ABSTRACT
Griffin Flood was one of the few professional criminals we will meet in this collection. His story is part of a familiar trope that we will also see later in the stories of “The penitent apprentice” and “The wicked life of Captain Harrison”. Beginning his young adulthood as a respectable apprentice, Flood quickly descended into knavish behaviour. He made his living by threatening to report illegal workers to the courts, unless they agreed to provide him with a sum of money, either in exchange for his silence, or so that he would bring a slow legal action that prevented other informers from bringing their own suits. At this time, to conduct business in the metropolis, it was necessary to be a “freeman of London”. This required being free from all indentures by having completed an apprenticeship or – especially in the case of foreign workers who entered the country to escape religious persecution – having purchased their “freeman” status and being admitted into one of many trade guilds. Informers were encouraged to report illegal workers; in exchange for their information, the informer would receive a fee, typically one-half of the fine levied against those convicted. Eventually, Flood’s criminal behaviour escalated to the attempted murder of a constable and the murder of a vintner he was trying to extort. Even in prison, awaiting trial for murder, Flood was quarrelsome, and his refusal to accept the power of the law or his social superiors resulted in his death by peine forte et dure. As the author notes, “Never was there (I think) the like audacious and shameless fellow living in this city, nor any of a more impudent carriage before his betters”. Even Flood would have agreed with this assessment, if there is any truth to the claim that he wrote his own epitaph: “Here lieth Griffin Flood full low in his grave, which lived a rascal and died a knave”.
