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Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with IHeartRadio.

There are some infamous names on the long list of road agents who preyed on Finchley Common, which until the early 1800s was a

hugely popular spot for robbers to hit carriages on the road when they were traveling

north of London between Finchley, Fryen Barnett, and Muswell Hill. At some time in their

highway robbery careers, some big names plundered those roads, including Captain Hind, always described in his lore as courageous in his axe.

Nettie Wicks, who was a tax collector before he went rogue, and everyone's favorite gentleman robber Claude Deval.

And among those names is also the dashing

and spirited highwayman Tom Cox, a highwayman who it said wasn't above robbing even other robbers.

Welcome to criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarky. And I'm Holly Fry. Tom Cox was born in 1666 in Blandford and Dorsetshire, the youngest son of a

gentleman. He inherited a small estate from his father, but he spent that small fortune in the blink

of an eye with his, quote, riotous living. In his book, Half Hours Highweeman, author Charles Harper suggests that Cox,

quote, resenting his meager fortune under that old fetish of the English landowner, the law of

primogeniture, came to London for the purpose of adding to it in what was then the conventional manner.

So, broke, Cox went to London to find work, and he did

find work, although it was not legal work. Tom fell in with a group of highway robbers, and he

quickly made a name for himself as bold, cunning, and handsome. It's reported that the number of robberies Tom committed were, quote, almost innumerable.

We've chosen three anecdotes from his career to share.

This first story is one of the most popular, maybe the most popular robber tale about him.

It was the day his mark was Thomas Killillegrue. This was quite a mark as

Kiligrew was a well-known and established playwright, actor, and theater manager. In 1663,

Kilagrew built the original theater royal in Drury Lane, and from 1673 to 1677, he was master of the rebels in the English royal court.

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