As you may or may not know, William Stowe published in 1722 a list of all Coaching Inns in London, together with the available destinations and which days they were available and also the type of transport (Coach, Carrier or Wagon).

I have taken this list and turned it into an easy-to-read table and added the ability to list by Destination or by Coaching Inn. Try looking up your favourite destination to plan your trip, then see what other services leave from the same place.

Here is the link: Coaching Inns in 18th Century London.

I’ve updated my Pharmacopeia database to include three sets of data: Fuller’s Pharmacopeia Extemporanea from 1710; Buchan’s Domestic Medicine from 1769; and a few recipes from the Reverend William Twigg dating to about 1715.

You can see more details on the Pharmacopeia Index page.

I’ve finished adding subject categories to Vaux’s glossary. I thought it worth making a separate page for this one, given that it is not part of the “B.E.” group (see the discussion of sources for more details) and has an Australian connection.

You can find it here.

While I was researching the Barber-Surgeons guild as part of 18th century medicine, I came across the London Livery Companies. I had been vaguely aware of The Worshipful Companies of Mercers/Fishmongers/etc but knew very little about them.

I discovered they were responsible for regulating various trades, having grown out of the medieval guild system. They also acted as lobby groups, periodically petitioning the monarch of the day for special privileges and monopolies.

The 18th century saw most of the Worshipful Companies diminish into social and charitable organisations as the crafts they represented were taken over by machines. At the beginning of the century, however, many of them still had considerable power to regulate their crafts even if by the end of the century they were moribund.

For anyone who is interested, I have made a few notes about the Companies, together with links for anyone interested in following up further.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into 18th century medicine. Like most things in the 18th century it evolves from the end of superstition through to beginnings of science.

I’m still very much working on it but, during the course of things I found the Pharmacopeia Extemporanea, produced in English by a Thomas Fuller from an earlier Latin edition in 1710. A Pharmacopeia, in case you didn’t know, is a recipe book for medicines. As is my wont, I have divided it up and put it in a searchable database.

Have a look at the indexed version and the database search. The latter is very useful if you are interested in what particular ingredients were used for.

I haven’t linked Medicine into the rest of the site yet but help yourself to a sneak preview.

Oh yes, and I’ve done more of the interminable task of putting Thieves Cant into subject categories and have nearly finished Vaux’s glossary.

Thank you to my visitors from now 50 countries. I hadn’t realised interest in the 18th century in general and Thieves Cant in particular was so widespread. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d particularly like me to add to the site.

I’ve added a new source of cant terms from the Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux published in 1819. Vaux was an English criminal transported to New South Wales in the early 19th century. At the end of his memoirs he includes a glossary of some 700 cant terms.

Vaux’s list overlaps with the material I currently have in the database but contains quite a lot that is new. I have added Vaux to the database but not yet added them to any category. However, the terms will appear in database searches with a date of 1819.

I have also added a new page discussing the sources used which might be of interest.

Thank you to everyone who has written in with feedback and suggestions. The Vaux material is a direct outcome of a suggestion of well-known lexicographer who indicated he did not wish to be quoted but whose help has been much appreciated.

A happy new year to all.

It is always nice when your site tops the google rankings for a search topic. I have a little thingie set up whereby google will tell me where I appear in various searches.

It told me that the site is #1 if you are searching for the words: so blossed beat. I checked and it was so.

Alas, that was last week. Now I am only #2 on the list. All the blossed beaters will go elsewhere.

[A bloss, by the way, is the cant term for a shop-lifter or a bully. You can find it with the cant database search.]

The Newgate Calendar Database Search is now available!

I have followed a similar format to the one for Thieves’ Cant. You can search by Names, Tagline (the punchy little one-liner provided with each entry) or by the Body Text.

I’ve had a lot of fun poking around, finding stuff I never even noticed when just reading the text. Try searching for your favourite English town in the Body Text. A surprising number of the larger ones are in there.

As always, please let me know if you find any bugs or if you have any suggestions. I’m keen to make this as useful as possible.

I’ve started a new project – this time The Newgate Calendar.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a collection of stories about criminals and their fates. There have been various editions, the latest covering up to about 1840.

The stories are a great resource for anyone interested in the period. Although some of the stories seem to be completely made up, they are still relevant because the fiction had to be plausible and so the descriptions can be assumed to be fairly accurate.

I have extracted all the 18th century entries (over 350 of them) and put each in a separate file. Currently, they are listed in one big index but I am planning to categorise them and eventually add a database search.

There stories range from exciting to tedious. To get you started, here is one of my favourites, the story of John Smith who holds the record for least successful Highwayman of all time with a career that lasted for only a single week.

Another interesting one is the case of Ann Flynn who was convicted of theft but the court was so sympathetic to her poverty that she was only fined her a shilling, which was then paid by the jury. Although the laws were severe, it is clear that sometimes juries took matters into their own hands.

Anyway, have a browse through them. Let me know if you spot any errors – it was too big a job to do manually so I wrote a script to extract everything. Given the uneven nature of the original formatting, it is quite possible that mistakes happened.

Oh yes, and I am still working on categorising the Thieves’ Cant database. It’s slowly getting there.

The cant database seems to be popular. Welcome to everyone from around the world (29 countries so far this month) – even those of you who were lost.

I’m still working on it. I’ve just categorised another 400-500 terms which will now appear in their proper subject headings. I’ve also removed a few duplicates which crept in there somehow. You may still find the odd duplicate with an entry in both the categorised and uncategorised sections. I’ll get to them shortly.

The database now has nearly 6,000 entries of which about half have been put into categories. Nearly of the uncategorised ones are from 1811.

I need to update the fixed category pages (the ones listed on the menu in the Cant section) as they still only contain the old lists and have very little of the later material. Shouldn’t be too big a job – really it’s more a matter of making sure their aren’t any terms on those pages which somehow haven’t made it into the database.

If all this sounds a bit dodgy, it has been a very manual process and mistakes do creep in. If you do spot any problems, please contact me and let me know. All help is appreciated.