The highwayman was a conspicuous character. One of the most
romantic of these gentry at one time was a woman named Mary Frith, born
in 1585, and known as Moll Cut-Purse. She dressed in male attire, was an
adroit fencer, a bold rider, and a staunch royalist; she once took two
hundred gold jacobuses from the Parliamentary General Fairfax on Hounslow
Heath. She is the chief character in Middleton's play of the "Roaring
Girl"; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse, pickpocket,
highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves' fence, she died
in peace at the age of seventy. To return to the inns, Fyner Morrison, a
traveler in 1617, sustains all that Harrison says of the inns as the best
and cheapest in the world, where the guest shall have his own pleasure.
No sooner does he arrive than the servants run to him--one takes his
horse, another shows him his chamber and lights his fire, a third pulls
off his boots. Then come the host and hostess to inquire what meat he
will choose, and he may have their company if he like. He shall be
offered music while he eats, and if he be solitary the musicians will
give him good-day with music in the morning. In short, "a man cannot more
freely command at home, in his own house, than he may do in his inn."
The amusements of the age were often rough, but certainly more moral than
they were later; and although the theatres were denounced by such
reformers as Stubbes as seminaries of vice, and disapproved by Harrison;
they were better than after the Restoration, when the plays of
Shakespeare were out of fashion.
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