Thieves

The most famous thief of them all is undoubtedly Robin Hood, although arguments still rage about whether he was a man or a myth. The story goes that he was an outlaw that lived in Sherwood Forrest in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

The people of England in the Middle Ages were going through a bad time and suffering under the tyranny of the nobility. Laws were introduced about where you were and weren’t allowed to hunt and many families were forced to break them or go hungry. Robin Hood came to be seen as a symbol for the rights of the people as he fought against unjust laws and famously robbed the rich to give to the poor.

Some experts believe that even though Robin’s most famous adversary was the Sheriff of Nottingham he was more likely to have operated Yorkshire. Others believe that he was an invention of the ballads of the time, originating from various different folklore legends.

A thief with a decidedly dodgier reputation is Jonathon Wild who was basically the 18th century version of the Kray Twins only not as popular. The phrase “honour among thieves” cut no ice with this rather nasty rogue who was the unscrupulous head of a gang who would go out stealing on his say so. Wild operated a lucrative “lost property” service, offering to sell the stolen property back to its owners for a fee. If any of his gang fell out with Wild or refused to follow his orders he would shop them to the law and let them hang. Officially he was described by the authorities as a “thief-taker” but his colleagues probably had a few rather more colourful ways of describing him!

Wild’s wicked ways eventually caught up with him and he was hanged at Tyburn in May 1725. He reportedly drank laudanum the night before his execution in an effort to escape the braying mob that he knew would await him but he only succeeded in falling asleep. On his way to the scaffold the drowsy Wild was jeered and pelted with stones. However unpopular he might have been his antics inspired novels by Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe and John Gray’s “The Beggar’s Opera”.

Charlie Peace was a notorious Victorian thief who carried the tools of his trade, burglary, around in a violin case. A dapper little man, Peace gave the appearance of being respectable and actually played the violin well enough to perform in local concerts. After shooting and killing Arthur Dyson in November 1876 Peace fled to London, settling in Peckham and changing his name to Thompson. He then carried out a series of night time burglaries in South London before he was finally apprehended near Blackheath in October 1878 by PC Edward Robinson. Amazingly the policeman was shot five times by the hapless Peace but still managed to restrain him until help arrived.

After he was convicted of the attempted murder of PC Robinson the authorities discovered Peace’s true identity and he was sent up to Leeds where he was tried and sentenced to death for Dyson’s murder. Before being hanged Peace confessed to the murder of another police officer in Manchester for which another man had been found guilty and was serving a life sentence. It turned out that Peace had even been at the trial!