Tudor Coney-Catchers and Modern Scammers - by Katherine Langrish

A few years ago on holiday in Paris, my daughter and I were walking along the Seine from the Musée D’Orsay (we’d hoped to get in, but the staff were on strike), heading for the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine to the Jardins des Tuileries, when a woman walking a few paces ahead of us suddenly exclaimed, bent down and stood up with a gold ring in her hand.  Eyes wide with amazement she turned to us, and asked us (in French) if we thought it was real gold?  

She passed it to me. My daughter and I examined it. It looked real. There was a hallmark on it. It seemed to be a man’s wedding ring. I passed it back. ‘Whatever shall I do with it?’ the woman asked. ‘Take it to the police?’I suggested. It seemed a long shot that anyone would claim it... ‘No I don’t have time’ the woman declared. She hesitated, seemed to make up her mind. She pressed it into my hand.  ‘Take it! I don’t want it! You keep it!’

‘Oh we couldn’t,’ I said, but she smiled brilliantly: ‘No no – it’s a bit of good luck!  Do what you like with it!  Bonne chance! Bonne journée!’ She started to walk away. My daughter and I glanced at each other in consternation. A gold ring? What were we to do with it?  We didn’t even know where to find a police station! Then the woman turned back. ‘But – if you have any spare change – some money for a meal...?’

Light dawned. I said to my daughter in English, ‘It’s a scam.’ But it had been so clever, so well-acted, I had to grin. The woman saw; she grinned too, but her hand was out and her eyes were fixed on my face.  I opened my purse and gave her a couple of Euros – enough for a coffee – which she took without fuss. We kept the ring as a cheap souvenir and crossed the bridge.  A hundred metres along the other bank, another woman waved at us. ‘Regardez ce que j’ai trouvee! - Look what I’ve found! A ring!  Is it real, do you think?’ We laughed at her and passed on. 

Paris that day was bursting with women doing the ring trick and clearly the way it was supposed to work – and must actually have worked a significant proportion of the time – was by a form of emotional blackmail. The victims examine the ring, find the hallmark and pronounce it real. A ‘valuable’ ring is then ‘gifted’ to them, plunging them into confusion. The request for money, an apparent after-thought, takes them by surprise and is hard to refuse. Some people may well have paid the scammer a fair percentage of what they felt the ring was ‘worth’... Last time I went to Paris, the scam of the moment seemed to be card tricks – men doing ‘Find the Lady’ on the Rive Gauche and under the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by small crowds of the fascinated and unwise, who may later have discovered their pockets had been picked.  

There is nothing new under the sun. I feel sure the ring trick was probably being played in Babylon and Ninevah. Certainly in Tudor England, the honest countryman coming into London on business was in grave danger of being fooled and robbed. The journalist Robert Greene wrote an exposé of them in his 1591 pamphlet  ‘A Notable Discoverie of Cozenage’. ‘Cozenage’ means ‘trickery’, and the scams were known as ‘Cony-catching’.  The conies, or rabbits, were the simple victims. The coney-catchers were the gangs of scamsters.  Here’s some of what Greene had to tell of their methods and how they struck up an acquaintance with their victims!

The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen or good fellows, with a smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul’s, Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand ... these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey; who, as soon as they see a plain country fellow, well and cleanly apparelled, either in a coat of homespun russet or of frieze ... and a side-pouch at his side – ‘There is a cony,’ saith one. At that word out flies the setter [‘the party that takes up the cony’, who ‘sets him up’]. And overtaking the man, begins to salute him thus: 

‘Sir, God save you, you are welcome in London! How doth all our good friends in the country? I hope they be all in health?’ The countryman, seeing a man so courteous he knows not, half in a brown study at this strange salutation, perhaps makes him this answer: ‘Sir, all our friends in the country are well, I thank God; but truly I know you not. You must pardon me.’

‘Why sir,’ saith the setter, guessing by his tongue [accent] what countryman he is, ‘are you not such a countryman?’ If he say ‘Yes’ then he creeps upon him closely. If he say ‘Nay’, then straight the setter comes over him thus: ‘In good sooth sir, I know you by your face... I pray you, if without offence, let me crave your name and the place of your abode.’  The simple man straight tells him where he dwells, his name and who be his next neighbours, and what gentlemen dwell about him. 

In these days of internet fraud, you may well wince. It was no different then, for Greene goes on to tell how the setter, having learned all he can, cunningly apologises: 

‘...Hold me excused, I took you for a friend of mine, but since by mistaking I have made you slack your business, we’ll drink a quart of wine or a pot of ale together’. If the fool be so ready as to go, then the cony is caught; but ... if he smell a rat by his clawing, and will not drink with him, then away goes the setter and discourseth to the verser [‘he that playeth the game’] the name of the man, the parish he dwells  in, and what gentlemen are his near neighbours. With that, away goes [the verser], and, crossing the man at some turning, meets him full in the face and accosts him thus: 

‘What, Goodman Barton, how fare all our friends about you? Why, I am such a man’s kinsman, your neighbour not far off. How doth this or that good gentleman, my friend? Good Lord, that I should be out of your remembrance.  I have been at your house divers times.’

On this, the countryman, too embarrassed to admit he has forgotten this ‘neighbour’, is persuaded to go for a drink in an ale-house, where ‘ere they part, they make him a cony and so ferret-claw him at cards, that they leave him as bare of money as an ape of a tail.’ 

Greene’s pamphlet, which goes into much detail on this and many other scams, was immensely popular, though it got him into some danger: in his follow-up pamphlet ‘The Second Part of Cony-Catching’, 1592, he claims that:

These cony-catchers, these vultures, these fatal harpies that putrefy with their infections the flourishing estate of England ... stand upon their bravadoes ... swearing by no less that their enemies’ blood, even by God Himself, that they will make a massacre of his bones, and cut off my right hand, for penning down their abominable practices.  But alas for them, poor snakes! ... every thunder-clap hath not a bolt, nor every cony-catcher’s oath an execution. I live still, and I live to display their villanies, which, Gentlemen, you shall see set down in most ample manner in this small treatise. 

'Robert Greene in Death's Livery' from John Dickenson's 'Greene in conceipt' (1598)

Be that as it may, Greene died the same year on 3 September 1592, aged only 34. He died not from violence (we’d probably have known about that) but, according to scholar and rival pamphleteer Gabriel Harvey, from ‘a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine’.  The rather spiteful Harvey also claimed in his ‘Four Letters and Certain Sonnets’, December 1592, that Greene kept a mistress, "a sorry ragged quean” and  the sister of a criminal known as "Cutting Ball" hanged at Tyburn.  If true, then the ‘Cony-Catching’ pamphlets were truly drawn from the low-lifes with whom Greene and many another minor Elizabethan writer knocked about. They are vivid and amusing pictures of the rough streets, ale-houses and back-alleys of Tudor London.  

"On Preserving Insects In Rectified Wine" etc - Katherine Langrish

I’ve been reading some more recipes and household tips from the ‘Family Receipt Book’ from 1837 which formed the subject of my August post, and I can’t resist sharing some more of them here. To dip in and out of this book – which is over 500 pages long – is to be amused, impressed and bewildered not only by the often mysterious (and sometimes downright dangerous-sounding) ingredients, but by the sheer variety of things – methods, objects, tasks – thought likely to be useful to the average 19^th century householder. There are innumerable separate recipes for making varnish, for example: varnish for oil-paintings, for toilet boxes and fan cases, for earthenware vessels, for plaster casts, for furniture.  There is Amber Varnish, Copal Varnish, Elastic Gum Varnish, Black Japan Varnish –

Melt eight ounces of amber, melt (separately from the amber) four ounces of asphaltum and four ounces of resin: when melted, add eight ounces of boiling oil and then sixteen ounces of oil of turpentine; then stir in from half an ounce to one ounce lamp-black and give it another boil or two...

There’s even a varnish ‘For preserving Insects, Fruits etc’:

Take one pound of rectified spirits of wine, and two ounces of white amber; add thereto an ounce of white sandarac and white mastic, an ounce and a half of Venice turpentine; digest the whole in balneo mariae during forty-eight hours, to an entire dissolution; take out the intestines of the insect you have a mind to preserve: lay them for some days in rectified spirits of wine, mixed with clarified sugar-candy; afterward besmear them with your varnish till they are transparent as glass; in this manner you will preserve them for a long time. 

The mind boggles. What is balneo mariae? What is white sandarac? How do you take out an insect’s intestines?  Why would you wish to?  What did a 19th century housewife's shopping list look like?  'Just sending the maid out for six drachms of balneo mariae and a pint of dragon's blood'?  (Yes, dragon's blood really does keep turning up in various recipes...)  I do not know, any more than I know why the average householder should wish for a ‘Varnish to prevent the Rays of the Sun from passing through the Glasses of Windows’? Were people really that worried about fading antimacassars? 

Some of the ‘receipts’ do sound worth trying, though you might want to cut down on the sugar.  To make ‘French Black Current Brandy’:

To each bottle of brandy add a pound of black currents, picked, with a little allspice, and broken cinnamon in a small muslin bag. Put the whole into a large bottle or jar, and cork it closely for six months. Then pour off the liquor, and for each bottle of this liquor add three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar...

My teeth are wincing. Maybe not. How about ‘To make twelve Gallons of Milk Punch’?  The recipe begins, ‘Take four gallons of rum or brandy...’  

Then there’s ‘Domestic remedies’.  For ‘Cramp and Spasm’ during the night, the suggested remedy is to take thirty to forty drops of a blend of ‘Tincture of Opium and Aether’ every evening before retiring to bed. That should do it.  To cure hiccups (‘an involuntary convulsive motion of the muscular coat of the stomach’) the little book suggests two teaspoons of ‘Fetid spirit of ammonia, Ammoniated tincture of valerian (of each, thirty drops) and Musk julep, three large tablespoonsful.’ In cases of pleurisy (which I once had and know to be very painful) I feel extremely sorry for the poor 19^thcentury patient: 

Bleed freely from the arm, taking away at least sixteen ounces from an adult and repeating the operation according to circumstances twice, thrice or even four times in twenty-four hours. [My italics]. Whatever may be the violence of the fever, a large blister should be applied to the side as near to the seat of pain as possible.  When, as it sometimes happens, a sufficient quantity of blood cannot be procured, twelve leeches should be applied to the side, and repeated. ... Success will depend on a large quantity of blood being taken from the patient in the course of a few hours. [My italics]. 

As if that was not enough, the book urges that the patient should also be given laxatives! I feel we don’t really appreciate modern medicine half as much as we should.

Ack-Ack Women of the Second World War - Katherine Langrish

Sorting through my mother’s bookcases, I came across this interesting little booklet published for the War Office and the Air Ministry, by the Ministry of Information in 1943. It’s all about the ‘static air defence’ of Britain, and is an account of Britain’s anti-aircraft (‘ack-ack’ in popular slang) defences from 1939 to 1942. As the War still had two years to run, besides supplying information the booklet would also of course have been intended to raise morale. The Foreword states that –

This book supplements and continues the story of how the R.A.F. defeated the attack of the German Air Force during the autumn of 1940. Much of the air fighting has already been described in “The Battle of Britain”. But the fighter squadrons never constituted the whole of our defensive system. It has therefore been thought worthwhile to tell the story of the static defences – A.A. guns, searchlights, balloons and the Royal Observer Corps...  Though their story is not dull, the life and the work of the men and women of the static defences very often contains every degree of exasperation. They have had to fight the canker of armies, monotony – often in isolated stations far from their own homes and from anybody’s home.  

Continuing, ‘It isn’t easy to shoot down a plane', and reminding readers of the weighty responsibility of the gun crews in determining whether an aircraft was in fact hostile or not, the book provides some statistics: 'During the first two years [of the war] just on 600 planes were shot down by A.A. fire over this country', from stations ranging from Dundee to Dover, from the Isle of Dogs in London to the Shetlands Isles.

Women played a vital part in these ‘static’ anti-aircraft operations. As members of mixed batteries, women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) operated searchlights, tracked enemy aircraft and controlled the direction of the guns. Though the official line remained that they did not fire them – ‘Women man everything except the guns themselves in Heavy A.A. units, and man them extremely well,’ declares the booklet – it seems highly likely that in actual fact they sometimes did. An officer commanding the first mixed battery to bring down an enemy plane is quoted thus: ‘The girls cannot be beaten in action and in my opinion they are definitely better than the men on the instruments they are manning. Beyond a little natural excitement which only shows itself in rather humorous and quaint remarks, they are quite as steady if not steadier than the men. They are amazingly keen at going into action, and although they are not supposed to learn to use the rifle they are as keen as anything to do so.’

The tone of the booklet is hilariously defensive about the involvement of women in this kind of active service. Someone in the War Office must have had the pragmatism and imagination to get it all going, but they clearly had to defeat a lot of scepticism. The need was felt, for example, to reassure readers that 'special regard' was being paid to 'the women's need for 'fresh fruit, salads and milk foods; and a balance was found between this and the spotted dog and cheese and pickles beloved of the old soldier'. Huh? Anyhow:

The first battery started training in spring, 1940. The A.T.S. members were picked from volunteers, and the men were newly joined recruits, the point being that men who had known no other army life would not find the atmosphere of a mixed battery so hysterically unorthodox. There was considerable anxiety as to how men and women would work together, but there need not have been. They took each other very much for granted; there was none of the musical-comedy-chorus atmosphere which had been anticipated, partly, no doubt, because such men and women had been working side by side in civilian life for years.

If your eyebrows rose as much as mine did on reading those words, maybe you, like me, will reflect on how much women still had to prove – how unusual it still was for men and women to do the same work – and to admire the common sense of those who, in charge of what was obviously seen as a daring experiment, took care that the men and women involved started on an equal footing of inexperience.  It worked.

The idea of men and women marching, eating, drilling and working together – all this under the auspices of the British army – was not without a certain revolutionary tinge. In a mixed battery, women drive and service the trucks, act as sentries and despatch riders, and, in fact, do everything but fire the guns... far from resenting the A.T.S., the men in the mixed batteries show a very real pride in the girls’ work and are the first to defend them against their critics...

 

It wasn’t only in the A.T.S. that women served in the anti-aircraft defences.  In 1941 the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – the W.A.A.F.s. – began to take over the deployment of barrage balloons. These were used to protect targets such as ports, factories and convoys from dive bombers and low-flying aircraft, driving enemy planes to heights from which accurate targeting – especially at night – would be difficult or impossible.  Balloons were therefore often themselves targeted, and hauling them up and down was a physically arduous business.

In the middle of January 1941, the Air Officer Commanding, Balloon Command, was asked to consider a suggestion that the flying of balloons could be completely carried out by the W.A.A.F. At first, this suggestion was received with dismay. ... The manning of balloons for 24 hours a day, frequently in the most appalling weather conditions, required physical strength not usually possessed by women...

Once again, given the chance, the women proved the doubters wrong. By May 1941 the first batch of volunteers had gone through ten weeks of intensive training, and – says the booklet –  

Every week since then the W.A.A.F. have taken over more and more balloon sites. They will continue to do so until a very large proportion of the Balloon Barrages in the British Isles will be manned by airwomen. ... The Balloon Operators of the W.A.A.F. will still have to endure the weather as well as attack from the air, but they have already shown that they can take it. Theirs is undoubtedly one of the hardest jobs undertaken by women in the war, but they have tackled it and succeeded at it.

Thunder Powder, Phantasmagoria, and Artificial Asses' Milk - by Katherine Langrish

This book has been in our family for a very long time; I remember opening it as a teenager and laughing over some of the contents with my mother, in whose bookcases I recently rediscovered it.  Published in this ‘improved’ edition in 1837, it is a compendium of all sorts of useful information and tips for every imaginable kind of domestic circumstance or emergency.  Do you wish to ‘increase the durability of tiles’? Prevent fishing lines from rotting?  Purify wool infested with insects?  Do you wish to ‘write both blue and red letters at once with the same ink and pen and upon the same paper’?  Do you wish to cure boils, burns, nosebleed, the hiccough, gout, gravel or jaundice?  How about advice on how to prevent accidents from leaving a poker in the fire (weld a small iron crosspiece to the end of the poker, so that it will catch on the fender, should it slip out) – or on how to ‘make Transparent Screens for the Exhibition of the Phantasmagoria’? 

Our ancestors lived dangerously, it seems. In 1837, Charlotte Bronte was nineteen. Much wonder has been expressed that she and her sisters in their quiet, remote parsonage, should have been able to construct such passionate and dramatic imaginative worlds.  All right: but this little book, if they had possessed it, would have encouraged them to attempt amusements such as these:

Thunder Powder

Take separately three parts of good dry saltpetre, two parts of dry salt of tartar and pound them well together in a mortar; then add thereto one part, or rather more, of flower of brimstone ... put this composition into a bottle with a glass stopper, for use.

Put about two drachms of this mixture in an iron spoon, over a moderate fire, but not in the flame; in a short time it will melt and go off with an explosion like thunder or a loaded cannon. 

Such fun!  Or Charlotte, Emily and Anne could have written their books with:

The Phosphoric Pencil 

Is a small bit of phosphorus, put into a quill, and kept in a phial, in water; when you write, dip your pencil often in the water, to prevent its taking fire. 

It was possible also to make your own matches by ‘mixing one part of flower of sulphur with eight of phosphorus’: the author warns however:

This requires caution, and should afterwards be handled with great care, lest any part of the mixture get under the finger nails, a small portion of which might occasion great inconvenience. When used to procure a light, a very minute quantity is taken out of the bottle on the point of a match, and rubbed upon cork or wood, which produces an immediate flame.

A 'small portion of which might occasion great inconvenience' sounds a suspicious understatement to me. 'Hurts like h-ll', more probably...  Conditions in homes may be guessed at by entries such as these: “A mouse trap, by which forty or fifty mice may be caught in a night’ (a see-saw placed at the edge of the dresser, baited with butter and oatmeal, which tips them into a bucket full of water where they drown). A receipt ‘To destroy Bugs’ is also illuminating:

The risk of bugs in a big city is inevitable; the clothes-boxes of servants, the going to a public place of in a public carriage, or the insect being blown against the apparel while walking the streets, may introduce it into the house. But to cleanly people, whose beds are examined, and the joints oiled with pure sweet oil three or four times a year, they cannot become troublesome; except what no person can guard against ... a filthy, though perhaps very fine predecessor, who has permitted the animal to entrench itself in the walls and the ceiling. 

The only solution then is to seal up the fireplace, windows and doors, and fumigate the rooms with ‘vitriolic acid gas’...

Do you wish to make artificial Asses’ Milk?  Then take: 

Two ounces of pearl barley, two ounces of hartshorn shavings, three ounces of Eringo root candied, nine garden snails; boil these in six quarts of spring water till it comes to three; put two spoonsful of cow’s milk into half a pint of the above, and drink it lukewarm about half an hour before you rise in the morning. 

NB – You may leave out the snails if you do not like them, but it is best to use them.

Were you, like me, hoping all through this recipe that the Artificial Asses’ Milk was going to be used as a toilet water, rather than as something to drink?  I love the footnote. 

‘For improving coffee’ – ‘To discover vitriol in Beer’ – ‘To discover if bread is adulterated with alum’ – ‘To cure smoky chimneys’ – ‘To preserve meat by treacle’ – this enchanting book goes on and on. I shall share some more with you another time, but will leave you for the moment with this:

Vulgar Error respecting the putting of Spirits into Boots and Shoes to prevent the Effects of Cold

The custom of pouring brandy into the boots or shoes, when the feet have got wet, with a view to prevent the effects of cold, is a practice which (though very common) is founded in prejudice and misconception, and often proves fatal, by bringing on an inflammation and consequent obstruction of the bowels.