Alt text: “A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highway-Men &c,” from Nathan Bailey’s The new universal etymological English dictionary (1760). Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera (Crime 7 (25)).
By Natasha Bailey
Sarah Page, Catharine Goodwin, Mary Allaway, and Elizabeth Talbot, spinsters, were indicted for making an assault on Diana Sawbridge, widow, in a certain field and open place, near the king’s highway…1
The parish constable of St Pancras hurries down the Kentish-town road towards London. He spots his quarry, a group of four women—two running, two steadfastly walking —matching the description he’s just received from a woman who was mugged for her cloak.
“You there!”, he calls. “You are to come along with me.” The women stop and square up to him. One lets off a burst of particularly unladylike language and her companion eyes the constable. “We’re not going anywhere with you”, she snaps. “If you will not go quietly then I shall have to use such means as you will not like,” he replies, letting the head of his truncheon show from his pocket. Once he has wrangled the unruly females back to Kentish-town, they are identified by their victim, who holds her cloak, dirtied from where the women dropped it while fleeing.
“What have you to say to this? Did you rob Mrs Sawbridge?” he asks sternly. One claims she knows nothing of the matter, as does a second woman. Catharine Goodwin (who had given the unfortunate Mrs Sawbridge a good thump during the robbery) follows suit and glares at the fourth accomplice. “Don’t you turn pastry-cook“, she growls threateningly.2
Pastry-cook? What on earth can she mean?
The note below this piece of testimony in the Old Bailey record of this trial explains it as “The cant word, Not to puff”, i.e. not to tell on someone. Witness testimonies were frequently glossed in this way, as witnesses either made use of these “cant” words themselves or reported defendants having done so. But what exactly was cant and what did it mean for people to speak in it?
The earliest instance of “cant” in written sources to refer to spoken language dates from 1640, when it was used to describe “a whining manner of speaking, especially of beggars”.3 Vagrancy had been an offence in English law since the fourteenth century, so this early association with poverty and lack of a fixed abode already suggested a connection between cant language and crime.4 By the late sixteenth century, “canting language” was understood not as a tone of speech but as a separate register of speech that used unusual slang terms.5 This register was understood generally to be spoken by criminals, who used it to conceal their activities.
The opportunities that cant offered for discussing plans in public and still keeping them secret must have been invaluable. The Old Bailey records testify to the popularity of taverns and coffee-houses as meeting places for all kinds of illegal doings, from selling on stolen goods to lying low from the police after committing a crime. By using cant, even if these acts were overheard, there was relatively little chance of the average person understanding them. Cant language even allowed its speakers to communicate within earshot of their victims as they were about to commit the crime. Catherine Walker, tried in 1757 for pickpocketing, had apparently issued instructions to her husband and an acquaintance whilst standing next to Elizabeth Riley, whose watch she was accused of stealing.6 The unfortunate Mrs Riley could hardly have expected that Catherine Walker’s hiss of ‘Gammon’ was a sign that her accomplices should walk in front of Riley to slow her down whilst Catherine took the watch.
When witnesses used cant words in testimony, they often translated the terms unprompted, though some had to be asked for further explanation. There were even disagreements as to whether a witness who claimed to understand a cant word was interpreting it correctly. At the trial of Thomas Denton and John Jones for counterfeiting in 1789, the policeman John Clark explained to the court that crowns and half-crowns were known amongst coiners as “bulls” and “half-bulls”, whilst shillings were referred to as “bobs”. The defence lawyer, Mr. Garrow, responded that he “fanc[ied] you are not in this case so accurate as to cant language”, since if these words did indeed mean crowns and shillings, the account books presented as evidence would show the wrong amounts!7
The idea of a secret criminal language held a powerful fascination for many people. This curiosity manifested in the popularity of cant dictionaries.8 For many readers, these works were doubly appealing. Not only did they suggest the reader could avoid falling victim to crime by being able to decode the language of criminals, but the unfamiliarity of these words to a literate, largely middle-class audience provided a kind of exotic novelty. B.E.’s A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699) promised that besides “being useful for all sorts of People (especially Foreigners) to secure their Money and preserve their Lives”, the work was moreover “very Diverting and Entertaining, being Wholly New.” Accounts and confessions of well-known criminals—printed in great numbers both as moral instructions and to satisfy an increasing thirst for what we might now call true crime — often had cant dictionaries attached. Included in the Old Bailey proceedings from January and October of 1708 was an advert for the “Memoirs of the right Villanous John Hall, the late famous and Notorious Robber”, which promised to acquaint the reader with “the Cant generally us’d by those Sort of People to conceal their Villanies; and Rules to avoid being Robb’d or Cheated by them”.9
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, suspicion of cant was increasingly giving way to a certain appreciation of this “vulgar tongue”.10 There were significant class divides between “high” and “low” society and culture during the 1700s, yet this was also a time where “common” popular culture was increasingly being praised as an authentic expression of British identity. Many words previously identified as cant became so widely intelligible that they evolved into slang- you’ll probably recognise some of the words in this glossary…
Cant in Old Bailey trials (pre-1800), a completely non-authoritative short glossary
| boned | to be apprehended by the police |
| buttons | counterfeit shillings |
| dubbs | lockpicks |
| fact | offence |
| fence | someone who sells on stolen goods |
| gambler | someone who drops money and pretends it belongs to a passerby in order to gain their trust e.g. “did you drop this?” |
| gammon | a thief’s accomplice who distracts the attention of a victim while a crime is committed |
| mark | a forged will |
| quid | a guinea |
| scamp | highway |
| thrums | threepence |
| to sham Abraham | to pretend to be hurt, to play dead |
| to stamp some men | to knock someone down and rob them |
| to turn buck or stag | to give evidence against someone |
| to turn pastry-cook | to tell on someone, to snitch |
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- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, April 1770. Trial of Sarah Page, Catharine Goodwin, Mary Allaway, Elizabeth Talbot (t17700425-40). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17700425-40?text=cant (Accessed: 24th January 2025. Verbatim quotes from trial records are indicated in italics. ↩︎
- This was preceded by much harsher language, which appears in redacted form in the court record but I thought best to omit here… ↩︎
- “Cant, N. (3).” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1195136820 ↩︎
- Unfortunately, homelessness also increased greatly over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As more parishes were given the power to administer their own funds for the poor, they preferred to give relief only to those few they saw as the ’deserving poor’. The enclosure of common lands also meant that traditional means of sustenance for the very poor, like cutting and selling wood from common land, were no longer available. ↩︎
- Some early modern writers believed that this so-called “criminal cant” originated from Romani, but there is little correlation between vocabularies of criminal cant and Romani or Angloromani vocabularies. This association should probably be taken as a reflection of contemporary anti-Romani attitudes that portrayed them as “vagabonds” and criminals. ↩︎
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, April 1757. Trial of Catherine, wife of Thomas Walker (t17570420-23). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17570420-23?text=cant (Accessed: 24th January 2025). ↩︎
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, June 1789. Trial of Thomas Denton , John Jones (t17890603-50). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17890603-50?text=cant (Accessed: 24th January 2025). ↩︎
- For an excellent overview of cant dictionaries between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, see Julie Coleman, A history of cant and slang dictionaries, vols. 1-3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ↩︎
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, January 1708. Advertisements (a17080115-1). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/a17080115-1?text=cant (Accessed: 20th January 2025). ↩︎
- For more on this development, see Janet Sorenson, “Vulgar Tongues: Canting Dictionaries and the Language of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37.3 (2004), pp. 435-454. ↩︎
