Episode Details

Send us your Feedback

William Burridge grows up strong, handsome, and restless in Northamptonshire, a young man built for the wrestling ring and the cudgel match but never for the carpenter's bench his father sets him to. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures him at the pivot point: a boy indulged too long, slipping easily from stolen poultry at country fairs to something far darker on the open road.

His is the kind of story that feeds the oldest appetite in true crime: a man whose physical gifts and inflated sense of his own worth carry him past every warning and every second chance. The praise he wins only sharpens his hunger for a life unburdened by honest labour.

Ahead of him lies a world of highways, prisons, and the slow tightening of a justice system that never forgets a name.

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

The vulgar: today this word means crude or obscene, but in the eighteenth century it simply meant the common people; the ordinary masses. When the text says the vulgar have false notions of courage, it is not insulting anyone's manners; it is saying that everyday folk misunderstand what bravery really is, and that misunderstanding can ruin a man.

Cudgel-playing: a rough sport in which two opponents battered each other with short, heavy sticks, trying to draw blood from the head. It was a fixture of country fairs and wakes, and winning earned a man the kind of local fame that could go straight to his skull; in more ways than one.

Junketting: not a spelling error but an older form of junketing, meaning feasting, carousing, and generally having a wild time. Burridge's particular flavour of junketting involved servant girls in the neighbourhood, which tells you everything about where his priorities lay.

Man-of-war: a warship; specifically a vessel in the Royal Navy armed and crewed for battle. Burridge's family hoped the discipline of naval service would straighten him out. The sea had other plans.

Becoming evidence: this phrase meant turning informer; offering testimony against your fellow criminals in exchange for your own life. It was a desperate bargain, and the courts knew exactly how to exploit it. A man who became evidence bought time, but rarely bought trust.

Wakes: in this context, not funeral vigils but annual parish festivals; loud, drunken, communal celebrations that often featured wrestling, cudgel bouts, and other rough entertainments. They were the proving grounds where young men like Burridge built dangerous reputations.

Bay gelding: a castrated male horse with a reddish brown coat. Stealing one was no petty matter; horses were enormously valuable property, and horse theft was treated as a serious felony that could carry the heaviest of consequences.

Old Bailey: London's central criminal court, standing next to Newgate Prison. For centuries it was the last courtroom many defendants would ever see. Its name alone carried weight enough to make a hardened man go pale.

About This Series

Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.

The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.

True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories