Did Pockets Move Inside Clothes to Stop Pickpockets?
Modern histories say yes. Those who were there say thieves followed the money in, and the first design against them I found dates from 1841.
Did pockets move inside clothes to stop pickpockets? That is the neat explanation in modern histories of the pocket, and I could not find one person from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century who said it. The people who were actually there tell a stranger story: the thieves followed the money inside, and the clothes kept changing to catch up. The first time I found a designer writing down that a garment was built against pickpockets is 1841, in a patent from Philadelphia.
What is the usual story about pockets and thieves?
Pockets, the story goes, were hidden inside our clothes to keep valuables safe from the cutpurse. It makes total sense, which is exactly why I went looking for the person who first said it. I read the statute book, a letter from the Recorder of London, an Elizabethan pamphlet, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, Blackstone, and the court record. None of them says pockets went inside to beat a thief. Only modern writers do.
What did Parliament say about thieves in 1565?
An act from the reign of Elizabeth I of England is furious with “Cut-purses or Pick-purses.” It says they have organized themselves into “a Brotherhood or Fraternity,” and it lists where they work: sermons, churches, fairs, the courts of law, even the Prince’s palace. They also work at executions, which tells you how well the terror was working.
The act says how they got close, too. They moved “under the Cloak of Honesty by their outward Apparel.” They dressed like the people they robbed, so the first garment in this story belongs to the thief. And the word the act keeps using is purses, not pockets. Taking something “from the Person of any other” meant death.
Was the pocket already a target in the 1580s?
Yes, and that is the problem for the neat story. In July 1585, William Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, reported on an alehouse near Billingsgate run by a man named Wotton, a “gentleman born” who had fallen on hard times. Fleetwood writes: “There was a school house set up to learn young boys to cut purses.”
The school hung up two practice targets, a purse and a pocket. The pocket held counters and was hung with hawks’ bells. A boy who could lift out a counter in silence earned the title “public foister,” meaning pickpocket. If he could take silver from the purse without a ring, he was a “judicial nipper,” meaning cutpurse. So by 1585 the school was already training on a pocket.
Who looked down on whom?
Seven years later the writer Robert Greene explained how the two trades saw each other. Both go after “a well lined purse,” but “the nip useth his knife, and the foist his hand.” The foist, the pickpocket, held himself the better thief, called himself a “gentleman foist,” and would not even carry a knife to cut his meat, in case anyone took him for a cutpurse.
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By 1755 Samuel Johnson’s dictionary treated the girdle purse as history. Cutting purses, he wrote, was “a common practice when men wore their purses at their girdles, as was once the custom.” The order of events in these sources is the opposite of the neat story. The pocket was a target, the best thieves preferred a hand to a blade, and the purse left the belt because the money moved. The hand went in after it.
So did clothes ever get designed against pickpockets?
Eventually, yes, and the date is exact. On the eleventh of October, 1841, Daniel Harrington of Philadelphia was granted US patent 2,309 for a “Mode of Constructing the Pockets of Garments.” He wanted pockets, for men and women, safe from “ordinary thieves or pickpockets,” and he called his invention “a protection or safety pocket.” His method was to sew small metal wire chain over the pocket. This is the first document I found in which the person designing the garment writes down that it is for pickpockets.
After Harrington the patents came in a stream. I found at least 164 filed before 1920 that use the word, and the search was not exhaustive. Of the ones I sorted, about 56 are pockets and about 42 are watches, chains and guards. Along the way: a pocket mouth kept so small that a pickpocket could not slip a hand in unnoticed, a pocket closed with an elastic band, a safety pocket attached to the underclothing in 1901 that is basically an early money belt.
Did the thieves ever make the clothes worse?
Sometimes fashion helped them. A fashion historian writing in 1937 quoted an unnamed magistrate in 1877 complaining that dresses had put pockets on the back of the skirt: “There could not be a more convenient arrangement for a pickpocket.” I would not lean on that. The magistrate is never named, and the Old Bailey record shows no wave of thefts from back pockets in the 1870s. Maybe the thieves were not quite as grateful as the magistrate feared.
Where does the story end up?
Today you can buy travel trousers sold as “Pick-Pocket Proof,” and the company’s own instructions say to zip the zipper and then secure the button flap. A button flap is the defense a man in London trusted for a note of 500 pounds in 1737, and the thief got past it on his hands and knees. I told that story in the video, along with Jenny Diver, George Barrington, and a gold watch taken in 1790 that is in a museum in London right now.
What I take from all of it is simple. Every time someone sewed up a gap, somebody else found the next one. The clothes were never really a fortress. They were a conversation, and the thief was always talking back.
When you are in a crowd, where does your phone go?
Watch the full episode on YouTube: How Pickpockets Changed the Way We Design Clothes
The illustrated companion to this episode: get it here
Sources and image credits: the full list
The narration is an AI clone of my own voice, and some of the illustrations are AI-generated.
