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Tag Archives: c18
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
The Great Pudding Robbery of 1718
An amusing little story, taken from Rendle and Norman’s The inns of old Southwark and their associations (1888), another of those charming antiquarian volumes so full of observation and detail. Covering areas transpontine, there’s some significant material on the sanctuaries … Continue reading
An Account of the Southwark Mint
The text below is taken from the first volume of John Timbs’ The Romance of London, published in 1865. Timbs was an antiquarian, with a prodigious output of anecdotal compilations – over 150, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911. … Continue reading
The Law against Wapping Mint
Another law, from 1724, the last made against the sanctuaries. Two years after the supression of Southwark Mint, similar measures were taken against those of its inhabitants that had crossed the Thames and claimed sanctuary at Wapping, where there once … Continue reading