Soon after this harrowing dismissal, Jack Ovet was taken, tried, and executed, ending in May 1708, in the thirty-second year of his age.
JOHN HALL, RICHARD LOW, AND STEPHEN BUNCE
John Hall, born in 1675 of poor parents in Bishop's Head Court, off Gray's Inn Lane, was one of those late seventeenth and very early eighteenth-century evil-doers, who anticipated the sordid career of the modern thief, without any redeeming qualities. A chimney-sweep by trade, he was, among other things, a highwayman, but he more often padded the hoof upon the highway than rode along it, and he would turn his hand, according to what he deemed the necessities of the moment, to pocket-picking, shop-lifting, or ringing the changes, with equal facility. At the same time, he was not altogether a fortunate malefactor. As a pickpocket, he was frequently detected and, we learn, "treated in the usual manner, by ducking in the horsepond," by those who did not want the trouble of prosecuting him. Happening upon more vindictive persons, he was arrested, time after time, and thrown into Bridewell and often whipped. Which was the more desirable, to be flung into a horsepond, or be whipped, it must be left to individual tastes to decide. It depends largely, no doubt, upon the comparative filthiness of the pond and the kind of lash in use by the brawny warders of Bridewell.
He was eminently versatile, but the public has ever looked with suspicion upon versatility; and perhaps for this, among other reasons, his name is scarcely famous: only notorious in a small way as a jack-of-all-trades, except honest ones, and a great master in no particular one.
He was, it may be at once granted, industrious enough in his perverted way, and was for always frequenting churches, fairs, markets, and public assemblies: he had also generally a confederate at hand, to whom he would swiftly pass on the swag, to be himself found empty-handed when searched, and with nothing on him to prove his guilt; quite in the modern style.
He had, as a shoplifter, the same painfully chequered fortunes that studded his pocket-picking career with deplorable incidents. In January 1682 he was convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing a pair of shoes, and was whipped at the cart's tail. A little later, still smarting from that correction, he was back at the same trade, and in the long span of eighteen years suffered a series of duckings, whippings, and the distressing indignities that are the common rewards of clumsy rogues, sufficient to have cured many an one. But Jack Hall was clearly an "habitual." The delight of sport gilded his occupation, and salved his moral and physical hurts; and, after all, although he was a more than commonly blundering criminal, it was in itself no mean feat in those severe times to follow the course he steered, and yet for so long to keep his neck out of the noose.
After eighteen years of miscellaneous villainy, he was convicted of breaking into the house of one Jonathan Bretail, and for this was sentenced to be hanged. With so lengthy a record as this, he was fortunate indeed in receiving a pardon conditional upon his being transported within six months to the American colonies. Fortunate colonies! But he escaped at the last moment from the convict ship, and England therefore did not lose her Hall.
Having tried many kinds of petty robbery with no very great or continued success, and being too well known as a pickpocket and shoplifter, against whom every pocket was buttoned, all tills locked, and goods carefully secured, he struck out a new line; robbing country waggons and stealing portmanteaus off coaches. But even here, in this arduous branch of a thief's varied business, ill-luck malevolently pursued him; for he was caught in the act and convicted in 1702. This brought him a period of two years' enforced seclusion in Bridewell, and the painful and disfiguring sentence of branding in the cheek, by which all men might know him on sight for a convicted felon, and be warned accordingly. This inevitable carrying his own condemnation with him wherever he went severely handicapped him when he was again at liberty; and it was probably for this reason that he returned to burglary, which, conducted at night-time, might reasonably offer inducements to a man with a scarred face.