Little could the pioneers foresee of the triumphs of their successors. “William the Sacrist,” if William it was who planned the robbery of the King’s treasury in 1303, perhaps the greatest burglary ever attempted, must have been a man of the highest genius. Had he lived in the nineteenth century he would have adopted more finished methods. He fell upon evil times, and his skin illustrates a door in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey (see p. 25). Yes, William, you and your like lived in cruel times! You were called harsh names, fures, latrones, vespiliones, raptores, grassatores, robatores. To extirpate these old-time thieves, to bring them to the gallows, was, if not the whole duty of man, at least the first duty of the citizen. “Theft,” writes Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, “seems to have been the crime of crimes. The laws are inexorable towards it. They assume everywhere that thieves are to be pursued, taken and put to death then and there.” Bracton[6] gives instructions for the swearing-in of the whole male population over fifteen years of age for the purpose of hunting down malefactors. The justiciaries on their circuits are to call before them the greater men of the county, and to explain to them how it has been provided by the king and his council that all, as well knights as others of fifteen years of age and upwards, ought to swear that they will not harbour outlaws and murderers, robbers or burglars, nor hold converse either with them or their harbourers: that if they come to know any such, they will declare it to the sheriff or his bailiffs. And if they shall hear the Hutesium—the Hue and Cry—they shall immediately follow with their household and the men of their land. Let them follow the track to the boundary of their land, and show it to the lord of the adjoining land, so that pursuit may be made with all diligence from land to land till the malefactors are captured. There must be no delay in following the track; it must be continued till nightfall. Such was the famous Hutesium—the Hue and Cry—the name of which remains with us to the present day. One of the old chroniclers tells how, in 1212, the Hue and Cry was raised causelessly, in a panic, and spread over almost the whole of England.[7] The truth is that in the simple life of those days no robber nor thief had the smallest chance of posing as a great man. The field, too, was limited. Thieves and robbers could but operate on movable property or clip the coin. It was the misfortune of the depredators living in “the dark ages,” that a thief not only was a thief, but was of all men known to be one.