Such a young man, according to Aubrey, was John Popham, afterwards Sir John, and Chief Justice of the King's Bench. "In his youthful days," says Aubrey, "he was a stout and skilful man at sword and buckler as any in that age, and wild enough in his recreations, consorting with profligate companions, and even at times wont to take a purse with them."
This wild fellow became, as a member of Parliament and a judge, an extremely severe personage in dealing with the class of people with whom we thus learn him to have associated. Partly his work was the Act of 1589, which prescribed banishment (or, as later times phrased it, "transportation") "into such parts beyond the seas as shall be at any time hereafter for that purpose assigned."
Shakespeare's highwaymen are, as a rule, gentlemen. Such were the outlaws who in the Two Gentlemen of Verona waylaid Valentine and Speed in the forest. They had been banished from Verona and Mantua merely for such trivial and essentially gentlemanly peccadilloes as an attempt to abduct an heiress, and stabbing another gentleman to the heart. Too bad!
They found Valentine so presentable a young man that, finding he had no property to lose, they immediately proposed to make him their captain. They were prepared to do him homage, and be ruled by him. "But if thou scorn our courtesy, thou diest."
Making the best of circumstances—being rather prepared to captain a band of desperadoes than lose his life, Valentine consented, with one proviso:
"I take your offer, and will live with you;
Provided that you do no outrages
On silly women, or poor passengers."
To which the outlaws indignantly reply that they "detest such vile, base practices."