watch was snatched from his fob and duly carried to Moll.  The next day the victim, anxious to repurchase his watch, repaired to Fleet Street, where Moll generously promised to recover the stolen property.  Unhappily security had encouraged recklessness, and as the farmer turned to leave he espied his own watch hanging among other trinkets upon the wall.  With a rare discretion he held his peace until he had called a constable to his aid, and this time the Roaring Girl was lodged in Newgate, with an ugly crime laid to her charge.

Committed for trial, she demanded that the watch should be left in the constable’s keeping, and, pleading not guilty when the sessions came round, insisted that her watch and the farmer’s were not the same.  The farmer, anxious to acknowledge his property, demanded the constable to deliver the watch, that it might be sworn to in open court; and when the constable put his hand to his pocket the only piece of damning evidence had vanished, stolen by the nimble fingers of one of Moll’s officers.

Thus with admirable trickery and a perfect sense of dramatic effect she contrived her escape, and never again ran the risk of a sudden discovery.  For experience brought caution in its train, and though this wiliest of fences lived almost within the shadow of Newgate, though she was as familiar in the prison yard as at the Globe Tavern, her nightly resort, she obeyed the rules of life and law with so precise an exactitude that suspicion could never fasten upon her.  Her kingdom was midway between robbery and justice.  And as she controlled the mystery of thieving so, in reality, she meted out punishment to the evildoer.  Honest citizens were robbed with small risk to life or property.  For Moll always frowned upon violence, and was ever ready to restore the booty for a fair ransom.  And the thieves, driven by discipline to a certain humanity, plied their trade with an obedience and orderliness hitherto unknown.  Moll’s then was no mean achievement.  Her career was not circumscribed by her trade, and the Roaring Girl, the daredevil companion of the wits and bloods, enjoyed a fame no less glorious than the Queen of Thieves.

‘Enter Moll in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard.’  Thus in the old comedy she comes upon the stage; and truly it was by her clothes that she was first notorious.  By accident a woman, by habit a man, she must needs invent a costume proper to her pursuits.  But she was no shrieking reformer, no fanatic spying regeneration in a pair of breeches.  Only in her attire she showed her wit; and she went to a bull-baiting in such a dress as well became her favourite sport.  She was not of those who ’walk in spurs but never ride.’  The jerkin, the doublet, the galligaskins were put on to serve the practical purposes of life, not to attract the policeman or the spinster.  And when a petticoat spread its ample folds beneath the doublet, not only was her array handsome, but it symbolised the career of one who was neither man nor woman, and yet both.  After a while, however, the petticoat seemed too tame for her stalwart temper, and she exchanged it for the great Dutch slop, habited in which unseemly garment she is pictured in the ancient prints.