ABSTRACT
In England, too, the earliest documents are of thieves' slang, but in England the earliest vocabularies belong to the sixteenth century. The chief are Copland's The Hye Waye to the Spyttel House, somewhere between 1517 and 1537; John Awdeley the printer's Fraternitye of Vacabondes, 1561, and especially Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Cursetours (i.e., vagabonds), 1566 or 1567, with a fourth edition in 1573. This last was pillaged by Robert Greene and used by Nashe in the sixteenth century; " borrowed " by Dekker, Samuel Rowlands, and Head in the seventeenth century, when dramatists like Brome, Jonson, and Middleton used him freely, much as eighteenth century writers drew on B.E. and nineteenth century novelists on Grose.
