When Mary Frith was a little girl she was described
as ‘… a very Tomrig or Rumpscuttle,’
which isn’t a description we use of little girls too often in our own day
(although perhaps we should); she was, as we might say instead, a tomboy. She
would run, jump, hop and fight with boys, and very often beat them, and soon
developed a taste for tavern-life. Her parents had thought to put her into
service but she had no love for housework and had a ‘… natural abhorrence to
the tending of children.’ Instead,
she grew up to be ‘a lusty and sturdy wench,’ took to a life of crime
and gained notoriety as a bully, forger, receiver of stolen goods,
fortune-teller and as a pick-pocket, from which she earned her nickname of ‘Moll
Cutpurse.’
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| A Cutpurse |
In those days (the early 1600s) before pockets became popular,
people would carry their money and valuables in a purse on their belts or
girdles, and a cutpurse would surreptitiously cut the strings by which it was
suspended and steal it away. They worked in teams; a ‘bulk’ would create
an obstruction or distraction (usually starting a fight), the ‘file’
(like Moll) would cut the purse whilst the third, the ‘rub’, would carry
it off. For a £20 wager, Moll dressed in a doublet and breeches, boots with
spurs and with a trumpet in her hand and a banner over her back, rode from
Charing Cross to Shoreditch on Morocco, a famous performing horse.
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| Morocco - the Performing Horse |
Moll was
hauled before an ecclesiastical court for the ‘crime’ of impropriety, (wearing
men’s clothes), and was sentenced to do penance wearing a white sheet at the
door of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, after which she regularly wore men’s clothes,
feeling that she had paid for the licence to do so. She was said to have wept
copiously as she underwent the punishment, which undoubtedly pleased the
authorities, until it came out later that she had drunk six pints of wine
before she went to be punished. She was also, it is said, the first woman who
regularly smoked tobacco in England.
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| Moll Cut-Purse Smoking |
She was a fine horsewoman, an adroit
fencer and fought readily with a cudgel, and contrary to the norm of her day,
she appeared on stage in plays and also played the lute to an audience (when
only male performers were allowed in the theatre). She also made what is
considered to be a marriage of convenience in 1614, to counter allegations that
she was a ‘spinster’ (which was code for ladies who, shall we say, favour the
flatter shoe).
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| Middleton and Dekker - The Roaring Girle - 1611 |
Moll was known as a ‘roaring girl’, after the ‘roarers’
of her day – young men who drank heavily in taverns and then fought savagely in
the streets, just for the hell of it – and a play by Middleton and Dekker ‘The
Roaring Girl’ (1611) was written about her exploits, presenting her in a
flattering, if idealized, light. Another play, Amends for Ladies, a
comedy also featuring Moll Cutpurse, by Nathaniel Field, appeared in 1639.
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| Nathaniel Field - Amends for Ladies - 1639 |
After King Charles returned from the Scotch War in the same year, she rushed
out into Fleet Street, shook and kissed the King’s hand shouting, “Welcome
Home, Charles,” and paid £20 for wine to be poured down the Great Conduit
which brought fresh drinking water into the city of London. When the Civil War
broke out, Moll declared herself most definitely for the King, and her exploits
as a highwaywoman served the Royal cause, as she only robbed Cromwell’s
supporters. She was said to have robbed General Fairfax and his men of 250
Jacobuses (a golden coin worth 25 shillings), on Hounslow Heath, shot him
through the leg and killed two horses belonging to his servants, was pursued
and taken prisoner by the Roundheads and sent to Newgate Prison, where she
gained her freedom with a bribe of £2,000.
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| Moll (or Mall) Cut-Purse |
She considered the robbery to be
just, as the Parliamentarians had, in her opinion, stolen the crown from her
King. She used the proceeds from her highway robberies to buy food and
provisions for the cavalier soldiery. In later life, she became a procuress and
ran a bawdy house, catering for both male and female clientele, high and low
alike, and made more money by becoming a go-between that negotiated between
thieves and the robbed for the safe return of stolen property. She also had
trained animals, which she exhibited for profit, and can be seen with an ape, a
dog and a parrot in a contemporary portrait.
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| Moll Cutpurse and her animals |
She died from dropsy, on July 26th
1659, aged 74, and left only £100 out of an estimated fortune of once over
£3,000, having given away most of the proceeds of her crimes, much of it to
distressed cavalier soldiers. She left her remaining money to a relative, John
Frith, a shipmaster at Rotherhithe, advising him to spend the money on wine,
like a man, rather than risk drowning in salt water, like a dog, with £20 to be
set aside and spent to make wine run once more down the Fleet Street Conduit.
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| Middleton and Dekker - The Roaring Girle - 1611 |
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