Episode 009: John Meff: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away

John Meff is the son of French Protestant refugees who fled persecution under Louis XIV, raised in London with great care and bound apprentice to a weaver. He serves faithfully, marries, and then finds himself unable to keep his family alive on honest wages; it is poverty, not wickedness, that first pushes him toward housebreaking, a trajectory recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals with the unsentimental clarity that makes it one of the earliest works of true crime writing we possess.

What follows is a life of compounding misfortune: narrow escapes, broken resolutions, and a restless drift across oceans that never quite carries Meff far enough from the world he is trying to leave behind. His story belongs to a London where the line between desperation and damnation is thinner than anyone cares to admit.

Every road Meff walks seems to curve back toward the same dark gravity, and the law of Georgian England is not a patient institution.

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

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

Transported: in modern usage this word simply means moved from one place to another, but in eighteenth century criminal law it carried a very specific and dreaded meaning. To be transported was to be shipped to the colonies as punishment, forced into years of hard labour far from home. It was considered a mercy compared to hanging, though those who endured it might have disagreed.

Marooned: today this word is used loosely to mean stranded anywhere, but its origin is steeped in pirate custom. To be marooned was to be deliberately abandoned on an uninhabited island, usually with little or no provisions; it was a death sentence disguised as exile, a punishment pirates inflicted on those who refused to join their crew or who broke their code.

Springes: a word now almost entirely extinct. A springe was a snare or trap for catching birds and small animals, typically made from a loop of cord or wire attached to a bent branch. In this account, the castaways fashion them from the horsehair of an old wig; desperation breeds invention.

Fluxes: in the eighteenth century a flux was a violent and often fatal bout of diarrhoea or dysentery, the kind of illness that could reduce a strong person to helplessness within days. The word had an urgency to it that its modern medical equivalents have lost; aboard ships and on desolate islands, flux killed as readily as fever.

Ill-courses: a polite eighteenth century way of saying a life of crime. The phrase carried a note of moral judgement baked right into it; one did not simply commit crimes, one 'addicted' oneself to ill-courses, as though lawbreaking were a sickness of the will.

Impeached: today impeachment belongs almost entirely to political language, but in this period it meant something closer to informing on or betraying one's accomplices to the authorities. To impeach a fellow criminal was to give evidence against them in exchange for one's own life; a survival tactic with a very short shelf life.

Act of Indemnity: a parliamentary pardon extended to certain classes of offenders, wiping the slate clean for specific crimes committed before a given date. These acts were political tools as much as legal ones, and whether a particular criminal fell within their scope could be a matter of life and death; in Meff's case, the question is raised at trial with everything hanging in the balance.

Put in the cart: the condemned were loaded into an open cart and paraded through the streets to the place of execution. The phrase sounds almost mundane, but for the person sitting in that cart, surrounded by crowds, it was the last journey they would ever take.

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 offenses collected from original papers and authentic memoirs and published in seventeen thirty five, edited by Arthur Hayward. Episode nine John Meff The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away. The rigid execution of felons who return from transportation has been found so necessary that few or none who have been tried for such illegal returning have escaped, though it is very hard to convince those who suffer for that offence that there is any real crime in their evading their sentence. It was this which brought John Meff, alias Mirth, of whom we are now to speak, to an ignominious death after he had once before escaped it in a very extraordinary manner. This unhappy man was born in London of French parents who retired into England for the sake of their religion, when Louis XIV began his furious persecution against the Protestants in his dominions. This John Meff was educated with great care, especially as to the principles of religion, by a father who had very just notions of that faith for which in banishment he suffered. When his son John grew up, he put him out apprentice to a weaver, whom he served with great fidelity, and after he came out of his time, married, but finding himself incapable to maintain his family by his labour, he unfortunately addicted himself to ill courses. In this he was yet more unlucky, for having almost at his first setting out, broke open a house, he was discovered, apprehended, tried, convicted, and put in the cart, in order to go to execution within the fortnight, but the hangman being arrested as he was going to Tyburn, he and the rest who were to have suffered with him were transported through the clemency of the government. On this narrow escape from death, Mef was full of many penitent resolutions, and determined with himself to follow for the future an honest course of life. Yet no sooner was he on board the transport vessel than much of these honest intentions were dissolved and laid aside. While these unhappy persons were amusing themselves with hopes of living easily in the plantations, a new and unlooked for misfortune fell upon them, for in the height of Bermuda they were surprised by two pirate sloops. Meff, however, and eight others, absolutely refused to sign the paper which contained the pirates' engagement and articles. These nine were, according to the barbarous practice of those kind of people, marooned, that is, set on shore on an uninhabited island. According to the custom of the people in such distress, they were obliged to rub two dry sticks together till they took fire, and with great difficulty gathered as many other sticks as made a fire large enough to yield them some relief. They caught some fowls with springers made of an old horsehair wig. Their next resource for food was an animal which burrowed in the ground like rabbits, but the flesh of these proving unwholesome, threw them into such dangerous fluxes that five out of the nine were scarce able to go. They were then forced to take up with such fish as they were able to catch. At last, when they almost despaired of ever getting off that inhospitable island, they espied early one morning an Indian canoe come on shore with seven persons. They hid themselves behind the rocks, and the Indians being gone up into the heart of the island, they went down and finding much salt provisions in the boat, they trusted themselves to the mercy of the waves. By the providence of God they were driven in two days into an English settlement, where Meff, instead of betaking himself to any settled course, resolved to turn sailor, and in that capacity made several voyages. On the main there is no doubt, but he led a life of no great satisfaction in this occupation, which probably was the reason he resolved to return home to England at all hazards. He did so and had hardly been a month in this kingdom before he fell to his old practices, in which he was attended with the same ill fortune as formerly. He was apprehended for one of his first acts and committed to Newgate. Out of this prison he escaped by the assistance of a certain bricklayer, but as he affirmed, being betrayed by the same bricklayer, he was retaken, conveyed again to Newgate, and confined with the utmost severity. At his trial there arose a doubt whether the fact he had committed was not pardoned by the act of indemnity then lately granted. However, the record of his former conviction being produced, the court ordered he should be indicted for returning without lawful cause, on which indictment he was convicted upon full proof, condemned and shortly after ordered for execution. During the space he lay under sentence, he expressed much penitence for his former ill spent life, and together with James Redding, who was in the same unhappy state with himself, read and prayed with the rest of the prisoners. This reading had been concerned in abundance of robberies, and as he himself owned, in some which were attended with murder. This malefactor, though but thirty five years of age, was a very old offender, and had in his lifetime been concerned with most of the notorious gangs then in England, some of whom he had impeached and hanged for his own preservation. But he was at last convicted for robbing George Brownsworth of a watch and other things of a considerable value between Islington and the Turnpike, and for it was executed at Tyburn, the 11th of September, 1721, together with John Meff aforesaid, then in the fortieth year of his age.