He is seventeen, an apprentice carpenter in Covent Garden, and he has just noticed a young woman standing in a doorway. In Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, the story of John Winship begins not with violence but with infatuation; a boy whose idle upbringing leaves him entirely unprepared for the cost of courtship, and who drifts toward the road when honest wages fall short.
There is something quietly inevitable about Winship’s slide from lovesick youth to mounted robber, a trajectory that feels as urgent now as it did in the 1720s. His is a piece of true crime from an era when the line between a restless boy and a desperate outlaw could be crossed in a single reckless season.
The dark roads outside London are waiting, and John Winship is about to learn what the night demands in return for its silver. Hear his full account read aloud from the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; let the words of 1735 carry you back to the world he once rode through.
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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Footpad: a highway robber who works on foot rather than on horseback. Where the highwayman had a certain theatrical glamour, the footpad was considered the meaner, more desperate breed; closer to a mugger than a mounted outlaw. Winship is called both, which tells you he took whatever opportunity came his way.
Pistoles: not pistols, though the words look similar enough to confuse. A pistole was a gold coin, originally Spanish, widely circulated across Europe. When the Frenchman loses a hundred and twenty of them, the sum is enormous; this is serious money taken at serious risk.
Caressed: today this word suggests gentle physical affection, but in the eighteenth century it meant to treat with favour, to flatter, to welcome warmly into a group. When the gangs ‘caressed’ Winship, they were not being tender; they were courting his agility and daring for their own profit.
Chariot: not the ancient two-wheeled war vehicle. In Georgian England a chariot was a light, enclosed carriage for one or two passengers, often privately owned. It signals wealth; if you are riding in a chariot, you are worth robbing.
The Ordinary: the chaplain of Newgate Prison, whose official duty was to minister to condemned prisoners. He also had a sideline that would raise eyebrows today: publishing accounts of their confessions and lives for public sale. When Winship refuses to confess to the Ordinary, he is refusing to feed both the man’s spiritual office and his printing press.
Suffered: in modern English, to suffer is to endure pain. In this text, it simply means ‘allowed’ or ‘permitted’; youths are ‘suffered to live’ in idleness means they are let alone to do nothing. The word carried no implication of agony, only of passive tolerance.
Divers: nothing to do with swimming. This is an old form of ‘diverse,’ meaning various or several. When Winship is said to have been concerned in ‘divers gangs,’ the word paints a picture of a man drifting between criminal circles, never settling, always available.
Run distracted: to go mad, to lose one’s reason from grief or shock. It is a vivid phrase; the mind does not simply crack, it runs, as if sanity were a thing that bolts from the body and cannot be caught again.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.