Tyburn - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

John Winship: The Young Highwayman of Covent Garden

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.

John Winship: The Young Highwayman of Covent Garden

Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop.

Subscribe via RSS

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.

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Matthew Clark: The Cowardly Footpad Who Turned Killer

by Davros Dark

Matthew Clark is the kind of figure who makes true crime so unsettling: not a mastermind, not a hardened villain, but a lazy, cowardly young man whose small vices compound into something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals introduces him as a creature formed entirely from the worst impulses of low life; idle, drunk, driven by lust, and too timid to commit even the crimes he plans.

Born in St. Albans to parents of modest means, Clark squanders every opportunity placed before him. Dismissed from a gentleman’s household for sheer incorrigibility, he drifts into roadside robbery on the heaths outside London; not from ambition, but because honest labour feels harder than the risk of the noose.

The Georgian world Clark inhabits is one where cowardice and desperation make a volatile combination, and the roads between country and city are lined with gallows that watch every traveller pass. Hear the full account read aloud from Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; let this dark voice from nearly three centuries ago carry you into Matthew Clark’s story.

Matthew Clark: The Cowardly Footpad Who Turned Killer

Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop.

Subscribe via RSS

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Footpad: a robber who works on foot, as opposed to a highwayman who attacks from horseback. The footpad was considered the lowest and most contemptible breed of thief; lacking even the theatrical swagger of the mounted robber, he was simply a desperate figure lurking in hedgerows and waiting for someone weaker to come along.

Meaner sort: nothing to do with cruelty here. In eighteenth century usage, ‘mean’ referred to lowly social standing or humble circumstances. The ‘meaner sort’ were the poor and labouring classes; the ones Georgian writers worried most about when it came to moral corruption.

Passengers: today we think of someone sitting in a vehicle, but in this era a passenger was simply anyone passing along a road on foot, horseback, or in a coach. Every passenger on a lonely heath was a potential victim; every stretch of road between towns was a hunting ground.

Junketting: feasting, merrymaking, carousing. The word ‘junket’ still survives in modern English, usually meaning a lavish trip at someone else’s expense, but in Clark’s day it was rawer and more physical: drinking bouts, dancing, and the reckless spending of stolen money on fleeting pleasures.

The matrimonial maggot bit his brain: a wonderfully vivid eighteenth century expression. A ‘maggot’ in this context was a whim or a sudden foolish fancy; the image is of a parasitic idea burrowing into a person’s thoughts and driving them to irrational action. When the matrimonial maggot bit Clark, it meant the notion of marriage seized hold of him like a fever.

Timorous: fearful, easily frightened. Still in use today but far less common, it perfectly captures Clark’s defining trait: a man who plans violence but whose own cowardice keeps undoing him, at least until desperation finally overwhelms his fear.

Jocose: playful, humorous, given to joking. The word carries a warmth and ease that makes its use in this story deeply chilling; Clark sits laughing and flirting with a woman he is already planning to kill.

Made a shift: managed with difficulty, barely succeeded. In this account, the phrase describes a dying woman’s final desperate effort; she ‘made a shift to mutter his name,’ meaning she barely managed to speak it through a wound that should have silenced her entirely.

About This Series

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Barbara Spencer: The Young Coiner of Cripplegate

by Davros Dark

Barbara Spencer is barely out of childhood when the world begins to shape her into something dangerous. Raised without restraint in the cramped lanes of Cripplegate, she is the kind of figure that Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures with unflinching clarity: a young woman too proud for servitude, too restless to stay still, drawn by temperament toward the edges of lawful life.

Her drift into counterfeiting feels almost inevitable; a single act of defiance carries her out of her mother’s alehouse and into the company of coiners who see her recklessness as a useful tool. In the annals of true crime, few portraits are as vivid as this one: a girl barely twenty, pushing false money through London’s streets with a freedom she mistakes for power.

Georgian justice has a particular cruelty reserved for women convicted of this offence, and the machinery of that law is already turning. Hear her story read aloud from the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; every word preserved, every detail intact, waiting for you now.

Barbara Spencer: The Young Coiner of Cripplegate — #image_title

Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop.

Subscribe via RSS

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Mean parents: today ‘mean’ usually suggests cruelty or stinginess, but in eighteenth century usage it simply meant humble or of low social standing. Barbara’s parents were not wicked; they were poor and unremarkable, the kind of people the law barely noticed until their children crossed it.

Mantua-maker: a dressmaker who specialised in the mantua, a loose flowing gown fashionable in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was one of the few skilled trades open to women, and an apprenticeship to one could have set Barbara on a very different path.

Utter: to utter false money had nothing to do with speaking. In legal language it meant to put counterfeit coins into circulation; to pass them off as genuine in a transaction. The crime of uttering was considered a form of petty treason against the Crown, because the monarch’s image and authority were stamped upon every coin.

Vend: to sell or distribute. Paired with ‘utter’ in the text, it underlines the commercial nature of the offence; coiners operated in networks, with some people manufacturing the forgeries and others, like Barbara, sent out into the streets to move them.

Petty treason: a legal category that has no modern equivalent. It covered crimes that violated a bond of allegiance or obedience: a wife killing her husband, a servant killing a master, or a subject counterfeiting the king’s coin. The penalties for petty treason were deliberately more severe than those for ordinary felonies, and for women the distinction carried a uniquely horrifying consequence.

Faggots and brushes: bundles of sticks and dry kindling used to build the fire at an execution by burning. The word ‘faggot’ today carries entirely different connotations, but in this period it referred simply to a bound bundle of firewood; the mundane fuel of an extraordinary punishment.

St. Giles’s Pound: a public pound near the parish of St. Giles in the Fields, used for impounding stray livestock. The area around it was notorious for poverty, gin shops and criminal networks; it was exactly the kind of place where a young runaway could vanish into a new and dangerous life overnight.

Discover: in this context, to discover someone meant to reveal or expose their identity to the authorities. Barbara refused to discover those who taught her to coin; she would not name them, even under the weight of her own conviction.

About This Series

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Robert Perkins: The Disinherited Baker Turned Thief

by Davros Dark

Robert Perkins grows up in Hertfordshire as the son of a prosperous innkeeper, but prosperity does not protect him. After his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home; stripped of affection, stripped of inheritance, stripped of everything that might have held him steady.

As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, Perkins drifts into the kind of company that haunts the margins of Georgian England: drinkers, gamblers, idlers whose appetites outrun their means. His is the sort of true crime story that begins not with malice but with dispossession; a young man living as though he still possessed his father’s fortune while owning almost nothing at all.

What follows is a life pulled further and further from solid ground, carried across oceans and through the gears of a justice system that does not forget. Listen now as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals delivers this restless and melancholy account in full.

Robert Perkins: The Disinherited Baker Turned Thief

Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop.

Subscribe via RSS

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 the eighteenth century it was the standard term for a stepmother. When the text says Perkins’s mother-in-law had him turned out of the house, it means his father’s new wife; not some distant relative by marriage, but the very woman who replaced his mother under the same roof.

Groat: a small silver coin worth fourpence. To say someone was ‘never a groat the better’ means they gained absolutely nothing; not even the most trivial sum. It was a common way of expressing total exclusion from any benefit or inheritance.

Cast: in legal language of this period, to be ‘cast’ meant to be found guilty at trial. It sounds almost casual to modern ears, like being tossed aside; and in a sense it was exactly that, the court casting you out of ordinary life and into the hands of punishment.

Upon the rake: to go ‘upon the rake’ meant to go out carousing; drinking, gambling, chasing trouble through the streets. A ‘rake’ was a dissolute young man, and the phrase captures the reckless energy of young men looking for anything but honest work.

Shuffle-board: not quite the gentle cruise-ship game of today. In Georgian alehouses, shuffleboard was a tavern pastime played on long wooden tables, and it was closely associated with gambling, idleness, and the kind of company that led to worse things.

Crown piece: a large silver coin worth five shillings. In this account, the alehouse owners had marked a crown with particular scratches or notches so it could be identified if stolen from the till; a trap that snapped shut on Perkins.

Transportation: the sentence of being shipped to the colonies as forced labour. It sounds almost merciful compared to the gallows, but in practice it meant being sold to a planter and worked in conditions little different from enslavement; and returning without permission was a capital offence.

Vulgar pleasures: today ‘vulgar’ suggests crude or obscene, but in this context it simply meant common or low; the cheap amusements of ordinary people. Drinking, gaming, skittle-playing: none of it was scandalous on its own, but together these pastimes marked a young man as someone drifting toward ruin.