William Barton is born with restlessness in his blood. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, his father abandons him as a child, fleeing to Jamaica with a concubine and a hold full of goods; the boy grows up in his grandfather’s eating-house, surrounded by comfort he cannot bring himself to accept.
This is true crime at its most unsettled: a young man who cannot sit still, who trades a safe apprenticeship for the open sea and trades the sea for soldiering and trades soldiering for the road. Every turn of fortune that might have saved him only sharpens his appetite for the next dangerous thing.
Somewhere on the highways of early Georgian England, the machinery of justice waits for a man who keeps running toward it.
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals preserves every twist of Barton’s restless, sprawling life; listen now and follow him into the dark.
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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.
Convened with: today ‘convene’ means to gather for a meeting; in early eighteenth century usage it could mean to cohabit or consort with someone, often with a hint of scandal. When the text says Barton’s father ‘had long convened with’ his concubine, it means they had been living together as lovers, not that they held committee meetings.
Temporal laws: these are the laws of the earthly state, as opposed to divine or ecclesiastical law. When the source says Barton’s father was ‘addicted to every species of wickedness, except such as are punished by temporal laws,’ it suggests the man was a sinner but not quite a criminal; wicked enough for God’s judgment, but careful enough to dodge the hangman’s.
Bound him to himself: not a reference to ropes or chains. To ‘bind’ a young person in this period means to apprentice them; the grandfather formally took Will on as his apprentice, training him in the eating-house trade. It was both a legal contract and a family rescue.
Rubbed on: to rub on means to get by, to muddle through with difficulty. It carries a sense of grinding friction; life is not smooth, you are scraping along it. The phrase is all but extinct today.
Reconnoitre: borrowed from the French, this military term means to survey or scout out an enemy position. Barton, the old soldier, sends his companion ahead to assess the strength of a stagecoach the way an officer would assess a fortification. It tells you everything about how he thinks: robbery is just war continued by other means.
Blunderbusses: a blunderbuss is a short, wide-muzzled firearm designed to spray shot at close range. The name likely comes from the Dutch ‘donderbus,’ meaning thunder gun. Coaches carried them as defensive weapons; their spread of shot made accurate aim unnecessary, which was the point.
Uxorious: excessively devoted to one’s wife. It sounds like a compliment, but in this context it is almost a diagnosis. Barton’s devotion to his wife is presented as the very engine that drives him onto the road; he robs because he cannot bear to see her want. The word carries a faint note of contempt, as if love itself is a weakness when it leads a man to the gallows.
Quoth: simply ‘said.’ Already old-fashioned by 1735, it survived mainly in literary and legal writing. When ‘quoth Will’ appears, the narrator is giving Barton’s words a slightly theatrical air, as if recounting a scene from a stage play rather than a crime report.
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.