Within the context of the streets, the Mohocks were not alone in their depredations. In the 1750s William Shenstone wrote that “London is really dangerous at this time; the pickpockets, formerly content with mere filching, make no scruple to knock people down with bludgeons in Fleet Street and the Strand, and that at no later hour than eight o’clock at night; but in the Piazzas, Covent Garden, they come in large bodies, armed with couteaus, and attack whole parties.” Here is a graphic illustration of how at night the city, without an adequate police force, could become terrifying. Sir John Coventry had his nose slit by a street gang. A courtesan named Sally Salisbury, displeased by an admirer’s speeches, “seized a knife and plunged it into his body”; she was conveyed to Newgate, surrounded by plaudits. “Now it is the general complaint of the taverns, the coffee-houses, the shop-keepers and others,” wrote the City Marshal in 1718, “that their customers are afraid when it is dark to come to their houses and shops for fear that their hats and wigs should be snitched from their heads or their swords taken from their sides, or that they may be blinded, knocked down, or stabbed; nay, the coaches cannot secure them, but they are likewise cut and robbed in the public streets
“Traffic” is as much in goods as in vehicles, and this is one of the indications that the prosperity of the city was being threatened by the violent propensities of some of its citizens. In this period, too, the apprentices would “go to Temple Bar in the evening, set up a shouting and clear the pavement between that and Fleet Market of all the persons there. The boys all knew boxing, and if anyone resisted one or two would fall upon him and thrash him on the spot, nobody interfered.”
James Boswell was very observant of the streets in the decade after Fielding’s death (1754). “The rudeness of the English vulgar is terrible,” he confided to his diary in December 1762. “This indeed is the liberty which they have: the liberty of bullying and being abusive with their blackguard tongues.” On many occasions he would have heard the familiar shouts of “Marry, come up!” and “Damn your eyes!” A month later he was reporting that “I was really uneasy going home. Robberies in the street are now very frequent” and then, in the summer of 1763, he recorded that “There was a quarrell between a gentleman and a waiter. A great crowd gathered round, and roared out
In the eighteenth century there are accounts of mobs with lighted torches and sticks or clubs; their leaders would read out the names of people, or of specific streets, in order to direct the violence against local targets. Houses and factories and mills could be literally pulled down; looms were cut apart. Sometimes we can hear them shouting-“Green you bugger, why don’t you fire? We will have your heart and liver!” There is also a remarkable collection of threatening letters, which testifies to the spirited and violent language of Londoners when addressing one another, “Sir, Damn Your Blood if You do not Ryes Your Works Too 2 pence a Pair moor We Well Blow your Braines out For We will Bllow your Brans out if You Doo not Do itt You slim Dog We shall sett You Houes on fier … if you do not Lay the Money at the place that we shall mention we will set your House and all that belongs to you on fire for it is in my power for to do it … Mr. Obey, we gave you now an Egg Shell of Honey, but if you refuse to comply with the demands of yesterday, we’ll give you a Gallon of Thorns to your final Life’s End.”
It is perhaps significant, in the context of the violent language of London, that much Cockney dialect springs immediately from pugilism: “breadbasket” for stomach, “kisser” for mouth, “conk” for nose, “pins” for legs and “knock-aht” for a sensation. Many of the words for beating, such as “hammer,” “lick,” “paste,” “whack” and “scrap,” also derive from the ring, suggesting that the vernacular of confrontation and pugnacity remains very much to the taste of the Londoner.
