Robbers,
Footpads, Housebreakers and Murderers

As society intends the preservation of every man's person and property
from the injuries which might be offered unto him from others, so those
who in contempt of its laws go on to injure the one, and either by force
or fraud to take away the other are, in the greatest proprieties of
speech, enemies of mankind; and as such are reasonably rooted out, and
destroyed by every government under heaven. In some parts of Europe,
certain outlaws, _Banditti_, or whatever other appellation you'll please
to bestow on them, have endeavoured to preserve themselves by force from
the punishments which should have been executed upon them by justice,
and finding mankind, from a spirit of self preservation, were become
their enemies, they exerted themselves the utmost they were capable of
in order to render their bodies so formidable as still to carry on their
ravages with impunity, and in open defiance of the laws made against
them. But an attempt of this sort was scarce ever heard of in Britain,
even in the most early times, when, as in all other governments the
hands of the Law wanted strength most; so that from the days of Robin
Hood and Little John to those of the criminals of whom we are now
writing, there was never any scheme formed for an open resistance of
Justice, and carrying on a direct war against the lives and properties
of mankind.

Edward Burnworth, _alias_ Frazier, was the extraordinary person who
framed this project for bringing rapine into method, and bounding even
the practice of licentiousness with some kind of order. It may seem
reasonable therefore, to begin his life preferable to the rest, and in
so doing we must inform our readers that his father was by trade a
painter, though so low in his circumstances as to be able to afford his
son but a very mean education. However, he gave him as much as would
have been sufficient for him in that trade to which he bound him
apprentice, viz., to a buckle-maker in Grub Street, where for some time
Edward lived honestly and much in favour with his master. But his father
dying and his unhappy mother being reduced thereby into very narrow
circumstances, restraint grew uneasy to him, and the weight of a
parent's authority being now lost with him, he began to associate
himself with those loose incorrigible vagrants, who frequent the ring at
Moorfields, and from idleness and debauchery, go on in a very swift
progression to robbery a