A pickpurse of the pastoral empire

"Yes, I think he is not a pickpurse nor a horse stealer...."

                                                          As You Like It      (III, iv)



Celia is just trying to combine commiseration with a bit of advice for her best friend, Rosalind. Enamored of Orlando, Rosalind is crestfallen at Orlando's failure to show up after swearing he would do so. Celia confides in Rosalind her belief that Orlando, while not the most devious of young men, is faithless when it comes to love: "......the oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster; they are both the confirmer of false reckonings."

As for a paragon of pickpurses and false reckonings, one need search no further than Shakespeare's cheerful peddler/thief Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. Ever observant, buoyant and philosophical, he is the very Plato of pickpockets. With a song on his lips, he is the Sinatra of shilling-stealers. He is also refreshingly honest, at least with himself, about who he is and what he does for a living. He is "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles."  Maybe we should all be so honest.

Pictured above are two small embroidered purses, and a detail view of a third, all in the collection of Agecroft Hall. Dating to the seventeenth century, they provide some idea of the considerable skill of embroiderers of wool, linen, and silk both in England and on the European continent at that time. They are the sorts of small bags that Shakespeare would have been accustomed to seeing, containing coins or small personal possessions. The quality of the needlework makes it evident that these were not the purses of vagabonds who were down to their last pence.

Purses like these would have caught the larcenous eye of the playwright's singing pickpocket, Autolycus. He was ever one to enjoy the crowds at a sheep-shearing: he could fleece a two-legged sheep in a heartbeat. And he boasts a certain pride in the knowledge of his craft:

"I know the business, I hear it: to have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses."      
                                                                                                                       The Winter's Tale   (IV, iv)

It's worth observing that nowhere has the embroiderers' art been more widely known or highly regarded than in that most singular of relics of England's history, the Bayeux Tapestry. The work, nearly three-quarters the length of a football field, is actually not a tapestry at all but an embroidery that uses imagery to relate the story of the Norman Conquest from a conqueror's point of view. The embroiderers stitched the story of this epic strife in linen, as compellingly as historians recounted it in ink.