rabbits and rather a lot of them it was a hoax that captivated the crowd as much as it mocked the king and his court in the language of the time it was known as the great Wim wamp a swiftly made trifle a bit of fun Mary Toft was an illiterate pregnant 25 year old from Surrey she seemed in every way unremarkable but her story would be the most remarked on of the age and it would unfortunately land her behind bars so how did this bunnies in the oven Story begin well in the nature of all the good rabbit stories let's begin at the beginning what's the matter doctor just short off it would appear that your wife has been delivered of a rabbit meritov's story is that when she was pregnant she saw a rabbit in a field and it captivated her suddenly all she could think about was rabbits and this somehow meant that the baby she was carrying turned into a rabbit or maybe it was always a rabbit and who knows but there she is giving birth to rabbits the doctor drunk or not who delivered the rabbit was John Howard if you don't believe me go look for yourself John Howard seemed to believe what he wanted to believe and he wanted to be in on the greatest medical sensation of the age so when he should have paused he jumped right in and he immediately penned a letter to the eminent medical men including the Swiss German Nathaniel santandre the surgeon to the Royal household who believed him now joining the ranks of the credulous was the king himself and his son the Prince of Wales Mary topped was now famous for being famous like all the best confidence tricks the rabbit Birds played into a narrative that people were strangely willing to believe and this was a pseudo-scientific theory called maternal Impressions it had long been a sort of idea of folklore and common belief that if you saw something that deeply impressed you when you were pregnant your child would somehow reflect that experience The Elephant Man was the most famous example of this it was said that the mother had seen an elephant while she was pregnant and that has was what had caused the baby to be born in that way it was said during the Civil War that a woman had given birth to a baby with two heads because that was the division reflected the division in society at the time so it's it's quite a common view I mean I suppose it's an extension of the idea that if you have a terrible shock when you're pregnant it might affect your baby Mary was a national sensation these were the early days of newspapers and if crime sold well rabbits sold even better physicians in the land had Gentry competed to meet her feel her stomach and await the next rabbit no one might enter the bed chamber except some payment of a Guinea immediate very well before long Lords and Ladies thronged to godalming to meet The Wonder of the age no amount of thieving could have brought Mary greater success sweet harmless little creatures may I have one and take it back to London I'm sure Mr Toph would be delighted to sell you one there's no question of it Madam these animals belong to science thought of your strong basket of course anyone looking at it rationally would say you know women can't give birth to rabbits but we're just moving from a period in which you know from an Age of Wonders to an age of Science and there are all sorts of gray areas in between where the perpetuation of popular culture popular ideas superstitions still seems to sort of have a sort of a draw to it you know well we know that can't be right but hang on how is she doing it then how is it that doctors have been to see her and apparently come out shrugging their shoulders and say she seems to be doing it of course some people thought that this was all complete Tosh but then again if the king his Heir the Prince of Wales and the most eminent surgeon in the land believed it oh this was all going to end unhappily for someone the king's surgeon Nathaniel santandre examined a rabbit and then with all medical propriety the intimate regions of Mary Toft he was satisfied with what he saw he rushed to publish the Learned thesis that he hoped would cement his place in history it would but not in the way he imagined the Final Act was Exquisite in its timing while Nathaniel santandre's book was at the printers rumors spread that Mary toft's husband had been caught smuggling rabbits into the household he claimed they were for a meal a rather unsettling observation for a man whose wife was giving birth to rabbits on a fairly regular basis then another obstetrician Thomas Manningham decided to confront Mary and say that he felt obliged to conduct an investigatory operation to see if she was formed differently from other women Mary was terrified she quickly broke down and confessed [Music] he did public aftermath was Glee the most eminent satirical engraver of his day William Hogarth etched his famous coniculari or the wise men of godlyman in which he lampooned the main players it delighted the public to hold their Bettors up to ridicule especially the king and his German cronies a Wim wam it most certainly was of course once the gath is blown then everybody slaps themselves on the back and said yes of course yes of course um but then the whole thing gets used by critics of the English um you know particularly I mean I'm thinking of Voltaire even writes about Mary Toft mainly so that he can just point out how superstitious the English are you know the French was far more sophisticated wouldn't dream of doing anything so silly of course there were casualties santandre was the first he was publicly humiliated at court and it was said that he never ate rabbit again Mary was sent to Bridewell prison for being a vile imposter and a cheat she was satirized as the Surrey rabbit breeder and she never escaped the sexual innuendo of her condition after all the 18th century word for a rabbit track was a prick Mary was held in tott Hill Fields prison but she could not be held indefinitely without a trial and who would lose most by her conviction after all she hadn't done much except Hoodwinked the establishment so she was quietly released in her Time Mary Toft had achieved something remarkable she had outwitted a society that seldom expected or allowed any social progress especially for women when maritov died her name was in the newspaper it was listed alongside the Great and the good there's no way in her ordinary existence her name would have been listed in the newspapers when she died um so in some ways I suppose you could say that it had been a you know a successful fraud fraud was a growing problem in the 18th century it was the White Collar well the white ruffle crime of the day and no one was more roguished villainous or devious than one particular member of the Georgian Elite the rich it appeared were often Above the Law one well-connected Devon Merchant Thomas Benson cheated the tax man out of close to a million pounds in today's money was a human trafficker and committed one of the largest Insurance frauds of the century Benson's crimes were perpetrated far away from crowded London they centered on the picturesque and peaceful North Devon town of appledore [Music] in 1747 at the age of 39 the world seemed to lie at Benson's feet he was married with Children and had inherited wealth and Merchant ships from his successful father what's more the king had just made him Sheriff of Devon so Benson was Law and Order in the county the man to bring Justice to its people what could possibly go wrong Benson lived at a time and in a place where there were immense rewards to be had the north Devon Coast in the mid-18th century was benefiting enormously from the trade in and out of Bristol and to the Americas so how did Benson begin his climb up the greasy pole and how did he acquire the veneer of respectability well one particular object in the Guild Hall in Barnstable I think gives the game away and this is it it's a seriously impressive solid silver very large punch bowl just here we can see Benson's coat of arms now next to it there's an inscription the gift of Thomas Benson Esquire to the corporation of Barnstable and the key thing in understanding that is that we know he gave it to them just before he decided to run as Member of Parliament for Barnstable and that that year he was elected unopposed now I shouldn't really say it here but I think it might have been a bribe the Thomas Benson case illustrates I think just how above a certain level corruption was Rife everybody knew that corruption lay at the heart of the English electoral system you know in the idea that there were you know perks and preferences and cronyiest kind of activities going on at all levels of society was common people understood that the higher up the social scale you went the less likely you were to get caught the less likely you were to be put through the courts it was the poor that always gets the blame Benson now started to play the system for all it was worth by escalating his occasional dodgy dealing into full-scale fraud Benson lived on that Hill up there and from there he could watch as his ship set sail for France Portugal and the Americas now behind me is the sheltered Estuary but beyond it is the Open Sea and that's where we'll discover that this man who was the law sought to live outside of the law [Music] to get to the bottom of Benson's rotary I'm taking a boat trip to the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel hi young hello how are you doing Sam isn't it it is nice to meet you thank you very much over a period of six years from 1747 to 1753 an extraordinary Tale unfolded one that would shock Benson's constituents dishonor his office and leave a catalog of smuggling and deception on a quite breathtaking scale Lundy would play an important part in Benson's Tale shortly after he became MP and sheriff for Devon Thomas Benson took the lease of the Island an island that was apparently uninhabited neglected and derelict on a good day Benson could see this island from his house but he wasn't interested in romantic ruins and he decided to make Lundy the key to his nefarious Deeds he would make this island his own private Kingdom Lundy lies at the Gateway to the Bristol Channel just three miles long it is now the peaceful haunt of holiday makers and bird watchers in the 18th century it was a dangerous place a place of Smugglers and mysterious comings and goings it was not a place that welcomed prying eyes or probing questions Thomas Benson MP used his position to secure lucrative tobacco contracts but strangely the amount of tobacco loaded on his ships in America was always more than that which was unloaded in England I think you can guess where the rest went to evade Customs tax Benson secretly unloaded Tobacco on Landy then when he felt it was safe he would smuggle the rest ashore under the noses of the revenue men a very profitable scam but Benson had another secret to conceal as well as smuggled tobacco he also had an illicit trade in convicts Benson was able to get a contract to transport convicts to the Americas not very many of them at a time but but a few of them and what he did was take them to Lundy Island which was not in his view part of England in the making of this program we uncovered 14 separate contracts in the Devon Heritage Center these documents reveal the true scale of Benson's corrupt Empire evidence that the real Rogues of the age were not the poor pickpocket or Thief but men like Thomas Benson this is one of the original contracts that Benson signed to take convicts to America and it's a remarkable document that puts everything that he did into context first of all we have the date just under his signature and his seal at the bottom then there is a list of these poor people who are going to be transported we see Elizabeth Penny William Frost John Lake and others there are 12 people here says very clearly that they have been a judge to be transported to some of his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America now I think most interesting of all is is that right down at the bottom here it says the only reason that he is not to fulfill this duty is if these conflicts suffer from Death casualties of the Seas or having been taken by enemy only those are the exceptions by which he doesn't have to fulfill this contract despite what seemed watertight contracts some of these men and women never reached America they ended up in Lundy barely 12 miles off the coast it was said that the convicts were housed in the ruins of the castle and sometimes in a cave below the graffiti on the cave walls some believe belongs to the poor unfortunate convicts men and women who were exploited without Mercy trapped because the penalty for escaping Transportation was death he's so Brazen about this that he invites oh various other local Grandes to go and visit Lundy they stay the night there they see the people working there Benson makes jokes about how it's not you know as long as he's taken them out of England they've they've been transported it doesn't matter if they don't actually get to America Benson's arrogance was nearly his undoing he was prosecuted for failing to honor his contracts to take the convicts to the Americas amazingly he got off but in the process had drawn attention to his smuggling he already owed over 8 000 pounds in unpaid taxes a considerable sum in the 1750s and the revenue men were closing in he then came up with another good wheeze one that would solve the problem of Lundy and make him a tidy summer the plan involved a rather broken down aging ship the Nightingale a previously upright Captain a full cargo of pewter linen and salt all insured to the hilt of course oh and some convicts banned for Maryland 12 chained men and three manacled women these convicts were nearly a master stroke and then just before the ship finally sailed from Lundy she was unloaded of all her Goods because Benson wanted a maximum return and so the Nightingale left Lundy and when she was close to another ship the Charming Nancy of Philadelphia the Nightingale was scuttled and a fire was lit the ensuing blaze of course was blamed upon the convicts the captain the crew and the chain convicts then took to the boats and the Nightingale slowly sank it seemed the perfect crime and it almost was but a drunken member of the crew with two looser tongue let the whole tail unravel even Benson couldn't stop the arrest trial and sentenced to death of his captain Lancey and with the Noose tightening around him Benson fled to Portugal his brief rule over the kingdom of Lundy was at an end Benson's crime spree had ended in utter disgrace once a sheriff he was now an outlaw this wonderful room is the main chamber of the Barnstaple Guild Hall and it used to be the town's courtroom it's a wonderful place there are galleries for Witnesses and tiered seating you get a real sense that this was once the Beating Heart of Law and Order in the town now also all around the walls are portraits of mayor's local dignitaries people who donated money to the town and there's one very important one missing Thomas Benson Benson was never seen again rumors circulated that he had secretly returned using his influential contacts but in truth he lived out his days in a Porto and is buried in an unmarked grave by the river there Thomas Benson a man outwardly respectable but appearances can be deceptive Benson had been able to hide in plain sight because public life was so corrupted in George and Britain the Sinister case of Edinburgh Town councilor William Deacon Brody Scotland's Most Wanted Outlaw a man who was an upright member of Edinburgh Society during the day and an unscrupulous ruthless and immoral felon at night it seemed as if every door in the town was open to him especially after Dark foreign the title Deacon didn't come from the church but because he was a master Craftsman a cabinet maker and he was head of the Woodworkers and Carpenters Guild he appeared to be a sober and industrious man [Music] on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh is a pub commemorating William Brody as one of the city's least favorite Sons on the front of the sign is Brody elegant and respectable on the reverse is the dark side of the man a thief and a burglar and a very cunning one at that this is William Brody and here through this wonderful old Edinburgh Arch used to be his Workshop where under Brody's supervision the finest furniture for the finest houses in Edinburgh would be made Brody's house just across the street from the pub no longer exists but his Workshop does Brody's Workshop is now a rather nice cafe but it's here that he would have made his furniture work which included the fitting and repair of locks so like Jack Shepherd his trade gave him the necessary skills to get into an out of any property he chose but unlike Jack Brody was supposed to be a respectable man William Brody came from an upstanding local family it's strange that a man with apparently so much to lose should risk it all on a life of robbery but away from refined Society Brody kept two Mistresses with children both were unknown to his friends and his parents and both were unknown to each other he liked to gamble he was particularly fond of cockfighting and he also liked to drink this was a man who was addicted to living beyond his means by 1786 Brody was facing a deepening cash crisis his appetite for women drink and the gaming tables was driving him to bankruptcy he needed another trade and his access to clients Keys gave him the means to embark on a nightlife of thieving as Brody himself said why breaking when you can walk in a one-man crime wave gripped the Old Town Brody was twice blessed he had the stolen property and gained extra work providing new locks and stronger windows for the victims of his crimes the two sides of Brody's personality are captured in the story of an Exquisite cabinet that survives in the writers Museum in Edinburgh a piece of Craftsman's ship that would link him to one of the most famous literary works of The Next Century this fine cabinet was in the childhood bedroom of Wright and Robert Louis Stevenson and it was made by our very own William Deacon Brody Stevenson as a child became fascinated with Brody's story particularly with his dual personality and it said that it inspired him to write the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a man who embodied both Good and Evil it's a Macabre object for a small boy's bedroom was a risk taker having tasted a life of crime he overreached himself everybody knew that when somebody got caught the best way to avoid prosecution was to shop your comrades your erstwhile Associates like many criminals of his time Brody's mistake I suppose is yes becoming somewhat overconfident and not being too careful about who he chooses to work with [Music] Brodie assembled a small gang to affect his robberies Andrew Ainsley George Smith and John Brown a convicted Thief already on the run from transportation their ambition was soon to outgrow their ability the Edinburgh excise office the tax office was in this court and on the night of 5th of March 1788 it was to be the location of Brody's Most Daring raid and his undoing the excise office was known to store large sums of money and that night 600 pounds in cash was to be kept on site Brody planned it well he had cased the joint and made a copy of the main door key Brody and his three accomplices cloaked and masked and with dimmed lanterns made their way down the alley Brodie had been drinking heavily which was his first mistake he only had a key to the outer door so they had to force the inner door they were then disturbed by the unexpected arrival of Mr James boner a bank official who had forgotten some papers in a panic they knocked Bona aside and they fled to save his own skin Brody then split from the others so he could establish an alibi but that was his main mistake in showing no loyalty to his accomplices they would then show no loyalty to him particularly when there was a large reward on offer the weak link was Brown John Brown was already on the Run having escaped from transportation turning King's evidence against Brody might lead to a pardon a once in a lifetime opportunity Brown chanced it and Brody fled first to York then London and on to Amsterdam all with George Williamson one of Scotland's Chief Law Officers hot on his Trail [Music] the remarkable thing was that he ran but didn't get away although he escaped Edinburgh the Scottish constables had new allies in the south once he's absconded to Amsterdam the Bow Street office in London tries to engineer getting him back now this isn't in a period before we have formal extradition orders with anyone but the Bow Street office takes initiatives so they intercept his correspondence in which he gives away that he's in or stand on his way to Amsterdam I think well we'll correspond with the magistrates of Amsterdam and see if we can get him picked up and held while we come over and collect him sounds like formal extradition wasn't formal at all it was an it was a it was a one-off actually brought back to Edinburgh on an overcast August morning in 1788 Brody and his co-accused Smith faced a packed Court [Music] Brody was described as a sometime right and a cabinet maker the first witness for the King was John Brown his evidence would prove fatal for both men they had robbed together and would hang together [Music] Deacon Brody was destined to die on a scaffold that he had helped build himself after all it was his civic duty as an upstanding member of the city to make sure that habitual criminals got their Just Desserts 40 000 people came to watch here just yards from his workshop and home as he climbed the scaffold Deacon seemed relaxed he had an easy manner about him even at this late hour had he one last trick up his sleeve well his collar rumors circulated that Brody had one final devious plan to cheat the inevitable there were stories of a secret steel collar stories of a special deal with the hangman stories he had cheated death all fanciful [Music] his body was cut down by his friends and rushed back through this alley to his Workshop where there were desperate attempts to revive him but the hangman had done his job well and William Deacon Brody was no more foreign [Music] of the saddest mementos of Brody's life is this the Brody Family Bible it's rather fragile but beautifully preserved and one of the prize artifacts here in the museum of Edinburgh now towards the back are the details of the Brody family tree Francis Brody William's father has Faithfully recorded the details of his marriage to Sissel Grant and also the birth of his sons well one son actually because the details of his first son William presumably the apple of their eye have been erased from their memory but not from history by the end of the 18th century it was no longer possible to live outside the law the age Of The Dashing Highwayman and that of the swashbuckling pirate had passed urban crime and fraud would of course continue but policing and police detection meant that although the Rogue could still break the law he could no longer live outside the law the modern world brought to an end the criminal as some sort of good guy or pantomime villain but our more traditional Rogues gave us ripping Yarns dark morality Tales and The unlikeliest of escapades and you know that's good enough for me [Music]

Channel: Real History

Views: 1,244,657

Keywords: World History, US History, History Lessons, Real History, Crime, Pirates, Highwaymen

Id: _PcIGb08RT8

Length: 175min 46sec (10546 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022