Playing fast and loose

Buoyant and brazen, the hard-riding, tough-talking and gun-toting highwaywomen of the 17th and 18th centuries struck fear and awe into the hearts of the nation

- Matthew Dennison

SOCIETY knew what it thought about them and it was mostly bad. Brave, independent, resourceful, even entrepreneurial they may have been, but the women who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, turned to crime on the nation's highways inspired deep mistrust-and not simply for the danger they posed to travellers. For highwaywomen, a term coined in the 1730s, were worse than criminals. More than their male counterparts, they represented a potent challenge to the established order: gun-toting, pipe-smoking, violent and, more often than not, cross-dressing.

Of one of Britain's best-known highwaywomen Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, whose life of crime lasted five decades, including targeted offences against Parliamentarians during the Civil War, the author of A History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Footpads, Shoplifts and Cheats, written in 1714, found little to commend.

Instead, he criticised Moll for fighting boys; he scorned her 'natural abhorrence of tending children'. Such a tendency, he impressed upon his readers, was anything but 'natural'.

In 1662, the Newgate Calendar had castigated Moll as 'a very tomrig or hoyden', possessed of a 'boisterous and masculine spirit'. Highwaywomen such as Moll were transgressive and readers were not surprised when they learned that, as a young girl, 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'.