A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

If we are to understand the history of the past three thousand years we have to make an effort of
imagination, and try to forget this notion of being protected by the law. In ancient Greece, the
problem was not simply the brigands who haunted the roads and the pirates who infested the seas;
it was the fact that the ordinary citizen became a brigand or pirate when he felt like it; and no one
regarded this as abnormal. In the Odyssey, Ulysses describes with pride how, on the way home
from Troy, his ship was driven near to the coast of Thrace; so they landed near an unprotected
town, murdered all the men, and carried off the women and goods. Greece was not at war with
Thrace; it was just that an unprotected town was fair game for anyone, and the war-weary Greeks
felt like a little rape and plunder. This state of affairs persisted for most of the next three thousand
years, and explains why so many Mediterranean towns and villages are built inland.
What is far more difficult to grasp is that ‘law abiding’ countries like England were in exactly the
same situation. Just before the time of the Black Death (as Luke Owen Pike describes in his History
of Crime in England, 1873), ‘houses were set on fire day after day; men and women were captured,
ransom was exacted on pain of death... even those who paid it might think themselves fortunate if
they escaped some horrible mutilation.’ And this does not relate to times of war or social upheaval;
according to J. F. Nicholls and John Taylor’s Bristol Past and Present (1881) England was
‘prosperous in the highest degree; populous, wealthy and luxurious...’ (p. 174). Yet the robber
bands were like small armies. They would often descend on a town when a fair was taking place
and everyone felt secure; they would take over the town, plunder the houses and set them on fire
(for citizens who were trying to save their houses would not organise a pursuit) and then withdraw.
In 1347 and ‘48, Bristol was taken over by a brigand who robbed the ships in the harbour -
including some commissioned by the king - and issued his own proclamations like a conqueror. His
men roamed the streets, robbing and killing as they felt inclined - the king had to send Thomas,
Lord Berkeley, to restore order. When a trader was known to have jewels belonging to Queen
Philippa in his house, he was besieged by a gang led by one Adam the Leper and had to hand over
the jewels when his house was set on fire. The law courts were almost powerless; when a notorious
robber was tried near Winchester, the gang waited outside the court and attacked everyone who
came out; so the case was dropped.
Things were still almost as bad four centuries later, in the time of Dr Johnson; gangs of robbers
attacked houses in the country at night and sometimes burned them down. Bands of footpads armed
with knives attacked parties of prosperous-looking people in London’s Covent Garden, and Horace
Walpole was shot by a highwayman in Hyde Park. ‘The farmers’ fields were constantly plundered
of their crops, fruit and vegetables were carried off, even the ears of wheat were cut from their
stalks in the open day. The thieves boldly took their plunder to the millers to be ground, and the
millers, although aware that fields and barns had been recently robbed, did not dare to object, lest
their mills should be burnt down over their heads.’ This is described by Major Arthur Griffiths in
his Mysteries of the Police and Crime (Vol. 1, p. 66). In Queen Victoria’s London, according to
works such as Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and The Victorian Underworld by
Kellow Chesney, footpads could operate by day, sometimes in upper-class residential districts:
Even children were not safe; ‘child strippers’, mostly women, would lure children into doorways
and steal their clothes.
What is so hard for us to grasp is that the whole of society, from top to bottom, operated upon
principles that would seem ferociously cruel to a modern citizen of the western world. Our present
concern for children and animals would have struck an early Victorian as ludicrous, while Dr
Johnson would simply have condemned it as dangerous sentimentality. Boswell tells in his Life of