Jack Bird was humbly born and as humbly educated. When it is added that he was born in the second half of the seventeenth century, it will rightly be supposed that his education did not include any of the sciences, and that it probably did not go far beyond teaching him to write his own name. He had no use for even that small accomplishment, for he was apprenticed to a baker, and before his indentures were expired had run away and 'listed for a soldier in the foot-guards; being almost immediately sent out to the Low Countries. He served under the Duke of Monmouth at the siege of Maestricht, but found too many masters in the army, and so deserted and made his way to Amsterdam, where he commenced a new career by stealing a piece of silk. He was detected in the act, taken before a magistrate, and condemned to a term of hard labour in the "rasp-house," where he was set to rasping log-wood, and to other severe drudgeries, for the term of twelve months. Unaccustomed to such hard labour, Jack fainted at his tasks, but the labour-master set it down to laziness, and to cure it, chained him in the bottom of an empty cistern by one foot, and caused a number of taps to be turned on, so that the cistern began rapidly to fill and the prisoner to be obliged, as the cistern was deeper than his own height, to work vigorously at a pump fixed in it, lest the water should gain upon, and drown, him. An hour's experience of this ingenious punishment rendered him quite anxious to return to the labour that had before been too much for him.

At the end of his term of bondage he hastened to take leave of Holland and the Hollanders, who had proved themselves such connoisseurs in quaint punishments. In England, justice certainly was more severe, and hanged men who stole quite trivial things, but it did not make people perform such hard labour, and Jack was one of those who would rather die than work. There are many of his kind even now.

Although hard labour was distasteful to our hero, he was by no means satisfied to live as humbly as he had been born, and his thoughts turned lightly to the road, as a likely place on which to pick up a good living without over-exertion. There was the choice of footpad or highwayman, and of course he chose the higher branch of the profession; for a footpad had to pad the hoof and be content, after all, with robbing the comparatively poor; while a highwayman could cut a fine figure on horseback, plunder the best, and be at little personal fatigue in doing so. Many foolish fellows, commencing highwayman, would hire, or even purchase, a horse; not so Jack Bird. "Thorough" was his motto, and he began business by stealing the mount he fancied. At the same time he took excellent good care to go fully armed, for we read that he provided himself with six good pistols and a broadsword. In this fortified condition, and in the dress of a gentleman, he opened his campaign. His first few attempts were highly successful, but he soon learned, in a painful adventure on the Dover Road, between Gravesend and Chatham, that fortune is fickle. There he encountered one Joseph Pinnis, a pilot, who was returning from London, where he had received ten or twelve pounds for piloting a Dutch ship up-river. He had been so unfortunate as to lose both hands during an engagement in the Dutch war, some years earlier, and it seemed to our callous highwayman an easy task to rob him.

Summoned to "Stand and deliver!" the pilot replied, "You see, sir, that I have never a hand, so cannot take my money out of my pocket. Be so kind, therefore, as to take the trouble to search me."

The highwayman, without the slightest misgiving, complied with this very reasonable request, and securing the pilot's purse, began to examine its contents, when he found himself suddenly seized around the waist by the traveller, who appeared to have enormous strength in his arms, even though he had no hands. He succeeded in overthrowing the highwayman, and falling upon him, beat him fearfully about the face with his metal-shod wrists.

Presently some other travellers approached, and, asking the cause of the struggle, Pinnis told them: asking them to take a hand and give the ruffian a further drubbing, and adding that he was almost out of breath with what he had done already.

The travellers then, informed of the whole affair, conducted Bird in custody to a magistrate, who committed him to Maidstone gaol, where he was tried and condemned to death, but was afterwards, for some reason that has escaped the historian, pardoned and set at liberty, to work more outrages upon unarmed and inoffensive folk.

At first, however, the danger and indignity he had passed through, of being so completely vanquished by a handless man, whom he had at first foolishly despised, quite put him out of conceit with himself and the road, and he resolved to abandon an employment which had at first promised so well, only to turn out so ill. But work—real work—was uncongenial as ever, and as he had to exist somehow, it happened that the road called him successfully again, after all.

The first person he encountered in his new series of adventures was a Welsh drover, who proved to be a muscular man, and the very devil of a fellow with that nasty weapon, the quarter-staff. "Once bit, twice shy," murmured Jack, withdrawing swiftly out of reach. "If a villain of a sailor without hands can overthrow me, I shall not venture my carcase within reach of one that has hands, for fear of something worse." So, he pulled a pistol from the armoury he carried in his belt, and from a safe distance shot the drover through the head. He then searched the body and found, to his disgust, only eighteenpence. But he summoned what philosophy he could over this disappointment, and, cynically remarking that "'Tis a price worth killing a man for, any time," rode off without the least remorse.

On another occasion he met the original "Poor Robin," the almanac-writer and humorous prognosticator; and as he did not disdain to exact contributions from the poor, as well as the rich (although "Poor Robin" probably was by no means so poor as his name would imply), he desired the calendar-maker to halt and surrender. As this was the first time Poor Robin had heard such language, and as he had received no hint of this occasion from the stars, he stood and stared, as if himself had been planet-struck.

"Come now," said Jack, "this is no child's play: I am in earnest."

Robin pleaded the poverty to which, he said, his nickname bore witness.

"That," returned Bird, "is a miserable, threadbare excuse, and will not save your bacon."

"But," pleaded the almanac-maker, "as author of those calendars that yearly come out in my name, I have canonised a great many gentlemen of your profession; look in them for their names, and let this be my protection."

But all in vain; Bird ransacked his pockets, and from them extracted fifteen shillings, took a new hat from his head, and requested him, as he had now given him cause, to canonise him also.

"Ay!" exclaimed Poor Robin grimly, "that will I, when you have suffered martyrdom at Tyburn, which will not be long hence."

"Poor Robin's" publications, it may be said, in this connection, are well worth examination. In an age when Lilly, Perkins, and a host of others issued prophetic almanacs, divining future events from the stars, and were extensively believed in, "Poor Robin's" almanac, year by year, made much fun out of those pretensions; fun that sometimes reads curiously modern. Seventeenth-century humour is, as a rule, as flat to the modern taste as champagne opened and left to stand, but much of "Poor Robin's" wit and humour still sparkles. While Perkins, with a provoking solemnity, would give a chronological table of events from the Year One and would proceed by degrees from "Adam, created 1, B.C., 3962," and would continue by way of "Methuselah, born 687, B.C., 2306," to "The Tyrant Oliver began his government, December 16th, 1653"; "Poor Robin" would devote his attention largely to the days when highwaymen were hanged, and would draw farcical conclusions from planetary dispositions. Thus we find him saying:

"Now the effects of the conjunction of Saturn and Mars will much operate: such conjunctions are always attended with remarkable accidents. There was one in the year 1672, and the German Princess rode up Holborn Hill; another in 1673, and Du Vail visited the three-legged tenement at Hyde Park Corner. I might instance in divers other examples, but these shall suffice."

The so-called "German Princess" was an adventuress, really a native of Canterbury, and a daughter of one of the choristers in the Cathedral there, named Moders. She was hanged at Tyburn, in 1678 (not in 1672), and so was Du Vall (not at Hyde Park Corner, and not in 1673).

In his burlesque monthly forecasts of the weather and public events, he evidently reflects upon his serious contemporaries, whose predictions would occasionally go wrong, and who, like our modern "Old Moore," would in consequence grow less cocksure and more cautious, and would then more or less cleverly tell readers to "expect" something or other, together with such eminently safe remarks for February and March as, "Wind and rainstorms are to be looked for by the farmer."

In February 1664, for example, "Poor Robin," in burlesque of this kind of thing, warns his readers to "expect some showers of rain, either this month or the next, or the next after that, or else we shall have a very dry spring.... The twenty-seventh day of this month died Cardinal Mazarine, and if you would know the reason why he died, then, I answer, it was because he could live no longer."

Under June, he declares that, "If the frost nips the fruit trees, there will be no apples." In July, "Fleas will grow troublesome, and will lie with you without leave," and elsewhere we find that "Tyburn shall be a great eye-sore to Highway men and cut-purses," and that "The leafless tree betwixt London and Paddington will this month bear fruit, but it will be only Medlers, and they are stark naught until they are rotten." The which extracts fully illustrate the allusions in the short life of Jack Bird.

Made bold by a long series of successes, Bird procured a good horse and determined never again to stoop to robbing for mere shillings. A meeting with the Earl of ——, rolling along in his carriage, accompanied by his chaplain, and attended by two servants, gave him his first opportunity of putting this excellent determination into practice.

"You must stop, my lord!" exclaimed Bird, threatening him with one pistol, and the coachman with the other.

"The devil I must!" said his lordship; "who the——"—here the chaplain gave a loud cough, and the word was lost in the throaty rasp he produced—"what the——" ("ahem!" from the chaplain) "are you then, fellow, that you bid me pull up on the roadway for you, you——?"

"An honest collector of tolls, your lordship," said Bird: "your purse this instant!"

"So! that is the way of it?" replied his lordship. "I am very little anxious about the small sum I have about me, but I intend you shall fight for it."

Bird then flew into a passion, and swore terribly, after the low fashion then proverbially prevalent among our soldiers in the Low Countries. He waved his pistols excitedly.

"Don't lose your temper," said my lord. "When I said 'fight,' I meant boxing, and not shooting, and I will fight you fairly for all the money I have, against nothing."

"That is an honourable challenge, my lord," replied Bird, "provided none of your servants be near us."

His lordship then commanded them to withdraw to a distance. The chaplain, however, could not endure the thought of the Earl fighting while he was but an idle spectator, and requested the honour of being his patron's champion.

Matters were arranged: the divine stripped off his gown, and in another half a minute the scene resounded with the thuds and grunts of the combatants, as they planted blows home on each other's faces and bodies. In less than a quarter of an hour the chaplain was knocked out of time, with only breath enough remaining to exclaim, "I'll fight no more!" Bird was unquestioned victor. "Now, my lord," said he, turning to the carriage, "if it please your lordship, I will take a turn with you."

"Not I!" earnestly replied the Earl, "for if you can beat my chaplain, you will surely beat me, for we have tried it out before." So saying, he handed the highwayman the sum of twenty guineas he was carrying.

Bird's career was closed by a foolish act. He, in company with a woman, knocked down and robbed a man in Drury Lane. The woman was seized on the spot, but Bird escaped. Going, however, to visit her in prison, he himself was arrested; and, being found guilty, he was executed at Tyburn, March 12th, 1690, aged forty-two.