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During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a gang of mostly homeless orphans and runaways who formed gangs and were known as The Blackguard Children or the Blackguard Youth. They dwelled in London’s poorest neighbourhoods like the Glass House Yard, Rosemary Lane, and the Salt Petre Bank and made a living by begging or stealing.
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is a clear example of such realities. The word “blackguard” underwent a change between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was originally spelled as two different words, “black” and “guards”.
It was used as a single word to indicate the attendant in charge of the kitchens or black-liveried personal guards. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, London stood among other European cities for it’s beauty and maintenance, but it still has to deal with the utter poverty as a huge portion of the people struggled with.
Many people couldn’t even afford proper accommodation for the night and would either spend the little they had gained during the day through begging and stealing to pay for disruptable lodgings or find shelter in barns, haylofts, and stables to avoid sleeping rough.
On November 4, 1730, an eleven or twelve year old Thomas Coleman was nabbed for stealing two dowlas shirts while his accomplice managed to escape. He was forced to confess and he revealed many details of crimes and accomplices.
He was acquitted on January 15, 1731 but had exposed an organised criminal gang led by Katherine Collins. Within a few years, most of them were caught and faced several different punishments for either stealing, housebreaking, or selling stolen goods. John Collins, the son of Katherine had already been
transported after being found of theft in the summer of 1729. There appeared to be further records on the account of someone named Thomas Coleman, but there was no way to be sure they concern the same person. During the eighteenth century, about one
hundred and twenty-five boys and who were mostly fourteen years of age were tried at the Old Bailey for either theft of violent. Seventy-seven of them were convicted of grand larceny.
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