Let Them Fight: A Comedy History Podcast · Jacob Trimmer and Tim Groeschel

Ep. 592 Jonathan Wild

·1 hr 50 min·5 clips

Wilde sold out thieves for 40 pounds and may have driven the “double cross” story.

1. Let Them Fight: A Comedy History Podcast focuses on Jonathan Wild, a London thief-taker who turned crime control into a private business. 2. The hosts frame Wilde as a poor man from Wolverhampton or Shropshire who later became linked to Mary Milliner, Charles Hitchin, and Jack Shepard. 3. The episode asks how Wilde moved from buckle-maker and debtor to a man who could profit from both theft and law enforcement. 4. Wilde was born around 1682 or 1683, baptized at St. Peter’s Collegiate Church, and came from a family where his father was a carpenter and his mother sold herbs and fruit. 5. His father died, Wolverhampton had about 6,000 people, and he was apprenticed at 15 to a buckleman in Birmingham. 6. After seven years, he married, had a child, and left for London in 1704 before returning and leaving again in 1708. 7. In March 1710, Wilde was arrested for debt and sent to Wood Street Compter, one of London’s debtor prisons. 8. At the prison, he did errands for the jailers, repaid his debt, lent money to other prisoners, and worked under the “liberty of the gate.” 9. That prison arrangement also let him help arrest thieves at night, which gave him money and access to criminals. 10. Wilde met Mary Milliner, described as a hooker, and Daniel Defoe wrote that she brought him into her own gang of thieves or whores. 11. After his release in 1712, Wilde lived with Milliner and her husband in Covent Garden and acted as her bodyguard on night walks. 12. He later got his own place opposite Cripplegate Church in Cock Alley and began working with highwaymen, cat burglars, and pickpockets. 13. Milliner advanced into becoming a madam while Wilde became a fence who disposed of stolen goods and paid bribes to get thieves out of prison. 14. When Wilde parted ways with Milliner, he cut off her ear to mark her as a prostitute. 15. The hosts say London crime rose in the early 1700s, and Charles Hitchin claimed in 1712 that he knew 2,000 Londoners who lived solely by theft. 16. Hitchin became under-marshal in 1711, was paid 700 pounds, and was accused of extravagant extortion, selective arrests, and coercion of sexual services from molly houses. 17. Wilde briefly worked under Hitchin in 1713, earned about 40 pounds per arrest, and then opened his own office in the Blue Boar Tavern. 18. He bought stolen goods, returned them for rewards, blackmailed owners, and used the press to publicize cases while calling himself Hitchin’s deputy. 19. The hosts present Wilde’s career as comedy and criminal bureaucracy colliding, with petty insults, fake authority, and constant bargaining over money and status. 20. Listeners who like Georgian London crime, anti-hero swindlers, and corrupt law enforcement will get the most out of this episode; listeners wanting a straight biography with minimal banter may skip it.

As heard by us

A filthy, fast-moving history of blackmail, arrests, and prison breaks around Jonathan Wild.

Jonathan Wild is framed as a grimy tale of printed blackmail, leverage over a brothel owner, arrests, and prison breaks. The hosts keep the pace tight and the language blunt, so the story moves like a chain of one bad turn after another, with Wild, Jack Shepard, and Elizabeth…

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Why you'd press play

You want a history podcast that treats a criminal mastermind like a complete goblin with paperwork.

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