The Highwayman’s Quarry – Thieves’ Cant

“Mill the gig with a betty, then we’ll strip the ken and backslang it out of here. I’ll lumber the swag at the stalling crib and we’ll be up in the stirrups.”*

One of the fun parts of writing a story set in the underworld of 18th-century London is getting to use Thieves’ Cant, or flash speech. What is Thieves’ Cant? It was a secret language attributed to criminals, mostly in Great Britain, beginning in the 1500s. Whether thieves actually used this language to disguise their activities, or whether it was invented by writers of pamphlets about thieves’ culture and dictionaries of their language, there seems no telling; probably there was a little of both. The speech became popular in Elizabethan theatre, and in the 18th century the Bow Street runners (early police) were said to be familiar with it.

Many of the terms are still used today: crib, crack, fence, gams, and grub all meant roughly what they do in today’s slang (or maybe the slang of old Hollywood gangster movies). Now we call an alcoholic a lush; back then the word meant either an alcoholic drink or the state of being intoxicated, and a drunken man was a lushy-cove.

Of course, sometimes you can have too much fun, and the modern reader won’t understand a thing. If I told you a word is on the tip of my Manchester, you’d probably think I’d lost my mind. And if I told you Oliver is in town, you’d still be in the dark and might want to light a glim.

Not wanting to confuse the reader was a small reason I didn’t use much flash speech in Daring and Decorum, even though it’s about a highwayman. The big reason is that the novel is told from the point of view of Elizabeth, the heroine, and takes place far from London. But when I wrote a prequel story featuring Robin Cantwell, my highwayman, told it from Robin’s point of view, and set it in the world of thieves and Bow Street runners, it only made sense that the characters would use flash speech.