*Ø* Blogmanac July 26 | The death of Moll Cutpurse

England's first highwayman was a woman

1659 Today marks the death of Moll Cutpurse (Mary Frith, alias Markham), the notorious underworld figure of 17th-century England. Born in 1584, Moll robbed travellers on Hounslow Heath, including Oliver Cromwell's associate, General Fairfax, for which she was sent to England’s most notorious prison, Newgate Gaol. In the attire of a man, she plied her trade as Britain’s first ‘highwayman’, as well as a fence and petty thief. Moll became the subject of a play written within her lifetime, The Roaring Girl.

As a child, Moll was what we would today call a ‘tomboy’:

She was a very tomrig or hoyden, and delighted only in boys' play and pastime, not minding or companying with the girls. Many a bang and blow this hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed, or taken off from her rude inclinations. She could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching; a sampler was as grievous to her as a winding sheet; and on her needle, bodkin and thimble she could not think quietly, wishing them changed into sword and dagger for a bout at cudgels. Her headgear and handkerchief (or what the fashion of those times was for girls to be dressed in) were alike tedious to her, she wearing them as handsomely as a dog would a doublet ; and so cleanly, that the sooty pot hooks were above the comparison. This perplexed her friends, who had only this proverb favourable to their hope, that " An unlucky girl may make a good woman "; but they lived not to the length of that expectation, dying in her minority, and leaving her to the swing and sway of her own unruly temper and disposition.

She would fight with boys, and courageously beat them; run, jump, leap or hop with any of her contrary sex, or recreate herself with any other play whatsoever.
Source

She lived to be 75, and her last request was to be buried face down, in order to be rebellious even after death. When she died of ‘a dropsy’ she was interred in St Bridget's churchyard. On her marble headstone was inscribed the following epitaph, composed by John Milton (1608-1674), but seven years later it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London:








Here lies, under this same marble,
Dust, for Time's last sieve to garble;
Dust, to perplex a Sadducee,
Whether it rise a He or She,
Or two in one, a single pair,
Nature's sport, and now her care.
For how she'll clothe it at last day,
Unless she sighs it all away;
Or where she'll place it, none can tell:
Some middle place 'twixt Heaven and Hell
And well 'tis Purgatory's found,
Else she must hide her under ground.
These reliques do deserve the doom,
Of that cheat Mahomet's fine tomb
For no communion she had,
Nor sorted with the good or bad;
That when the world shall be calcin'd,
And the mixd' mass of human kind
Shall sep'rate by that melting fire,
She'll stand alone, and none come nigh her.
Reader, here she lies till then,
When, truly, you'll see her again.

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