The Sailor’s Widow, or Crime Sometimes Pays

By | 17 January 2025

By Natasha Bailey

This post is the first of a series looking at the LawBod’s pre-1800 collections (yes, we do have them!) and one of (hopefully) several on cases that have caught my eye from the proceedings of the Old Bailey. The original print copies of these proceedings from the early 1700s onward are in the LawBod’s Official Papers collection but thanks to the wonderful ‘The Proceedings of the Old Bailey’, you can now search over 190,000 trial records online. Now without further ado, let me introduce you to…

Alt text: Jane Tease, wife of Peter Tease, was indicted, for that she, after the 24th day of June 1736, to wit on the 23d day of June in the 16th year of our Sovereign Lord George II… falsely and feloniously did utter and publish as true a certain false and counterfeit paper writing…1

A woman and her friend enter the Naval Pay Office. She’s dressed in black and holds a handkerchief to her face, sniffling. She produces a piece of paper and hands it over for inspection. Scanning the page, George Purvis, the official on duty, sees it is the will of Richard Clarke, a deceased sailor. According to this paper, the wages Clarke was due from the Navy at the time of his death are to go to his “dearly beloved wife, Alice Clarke.”  “What is your name?”, Purvis asks the woman, and she looks back at him, bemused.

“Jane,” she answers. Her companion gives her a sharp prod in the ribs. “Your name is Alice!”, she hisses and turns apologetically to Purvis.2 “She’s not been the same since poor Clarke died.”

Something doesn’t seem quite right, but she does have the will after all. And who would turn up to claim Richard Clarke’s pay, if not his wife?

The woman leaves the office clutching a ticket which entitles her to the eighteen pounds, five shillings and sevenpence that poor, drowned Richard Clarke was still owed as pay… but of course, she isn’t Alice Clarke at all. Two years later, the fake widow—real name Jane Tease —would appear in the Old Bailey dock accused of deception and fraud.

Why pretend to be a sailor’s widow?3 The eighteenth century was a time of global sea warfare, where some of the most decisive battles were fought on board ship, and sailors were always in high demand. This huge navy was eyewateringly expensive: on average, the Royal Navy requested between £1 million and £2million per year from Parliament in the last half of the 1700s.4 The navy was also in constant debt. Sailors’ pay was often years in arrears… so when Richard Clarke died at sea in 1740, there was still a considerable amount to collect.

Jane Tease played a crucial role in the fraud as the grieving widow, but she was not the ringleader. The key witness against her, Francis Sherlock, freely admitted that he made his living from forging seamen’s wills. Indeed, when asked at the trial of Frances Stanton (another female accomplice) how many times he thought he had carried out the ruse, Sherlock replied it was “so often, that really I can’t remember.”

The scheme usually went like this. First Sherlock would ask about for news of any sailors who had recently died. Given the constant docking of ships on the Thames, sailors were not hard to find in London taverns. Sherlock also mentioned being tipped off when a ship had arrived with “something worth picking up”. Next, he would locate a woman in need of money and persuade her to take part. Rather than partnering with professional frauds, Sherlock targeted working women who had good reputations in their communities. Character witnesses for Jane Tease and another accomplice, Mary Cooke, both described them as “honest hardworking wom[e]n”. How unaware the women really were of the illegality of the scheme is unclear. Most claimed they did not realise how “wicked” the plan was and that they would never do such a thing again, but they would hardly have been the first defendants to plead ignorance in the hope of an acquittal! Indeed, if Sherlock was to be believed, Frances Stanton had already worked with him once, but had run off with the claims ticket…

The false sailors’ wives—Jane Tease, Mary Cooke, Frances Stanton and Mary Ogden— were all tried in the same session. Francis Sherlock was more than happy to testify against all his former accomplices. “I think I did very well,” he told Mary Cooke, “to bring you all to justice, or else you would have brought me to it, I only catched you first.” The court did not quite share his opinion; every woman charged with fraud for assisting Francis Sherlock was acquitted. Sherlock himself does not seem to have been tried for leading the scheme. It’s quite possible that he was indeed caught but denounced his accomplices in exchange for freedom from prosecution… and perhaps before they got the idea to turn him in first.

I’d be the first to admit I have a weakness for stories of clever scams, however, this case does reveal quite a bit beyond the immediate oddness of the identity theft. Word clearly travelled fast between ships and land once they docked; as a port city, London was a hub for all kinds of information from overseas. Taverns and coffee-houses were not just places to enjoy a drink but also to seek out news. In the hands of enterprising folk like Francis Sherlock, this news had real monetary value.

Women could become embroiled in certain kinds of crime by virtue of their gender. The ‘sailor’s wife’ scheme played on a recognition of grieving women as more deserving of pity and assistance than male relatives, hence the choice of widows or sisters as claimants. A widowed woman cut a far more vulnerable figure than a widowed man. Working women frequently combined several forms of low-paying labour to make ends meet and were probably reluctant to ask too many questions, when each job was sorely needed.  The promise of a few guineas for only a day’s work must have seemed very attractive to someone like Jane Tease, a market gardener’s wife who took in washing, nursed children and had four young children of her own to care for. Equally, however, Sherlock’s female accomplices had a certain amount of power in the scheme; since it only worked with a woman to make the claim, he could hardly threaten to cut them out and proceed on his own. Lastly, there’s a certain sadness to the whole endeavour. Death or injury at sea was commonplace and the uncertain frequency of ships docking must have meant that many genuine wives and families waited years for news of their loved ones. Eighteen pounds might have been a welcome sum to Jane Tease and Francis Sherlock, but for the many real Alice Clarkes of eighteenth-century London, their claims tickets probably offered little consolation for their lost sailors.

Look out for the next post in the series…. you can keep updated on all things LawBod on Bluesky (@thelawbod.bsky.social) and on Instagram (@thelawbod).


  1. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) May 1744. Trial of Jane Tease (t17440510-28). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440510-28?text=tease  (Accessed: 7th January 2025). Verbatim quotations from the trial record are given in italics. See also the associated trials of Frances Stanton (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440728-33?text=stanton), Mary Cooke (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440510-30?text=cooke) and Mary Ogden (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440728-31?text=Gulleland), mentioned later in this post.
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  2. Reportedly, Jane Tease did in fact forget to answer to the false name of Alice and gave her own name instead! ↩︎
  3. For a more detailed exploration of naval ticket fraud as a social phenomenon, see Margaret Hunt. ‘Frauds on Navy Pay and the Men and Women of Maritime London, c. 1620-1740’, Past & Present, Vol. 65 Issue Supplement 17, pp. 108-138. ↩︎
  4. See Clive Wilkinson, The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), ch. 3 ”Treating the House with Contempt’: British Naval Finance in the Eighteenth Century’. ↩︎