ABSTRACT
The community has to be large rather than small for burglars to remain unidentified. Indeed in medieval rural burglaries, the identity of the perpetrator was known purely because the communities were so small. For burglary to occur there also has to be an apparatus of social control to check burglars’ activities. There is a potential reliability problem with this sort of data – burglars must be good at lying. The language that is used by the burglars is based on a restricted vocabulary and contains a lot of obscenity, but very little argot or slang which was of the type only used by burglars, a feature which highlights the individualism of the work. Linguistically the speech-code of the burglar is usually that of manual workers with a premium placed on understatement, personal control and respect, and this became very clear in the interviews.
