On Her Own Terms: the Highway-woman

This is an extract from Anna Field’s ‘Masculinity and Myth’, which won the 2014 History Today undergraduate dissertation prize, awarded in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society:


Moses Brotherton was assaulted and robbed of a bank note worth £20 while on the road from London to Staines, Middlesex with a consignment of post. His attacker was tried at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, in September 1744. Brotherton’s robber, who was mounted on horseback, had donned a ‘long white wig’ and obscured their face with a cape in order to carry out the attack. The mysterious assailant drew a pistol, which so frightened Brotherton that he tumbled from his horse to the ground. The robber also took two bags of mail destined for Portsmouth and Exeter. Brotherton claimed that, just before departing, the robber ‘put her hand in her pocket, and gave me a shilling’. After this unusual revelation, the court asked why Brotherton thought the robber was a woman. It emerged that upon attempting gestures characteristic of the dashing highwayman – the exchange of a polite handshake, a swift apology for the inconvenience and a jaunty exit – the ‘soft’ hands and feminine voice of the defendant, Ann Hocks, were revealed.

In this testimony, the male victim drew upon the romanticised language of literary depictions of the highwayman, mounted on horseback, dressed as a gentleman and sporting an array of weapons. Old Bailey trials were summarised in printed transcripts called the Old Bailey Proceedings and released in regular instalments throughout the 18th century. Out of 298 transcripts reporting trials of female highway robbers from 1681 to 1800, Brotherton’s testimony was the only example where this particular masculine image was evoked. So what did the other 297 transcripts say about female highway robbers? To help answer this question, we must first look at the legal context of the crime.
A fearful crime

Highway robbery was both a crime against property and a crime against the person. Perpetrators used a tangible threat or actual violence in order to steal goods from their victim. As the 17th-century magistrate Michael Dalton instructed in his Countrey Justice (1619), it was necessary for the victim to be ‘put in feare’ by the perpetrator’s ‘menacing’ actions and, as a result of that fear, handed over his goods. Any road in the country could be defined as the king’s highway, which meant that the legal term applied to robberies committed on the streets of both urban and rural areas. The inclusion of violence in the legal category meant that highway robbery was not understood by juries in the same way as a crime such as grand larceny, which was another felonious property crime. Grand larcenists could claim benefit of clergy, whereby if the suspect correctly recited a passage from the Bible they received the punishment of whipping or branding instead of hanging. A convicted highway robber could not claim benefit of clergy. The punishment for highway robbery was hanging and pardons could only be conditional on transportation.

The 298 Old Bailey transcripts are reports from the trials of women prosecuted for highway robbery in 18th-century London and Middlesex. The female suspects were tried alone, with members of their own sex or in groups where female defendants equalled or outnumbered the male counterparts with whom they were prosecuted. A quick search of statistics from the Old Bailey Proceedings online database reveals that a total of 420 female defendants were tried over the period. This larger total includes women who were tried as accessories to male defendants, as well as in groups where men predominated. However the status of these particular women as active agents in the robberies is ambiguous, so they have not been included in this study. Nonetheless, the numbers show that the incidence of women prosecuted for highway robbery was much higher than for stereotypically ‘female’ felonies such as infanticide (186 defendants) or petty treason (17 defendants), crimes which have so far received greater attention from historians and others. We cannot assume that images of highway-women in the Proceedings, or in the semi-fictitious printed literature of criminal biographies and broadside ballads, carried the same cultural weight as depictions of murderers of new-born children. Trial reporters, as well as authors of various forms of printed literature, relied on assumptions about both female violence and sexuality that warrant further and more detailed explanation. Our present concern with the legal category reveals that the law did not require horses, pistols or fine clothing to convict a highway robber. The law instead emphasised the use of fear to steal goods from a person. To start with, then, a comparison with non-violent female property crime is especially instructive. The kinds of goods women stole, who they stole from and how female thieves behaved all contributed to the image of the female highway robber in the trial reports.

Female highway robbers stole the same kinds of items as non-violent female thieves, such as clothing, household goods, jewellery and watches. These items remained a popular target for female thieves during the 17th and 18th centuries, because the personal and economic value, as well as the ubiquity of the goods, remained fairly unchanged. For example, in 1721 Jane Worsley violently stole ‘a Stuff Ridinghood and a Linnen sheet’ from Margaret Pritchard. Worsley had to ‘throttle’ Pritchard in order to wrestle the hood from her. The linen could easily have been sold, as it kept a constant value, whereas the hood may have been selected for its aesthetic appeal. In the early modern period, clothing was one of the most obvious indicators of status and a person’s immediate wealth. It was possible that Worsley wanted the hood for herself; perhaps the temptation of fine clothing caused her to act opportunistically. On the other hand, her actions could have been premeditated, because it would have been fairly easy to sell the hood at the same time as the linen and for it to disappear into the legitimate trade in second-hand clothes. The wider cultural and economic value of clothing remained the same, regardless of whether the theft was violent or not. Examining the kinds of items that were stolen also allows us to consider the motives of the suspects in their own terms, separate from the explanations favoured by elite male commentators of the time or crime pamphlet authors, such as the female criminal’s ‘natural’ feminine weaknesses that led her to steal, or the dangerous nature of female violence.

Just as it informed the items favoured by female thieves, gender also informed the ways in which women’s crimes against property were discovered and the culprits pursued. For example, historians such as Garthine Walker have shown that early modern women could single out the most likely perpetrators of a theft in their communities by knowledge of unique items or identifying suspicious behaviour. This also applied to cases of highway robbery. Susan Perry was tried in 1713 at the Old Bailey for highway robbery committed against a young boy. She was also tried at the same time for the child’s murder. According to the trial account, Perry had stripped the child victim and sold some of the clothing to a female street peddler. The street peddler heard the news that a small boy had gone missing. She realised that the goods purchased from Perry matched the description of what the child was wearing when he disappeared. The woman searched the streets for Perry, managed to find her and took her to the local justice of the peace, under suspicion of stealing the child’s clothes. Meanwhile, the child’s aunt had received word of Perry’s arrest for stripping a child, so she went to the justice and identified the clothes as those of her nephew. The child’s body was later found in a ditch. Perry’s suspected involvement in the robbery contributed to circumstantial evidence that she was the murderer, too. The position of the peddler and the boy’s aunt locally enabled the first steps of the investigation to occur. The street peddler’s experience in lawful exchanges of goods meant she was more likely to pay attention to the appearance or distinguishing features of the items she bought. Her knowledge then allowed her to connect the purchase from Perry with the boy’s disappearance. Susan Perry and Jane Worsley’s trials also show that highway-women did not always commit their crimes outside of the communities in which they conducted their daily lives. Both Worsley and Perry operated in circles where they lived or worked, which indicates that gendered networks of employment and socialisation were just as important in cases of highway robbery as they were for non-violent thefts. Yet we cannot adequately consider highway-women without paying attention to violence. Violence was essential in order for the perpetrator’s actions to meet the legal criteria and secure conviction.

In the past, historians have suggested that female property criminals were generally unwilling to risk confrontation with their victims, so they undertook ‘petty’, non-violent thefts. However, it has since been shown by early modern gender historians that women did commit property crimes carrying a risk of confrontation with the victim, such as burglary or housebreaking. The trial reports from the Old Bailey contain evidence that can help us examine the nature of violence perpetrated by highway-women. Many of the victim testimonies included in the Old Bailey Proceedings depicted highway-women as dangerously violent. For example, Mary Mukes and Jane Dennis were put on trial at the Old Bailey in January 1727 for highway robbery. In order to make the suspects appear guilty, the victim, Isaac Estwick, attempted to frame Mukes’ and Dennis’ violence as serious enough to meet the legal criteria for conviction. Estwick deposed that the two women grabbed him ‘by the Cholar and pull’d’ him into a gin shop against his will. They hit his two companions with a poker, threw them out and locked Estwick inside the shop. Mukes and Dennis then assaulted him and took his money bag. He only escaped when his friends returned and managed to open the door again. The attack on Estwick took place behind closed doors, which meant that a clandestine element was involved in the crime. Estwick’s companions had been thrown out; they did not know for certain what was happening inside, their only experience having just been assaulted and now Estwick was stuck inside with the suspects. Such uncertainty about what was going on evoked a stereotype that a woman’s potential for violence was just as dangerous as any visibly violent actions. However, a stereotype was not enough for the women to be found guilty of highway robbery; their actions had to satisfy the legal criteria. They were ‘menacing’ and made a substantial threat of violence, but the crime took place in the gin shop, which was not on the king’s highway. Mukes and Dennis did use initiative and courage, because they selected and confronted their victim in order to carry out their crime. However, the courage and initiative displayed by female suspects in the Proceedings did not have the same origins as the courage of the gentleman highwayman. Narratives of violence in the trial accounts of female highway robbers were complex and bound up with assumptions of gender.
Sensational depiction

The trials of Worsley, Perry, Mukes and Dennis show the various ways in which women prosecuted for highway robbery were constructed in 18th-century sources. It is clear that these women’s crimes did not rely on the gallant, literary image of the highwayman. Yet what about Ann Hocks, the caped, bewigged attacker of Moses Brotherton? Hocks’s story does not have an end as glamorous as her sensational depiction warrants. She was acquitted at her trial due to insufficient evidence of her identity as the robber. Instead, more representative examples taken from the Old Bailey Proceedings show that the highway-woman has enough substance to be studied in her own right, which in turn opens up new ways of studying the crime in both its legal and cultural context. While the focus has been on the ways in which the crime was depicted at the Old Bailey, there is still further evidence to explore. Many more accounts of violence, as well as sexuality, underpinned contemporary accounts of female highway robbers in the Proceedings and in other printed sources, such as broadside ballads and criminal biographies. Attempting to identify and explain the significance of these languages offers us revealing ways to analyse the female highway robber on her own historical terms.

Anna Field is a postgraduate student at Cardiff University.


http://www.historytoday.com/anna-field/her-own-terms-highway-woman