The scandalous Moll Frith
Mary Frith was born sometime in 1584; she was nicknamed Moll from a young age. Moll was a common pet name of Mary in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was also used to describe a young woman, usually of disreputable character.
It’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction of Moll’s life, which was immortalised in a sensationalised biography in 1662, three years after her death.
Mary was born to a shoemaker and his wife, and was in trouble from a young age, smoking, something that was reserved only for men at the time, and honing her skills as a pickpocket. Her paternal uncle, who was a minister, tried to reform her, and even tried having her sent to New England, but Moll jumped overboard before the ship set sail and swam back to shore.
Moll’s scandalous behaviour also included her dressing in men’s clothing, smoking a pipe, acting in a ‘vulgar’ way, and swearing. At the time, women who dressed in men’s attire on a regular basis were generally considered to be “sexually riotous and uncontrolled”.
Her first recorded crime was in 1600, when she was indicted in Middlesex for stealing 2s 11d. The common punishment for thieves at the time was to have their hands burned; she is recorded as having suffered this punishment four times. Despite her penchant for dressing as a man and acting boldly, she had three maids and lived in a rather feminine home, full of mirrors, where she kept parrots and bred mastiffs.
Her very public actions often led to reprisals; she was arrested for being dressed indecently on December 25, 1611, and accused of being involved in prostitution. In 1612, she was sentenced to do penance while standing in a white sheet at St. Paul’s Cross during the Sunday morning sermon; this did little to tame her.
She supposedly performed on stage dressed as a man, bawdily engaging with the audience, singing vulgar songs while playing a lute. Another legend has her challenged to ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch dressed as a man, which she did, carrying a banner and blowing a trumpet the whole way; she won twenty pounds. Two plays were written about her and her exploits during her lifetime.
By the 1620s, according to her own account, she had moved on from pick-pocketing to working as a fence. She later added p!mp to her list of occupations. She procured young women for men and male lovers for middle-class wives. A more sympathetic story has her coercing the lover of one of her female clients, who had passed, to send money for the maintenance of the children that were probably his.
She was briefly held in Bethlem Hospital, after being found insane (probably a ruse to avoid prison), she was released on June 21, 1644. It was said that to escape the gallows and Newgate Prison, she paid a £2,000 bribe. Whichever stories of her life are true, Moll certainly enjoyed an unusual amount of freedom in a society that so frowned upon women who acted unconventionally.
She died of dropsy on July 26, 1659.
Sources:
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10189
Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, Melissa M. Mowry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/542253?fbclid
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