-
2. Common Thievery in the Old Town in 1828
- The University of Akron Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CommonThievery in the OldTown in Lucky Log stopped the Grays on their way to the police, and consequently knew just as much as M’Dougal about the trouble ahead. It is inconceivable that she would not have urged Hare to see where their self-interest lay, and urged him to join her in turning king’s evidence once all four had been jailed. Log lived in a neighborhood, or neighborhoods , where women often played a part, and an aggressive one, in the most common businesses of crime in Edinburgh, theft and reset. Resetting stolen goods meant, to be literal, to set them before the public again: in practical terms, to sell them to pawnshops, or private persons, for cash. Log lived in an extended neighborhood that stretched from the West Port to the High Street, on to the North Back of the Canongate, south along the Pleasance, back into the Cowgate, which led to the Grassmarket, which in turn led to theWest Port. She must have known more than a few women and men who could deliver or dispose of shirts, a pair of blankets, salt cellars, watches, or almost anything else. If Log did not know them, the prosecuting lawyers in the Lord Advocate’s Department certainly did. In , women and men were “precognosed” or interviewed by prosecutors as persons potentially guilty of felonies. One out of six suspects was a woman, which tells us that women were neither an overwhelming presence, nor were they absent. In Edinburgh neighborhoods, chiefly the Old Town, in , nineteen women including Log and M’Dougal were taken into custody and interviewed. If one includes the ports north of Edinburgh, Leith and Newhaven, now part of Edinburgh, the number rises to twenty-one. That is not a large number for a city of , in , and it suggests that we are not seeing social crime— some large-scale shift that leaves many destitute, stealing to keep from starving or to protest the sudden loss of their livelihoods. Rather, it looks like most of the twenty-one, some of whom where caught redhanded by irate householders or found quickly by the Edinburgh police , were largely habitual criminals who chose to steal, and hardtempered women who repeatedly got into fights. Log and M’Dougal differed from most of them in having no previous police records, but they too had chosen their work, even though they both protested that their husbands had given them no choice.1 In other words, with these seventeen women, leaving aside Log and M’Dougal, we are seeing something of the people the Edinburgh police referred to as “habite and repute” criminals, women who, with scores of associates, lived with a different map of Edinburgh in their heads. Their map, the underworld map, highlighted, for example, the spot on the North Bridge where strangers waited for their coaches; the room in Little Anderson’s Close available for prostitution; the particularly narrow and empty closes that were good places to pick a drunken man’s pocket. It included the pawnshops, loan companies, and brokers who would buy an exquisite men’s shirt or a nice gold watch from a woman without asking any questions. Ironically, in parts of the OldTown in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century , the underworld as figure of speech became a reality, as improvements like the Mound, the George IV Bridge, the North Bridge, and the South Bridge linked the Old Town and the New. Between and , bridges over dry ground literally provided new, direct streets through the OldTown, and extended neoclassical style into, and over, the jumble of early modern tenements, closes, and courtyards.2 Common Thievery in the Old Town in [3.147.73.35] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:45 GMT) The Creation of an Underworld The heart of the Old Town lay atop a volcanic ridge, while many of the tenements, especially the poorer ones, lay on the northern or southern slopes of that ridge. As new streets came to connect the New Town, itself built on high ground north of the old ridge, they were built as bridges over the old neighborhoods. On the north side of the very old High Street, even in the eighteenth century, closes were leveled or covered to become the basements of great new buildings . Mary King’s Close was preserved intact within the basement of the Royal Exchange. On the south side of the ridge, where the Cowgate and the South Back of the...