Robert Perkins grows up the son of a prosperous innkeeper near Hempsted in Hertfordshire, but when his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home and stripped of everything. Disinherited, apprenticed to a baker, and left to the wide world, he drifts toward drink, gambling, and the company of young men heading nowhere good.
One night in a Whitechapel alehouse, a marked crown piece is found in his pocket, and just like that, old England's justice takes hold of him and does not let go. His story is a true crime case built on small misfortunes that stack into something terrible.
Listen now to how a stolen coin set a young man on a course that would carry him across oceans and back again, with the law waiting at every shore.
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FROM THE 1735 TEXT
the ready way to force a naked uninstructed youth on the most sinful courses
Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Mother-in-law: today this means your spouse's mother, but in old England it commonly referred to a stepmother. When the text says Perkins's 'mother-in-law' turned him out, it means the woman his father married after his real mother died.
Cast: not thrown, but convicted. In old England's courtrooms, to be 'cast' was to be found guilty; the word carried a finality that felt like being tossed aside by the law itself.
Transportation: the practice of shipping convicted criminals to colonies overseas as forced labourers. In old England it served as a middle punishment between whipping and the gallows; for someone like Perkins, it meant being sold to a planter for years of backbreaking work.
Crown piece: a silver coin worth five shillings. A marked crown was one with distinctive scratches or notches that let its owner identify it; shopkeepers in old England used this trick to catch thieves, essentially turning their own money into evidence.
Upon the rake: to go 'upon the rake' meant to go out looking for wild, dissolute fun: drinking, gambling, chasing trouble. Think of it as the old England version of a night out that everyone knows will end badly.
Shuffle-board: not the cruise-ship pastime you might picture, but a tavern game in old England where coins or discs were slid along a table. It was a common haunt of idlers and gamblers, and the text lists it alongside skittle-playing as evidence of Perkins's wasted days.
Sessions: the regular sittings of a criminal court in old England. Cases moved fast once the sessions came on; there was no long wait for trial, and for someone like Perkins, that speed was devastating.
Returning from transportation: coming back to England before your sentence of banishment had expired was a capital offence in old England. It did not matter how you had suffered abroad or how honestly you had lived since; the return itself was enough to hang you.
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.
