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Tag Archives: c18
Resource: Narcissus Luttrell’s State Affairs
I’ve previously commented on some of the difficulties with the voluminous digital archives available on the web. Google Books and archive.org offer an extraordinary amount of material, but the curation – meaning the organization and metadata – is often deficient. … Continue reading
The Women of Southwark Mint
For my second post on women in the Mint, I turn from fiction to data. The final clause of the Act against Southwark Mint offered an amnesty to those Minters, discharging debts below £50, albeit at the cost of “assigning … Continue reading
Moll Flanders in the Mint
For International Women’s Day, and for Women’s History Month, the first of two posts about women in the Southwark Mint. Published in 1721, a few years before the dissolution of the Mint, Moll Flanders gives a rare view of that … Continue reading
The Minters petition Parliament
So far, most of the texts I have found concerning the debtor sanctuaries of London have been written by their opponents: laws and indictments, and also the last dying words transmitted via the Ordinary of Newgate. There has also been … Continue reading
The Black Act
Following on from my previous post, I present the text of the infamous ‘Black Act’ of 1723. This draconian statute was ostensibly in response to the ‘emergency’ created by organized poaching in Windsor and Hampshire. It created a host of … Continue reading
The Ordinary of Newgate’s account of Charles Towers
I’ve previously published one version of the story of Charles Towers; here is a contemporary telling from the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account. It’s not the complete document; I’ve removed the parts not relating to Towers, meaning those to the William … Continue reading
The Law enters Southwark Mint
We now present another classic piece of ‘Newgate Literature’, featuring adultery, fraud, debt, perjury, sanctuary, murder, court room shenanigans, and an execution to round everything off. But for my purposes the central interest is in the description of law enforcement … Continue reading
Thomas Baston’s “Little Republick”
Little is known of Thomas Baston, a printmaker specializing in naval scenes. It appears he was born in the early 1670s, fought the French at sea and perhaps the Irish on land, lived and worked in London, had prints commissioned … Continue reading
Resources: Canting Dictionaries
To round off this series of posts on canting language, here are links to those pre-Victorian cant, slang and jargon vocabularies freely available on the internet. More are to be found in various subscription archives; these are not listed here … Continue reading
The Life of Charles Towers, a Minter in Wapping
Of all the sanctuaries, Wapping Mint, also known as the New Mint, was the most audacious and the shortest lived. Set up by refugees from Southwark Mint after the act of 1722, the claim for being a sanctuary was based … Continue reading