Free Roaring Boys by Judith Cook Page B

shortly before his death, and Dekker’s
A Gull’s Horn Book
2 was first published about ten years later but little, if anything, had changed in the intervening period.
    Greene needs no further introduction. Thomas Dekker, about whose origins we know very little until he started writing professionally, was born in London sometime in 1570. As well as delightful comedies such as
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
and collaborations with other dramatists on a wide variety of work, like a number of his contemporaries he wrote popular pamphlets which would sell for a few pence. His is a name which fairly regularly appears in
Henslowe’s Diary
when he runs into money problems.
    To begin with Greene and the Elizabethan underworld, those to whom his pamphlet is addressed need look no further for practical advice on the perils awaiting the unwary on the streets, inns and taverns of even the better parts of London, let alone the brothels and gaming houses of the Bankside:
    The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen or good fellows, with smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul’s, Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand, and such common-haunted places, where these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey; who, as soon as they see a plain country fellow, well and clean apparelled, either in a coat of homespun russet or of frieze, as the time requires, and a side-pouch at his side – ‘There is a cony’, saith one. [The most obvious hazard is the pickpocket or cutpurse]
    In St. Paul’s between ten and eleven is their hour and there they walk, and perhaps if there be a great press, strike a stroke in the middle walk, that is upon some plain man that stands gazing about, having never seen the church before; but their chiefest time is at divine service, when men devoutly go up to hear either a sermon, or else the harmony of the choir and organs. There the nip and foist [cutpurse and pickpocket], as devoutly as if he were some zealous person, standeth soberly with his eyes elevated to heaven, when his hand is either on the purse or in the pocket, surveying every corner of it for coin.
    Then, of course, there are the whores, known on the Bankside as the ‘Winchester Geese’ since they operated on the substantial area of church-owned land within the borough of Southwark which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester. Greene was an expert on whores, which is not surprising as for several years he lived and was kept by one. ‘A shameless hussy has honey in her lips’, he warns, ‘and her mouth is as sweet as honey, her throat as soft as oil; but the end of her is more bitter than aloes and her tongue is more sharp than a two-edged sword.’ ‘End’ has a double meaning in this context. It might well be understood to mean that such a woman would come to a bad end, but it could also be taken as a warning that while her mouth might be sweet as honey, her ‘end’ was more likely to give you at best ‘the clap’ (gonorrhoea) or at worse ‘the pox’ (syphilis). Very aware that sex always sells popular journalism, he pontificates against lust while going into its variations in detail. There is no end to the tricks played by whores, he counsels, from the straightforward stealing of a purse as a client sleeps, to a variation in which the client is set on and robbed by the whore’s pimp while she is busy servicing him.
    He particularly warns against ‘cross-biting’, a ploy still used centuries later and more recently known as ‘the badger game’. ‘Some unruly mates’, he writes, ‘that place their content in lust, let slip the liberty of their eyes on some painted beauty, let their eyes stray to their unchaste bosoms til their hearts be set on fire.’ They then set about courting the fair one and are almost immediately successful, ‘their love need not wait’, and the young woman