Cover of Middleton and Dekker’s 1611 play The Roaring Girle. An image of a woman in men’s clothing, carrying a sword and smoking a pipe.
12 May 2021
It’s not the image most of us have of her, but Bonnie Parker (1910–34), of Bonnie and Clyde fame, penned several poems. One, titled “The Story of Suicide Sal,” is semi-autobiographical. She wrote it in 1932 while in jail awaiting a grand jury verdict for an attempted robbery—the grand jury eventually failed to indict her, and she was released. But Clyde Barrow had eluded capture, and she was afraid that he had abandoned her. One passage from that poem reads:
But not long ago I discovered
From a gal in the joint named Lyle,
That Jack and his “moll” had “got over”
And were living in true “gangster style.”
If he had returned to me sometime,
Though he hadn’t a cent to give,
I’d forget all this hell that he's caused me,
And love him as long as I live.
But there’s no chance of his ever coming,
For he and his moll have no fears
But that I will die in this prison,
Or “flatten” this fifty years.
But why did Parker refer to the woman who had replaced Sal in Jack’s affections as a moll? It’s a term meaning the female companion of a criminal, but where does the term come from?
Moll is a hypocoristic form of (i.e., pet name for) Mary. The connection between Moll and Mary doesn’t seem obvious on its face, but such shifts between the liquid consonants / l / and / r / are quite common. We see similar shifts in the pairs Dolly/Dorothy, Sally/Sarah, and Hal/Harry.
The association of the name Moll with women of low character is most likely a result of the common belief, unsupported by any scriptural evidence, that Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute. But we first see the association between low character and the name Mary in the hypocoristic Malekin, a diminutive of Matilda or Maud, which was later conflated with Moll and Mary. The use of Malekin to refer to a woman with sexual agency appears in the late thirteenth-century poem A Lutel Soth Sermon (A Short, True Sermon):
Þes persones ich wene;
ne beoþ heo noȝt for-bore
Ne þeos prude ȝungemen
þat luuieþ malekin,
And þeos prude maidenes
þat luuieþ Ianekin.
At chirche and at cheping
hwanne heo to-gadere come
Heo runeþ to-gaderes
and spekeþ of derne luue.(These people I know;
They do not restrain themselves
Not these proud young men
that love Malekin
And these proud maidens
that love Johnny
At church and at market
when they come together
They whisper together
and speak of secret love.)
And in the late fourteenth century Chaucer has the host speak these words in the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale:
Wel kan Senec and many a philosophre
Biwaillen tyme moore than gold in cofre;
For “Los of catel may recovered be,
But los of tyme shendeth us,” quod he.
It wol nat come agayn, withouten drede,
Nomoore than wole Malkynes maydenhede,
Whan she hath lost it in hir wantownesse.
Lat us nat mowlen thus in ydelnesse.(Well can Seneca and many a philosopher
Bewail time more than gold in a coffer;
For “loss of property may be recovered,
But loss of time ruins us,” said he.
It will not come again, without doubt,
No more than will Malkin’s maidenhead,
When she has lost it in her wantoness.
Let us not grow moldy thus in idleness.)
The link between a Moll with sexual agency and Mary Magdalene is made explicit in Lewis Wager’s 1566 The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene:
Let me fele your poulses mistresse Mary be you sick
By my trouth in as good te[m]pre as any woman can be
Your vaines are full of bloud, lusty and quicke,
In better taking truly I did you neuer see.The body is whole, but sick is the conscience,
Which neither the law nor man is able to heale,
It is the word of God receyued with penitence,
Like as the boke of wisedome doth plainly reueale.Conscience? how doth thy conscience litle Mall?
Was thy conscience sicked, alas little foole?
And in his 1604 Father Hubbards Tales: or the Ant and the Nightingale, Thomas Middleton writes:
[He] would not stick to be a Bawd, or Pander to such young Gallants as our young Gentleman, either to acquaint them with Harlots, or Harlots with them, to bring them a whole dozen of Taffeta Punkes at a supper, and they should be none of these common Molls neither, but discontented and vnfortunate Gentlewoman, whose Parents being lately deceased, the brother ranne away with all the land, and the poore Squalles with a litle mony, which cannot hold out long without some commings in, but they will rather venture a Maidenhead then want a Head tyre
But the association of the name Moll with prostitution and pandering would be given a boost by the exploits of Mary Frith, a.k.a. Moll Cutpurse (c.1584–1659). Frith was a cross-dressing thief, fence, and pimp who became notorious in her day. It does not appear that Frith was a prostitute herself, although we can’t rule that out. Her sexuality cannot be known now, but she might identify as a lesbian or trans-man were she alive today. We do know, however, that she was quite famous in her day. Two plays inspired by her life were written during her lifetime. One, the 1610 The Madde Prankes of Mery Mall by John Day, has been lost, but the other, the 1611 The Roaring Girle by the aforementioned Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, survives. In the play, a young man named Sebastian wishes to marry a girl named Mary, but their fathers disapprove of the match, so Sebastian pretends to court Moll Cutpurse in order to make Mary seem more appealing to his father. In this passage, Sebastian and his father, Alexander, discuss the objection to Sebastian’s choice in women:
Seb. Why is the name of Mol so fatall sir.
Alex. Many one sir, where suspect is entred,
For seeke all London from one end to t'other,
More whoores of that name, then of any ten other.
Thieves and other criminals are known, or at least thought, to associate with prostitutes, and by the nineteenth century Moll had come to refer to a criminal’s female companion, whether or not she was actually a sex worker. From an 1823 dictionary of slang written by John Badcock under the pseudonym of John Bee:
Molls—are the female companions of low thieves, at bed, board, and business.
From Mary Magdalene to Mary Frith to Bonnie Parker, that’s how the name Moll became associated with criminality.
Sources:
Bee, John (pseudonym of John Badcock). Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life. London: T. Hughes, 1823, 120. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale” (c.1390). The Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer’s Website.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. moll, n.
“A Lutel Soth Sermon” (c.1275). An Old English Miscellany. Richard Morris, ed. Old English Text Society 49. London: N. Trübner, 1872, lines 51–60, 188. HathiTrust Digital Library. London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.9.
Middleton, Thomas. Father Hubbards Tales: or the Ant and the Nightingale. London: T. Creede for William Cotton, 1604, sig. D1r.
Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut-Purse. London: Thomas Archer, 1611, sig. E2v.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. moll, n.2.
Parker, Bonnie. “The Story of Suicide Sal.” Emma Parker and Nell Barrow Cohen. Fugitives: The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Jan I. Fortune, ed. Dallas: Ranger Press, 1934, 101. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wager, Lewis. A New Enterlude, Never Before This Tyme Imprinted, Entreating of the Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene. London: John Charlewood, 1566, sig. f.2.r–v.