Episode 005: Barbara Spencer: The Young Coiner of Cripplegate

Barbara Spencer is barely out of childhood when the world begins to shape her into something dangerous. Raised without restraint in the cramped lanes of Cripplegate, she is the kind of figure that Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures with unflinching clarity: a young woman too proud for servitude, too restless to stay still, drawn by temperament toward the edges of lawful life.

Her drift into counterfeiting feels almost inevitable; a single act of defiance carries her out of her mother's alehouse and into the company of coiners who see her recklessness as a useful tool. In the annals of true crime, few portraits are as vivid as this one: a girl barely twenty, pushing false money through London's streets with a freedom she mistakes for power.

Georgian justice has a particular cruelty reserved for women convicted of this offence, and the machinery of that law is already turning.

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Mean parents: today 'mean' usually suggests cruelty or stinginess, but in eighteenth century usage it simply meant humble or of low social standing. Barbara's parents were not wicked; they were poor and unremarkable, the kind of people the law barely noticed until their children crossed it.

Mantua-maker: a dressmaker who specialised in the mantua, a loose flowing gown fashionable in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was one of the few skilled trades open to women, and an apprenticeship to one could have set Barbara on a very different path.

Utter: to utter false money had nothing to do with speaking. In legal language it meant to put counterfeit coins into circulation; to pass them off as genuine in a transaction. The crime of uttering was considered a form of petty treason against the Crown, because the monarch's image and authority were stamped upon every coin.

Vend: to sell or distribute. Paired with 'utter' in the text, it underlines the commercial nature of the offence; coiners operated in networks, with some people manufacturing the forgeries and others, like Barbara, sent out into the streets to move them.

Petty treason: a legal category that has no modern equivalent. It covered crimes that violated a bond of allegiance or obedience: a wife killing her husband, a servant killing a master, or a subject counterfeiting the king's coin. The penalties for petty treason were deliberately more severe than those for ordinary felonies, and for women the distinction carried a uniquely horrifying consequence.

Faggots and brushes: bundles of sticks and dry kindling used to build the fire at an execution by burning. The word 'faggot' today carries entirely different connotations, but in this period it referred simply to a bound bundle of firewood; the mundane fuel of an extraordinary punishment.

St. Giles's Pound: a public pound near the parish of St. Giles in the Fields, used for impounding stray livestock. The area around it was notorious for poverty, gin shops and criminal networks; it was exactly the kind of place where a young runaway could vanish into a new and dangerous life overnight.

Discover: in this context, to discover someone meant to reveal or expose their identity to the authorities. Barbara refused to discover those who taught her to coin; she would not name them, even under the weight of her own conviction.

About This Series

Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.

The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.

True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.

The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David's own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David's real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.

Transcript

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This is a Dark Stories presentation of the lives of the most remarkable criminals who have been condemned and executed for murder, highway robbery, housebreaking, street mugging, forgery or other offences collected from original papers and authentic memoirs and published in seventeen thirty five, edited by Arthur Hayward. Episode five Barbara Spencer The Young Coiner of Cripplegate Barbara Spencer was the daughter of mean parents and was left very young to the care of her mother, who lived in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate. This old creature, as is common enough with ordinary people, indulged her daughter so much in all her humours, and suffered her to take so uncontrolled a liberty that all her lifetime after she was incapable of bearing restraint, but on every slight contradiction, flew out into the wildest excesses of passion and fury. When but a child, on a very slight difference at home, she must needs go out apprentice, and was accordingly put to a mantua maker, who having known her throughout her infancy, fatally treated her with the same indulgence and tenderness. She continued with her about two years, and then, on a few warm words happening, went away from so good a mistress and came home again to her mother, who by that time had set up a brandy shop. On Miss Barbara's return, a maid had to be taken, for she was much too good to do the work of the house. The servant had not been there long before they quarrelled, the mother taking the wench's part. Away went the young woman, but matters being made up, and the old mother keeping an alehouse in Cripplegate Parish, she once more went to live with her. One day, it seems, she took into her head to go and see the prisoners die at Tyburn, but her mother meeting her at the door, told her that there was too much business for her to do at home, and that she should not go. Harsh words ensuing on this her mother at last struck her. However, Barbara went, and the man who attended her to Tyburn brought her afterwards to a house by St. Giles's pound, where after relating the difference between herself and her mother, she vowed she would never return home. In this resolution she was encouraged, and soon after was acquainted with the secrets of the house, and appointed to go out with their false money, in order to vend or utter it, which trade, as it freed her from all restraint, she was at first mightily pleased with. But being soon discovered she was committed to Newgate, convicted and fined. About this time she first became acquainted with Mrs. Myles, who afterwards betrayed her. On the affair for which she died, the evidence could have hardly done without Myles' assistance, which so enraged poor Barbara that even to the instant of death she could hardly prevail with herself to forgive her, and never spoke of her without a kind of heat. The punishment ordained by our laws for treasons committed by women, whether high or petty, is burning alive. This, though pronounced upon her by the judge, she could never be brought to believe would be executed, but while she lay under sentence, she endeavoured to put off the thoughts of the fatal day as much as she could, always asserting that she thought the crime no sin for which she was condemned. It seems her mother had died at Tyburn before midsummer, and this poor wretch would often say that she little thought she should soon follow her, when she attended her to death. She lost all her boldness at the near approach of death, and seemed excessively surprised and concerned at the apprehension of the flames. When she went out to die, she owned her crime more fully than she had ever done. She said she had learnt the coin of a man and woman who had now left off and lived very honestly, wherefore she said she would not discover them. At the very stake she complained how hard she found it to forgive Myles, who had been her accomplice and then betrayed her, adding that though she saw fagots and brushes ready to be lighted and to consume her, yet she would not receive life at the expense of another's blood. She averred there were great numbers in London who followed the same trade of coining, and earnestly wished they might take warning by her death. At the instant of suffering, she appeared to have reassumed all her resolution, for which she had indeed sufficient occasion, when to the lamentable death by burning was added the usual noise and clamour of the mob, who also threw stones and dirt, which beat her down and wounded her. However, she forgave them cheerfully, prayed with much earnestness, and ended her life the same day as the last mentioned malefactor, Perkins, aged about twenty four years.