Richard James is barely twelve years old when the world discards him. His father, a nobleman's cook, vanishes from his life early, and the boy is packed off to sea: a disposable child in old England's long machine of poverty and neglect.
What follows is a restless orbit of misfortune: captured by Spaniards, taken in by a kind house-painter abroad, drawn home by longing for England, only to find that England has nothing left for him. He marries too young, loses his wife to another man, and drifts toward the only trade that pays without asking questions.
His story is one of the rawest pieces of true crime from old England's highways: listen now and ride the Oxford Road with Richard James.
Follow the podcast so you never miss an episode:
FROM THE 1735 TEXT
He looked upon it as a very happy relief from a very troublesome and uneasy life.
Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Profligate: in old England this did not simply mean wasteful with money; it described a person morally abandoned, someone who had thrown off all restraint. To call a man profligate was to say his soul was ruined as thoroughly as his purse.
Disobliged: today we might say 'offended' or 'alienated.' In old England, to disoblige someone was to undo whatever goodwill they owed you: a quiet, devastating word for burning your last bridges.
Betake him: an old reflexive phrase meaning to commit oneself to a course of action. When James 'betook him to the sea,' it meant he had no other path; it carried the weight of surrender.
Viz.: short for the Latin 'videlicet,' meaning 'namely' or 'that is to say.' Writers in old England dropped it into sentences the way we might write 'i.e.' today: a crisp, clipped signal that the ugly truth was about to be named.
Waggoners: not casual travellers but the commercial drivers hauling goods by wagon along England's main roads. Robbing waggoners on the Oxford Road was both profitable and ruthless: these were working men carrying other people's freight.
Reprieve: a temporary suspension of a death sentence. In old England a reprieve was not a pardon; it was a pause, a breath between the verdict and the rope, sometimes granted by royal mercy and sometimes simply delayed until the next hanging day.
Place of execution: almost always Tyburn, the notorious gallows west of London where crowds gathered to watch the condemned die. In old England, your last words at the scaffold were a public performance; the crowd expected a speech, and they judged you by how well you gave it.
Ignominious: shameful, publicly disgraceful. James used the word himself at the scaffold, naming his own death as a thing of dishonour: not because he feared it, but because he understood the spectacle the law was making of him.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735) is one of the earliest works of true crime in the English language. Each week this podcast retells one of its stories for today's listener, keeping the old book's most striking lines.
