Samuel Harris, though he had received a very tolerable education as to reading and writing, yet he never applied himself to any business, but served bricklayers as a labourer, in company with his fellow-sufferer Medline.  But having been all his life addicted to lust and wickedness, he proposed robbing to his companions as the most feasible method of getting money wherewith to support their debauches and the strumpets who used to partake with them at their houses of resort.  He confirmed what Owen had said, and acknowledged that during the time they continued their robberies, never any people in the world led more profligate and more uneasy lives than they did; being always engaged in a continual circle of drunkenness, violence and whoredom; while their minds were continually agitated with the fear of being apprehended, so that they never enjoyed peace or quiet from the time of their betaking themselves to this course of life unto the day of their apprehension and coming to the gallows.

Thomas Medline was born more meanly than either of his companions, and had so little care taken of him in his youth, that he could neither read nor write.  However, he applied himself to working hard as a labourer to the bricklayers, and got thereby for some time sufficient wherewith to maintain himself and his family.  At last, giving himself over to drink, he minded little of what became of his wife and children, and falling unhappily about the same time into the acquaintance of the before-mentioned malefactor Harris, he was easily seduced by him to become a partner in his crimes and addicted himself to the highway.

It was but a very short space that they continued to exercise this their illegal and infamous calling, for venturing to attack one Mr. Barker, on the Ware Road, and not long after Dr. Edward Hulse,[81] they were quickly apprehended for those facts, and after remaining some time in Newgate, were brought to their trials at the Old Bailey.

There it was sworn by Mr. Barker, that he observed them drinking at an alehouse at Tottenham, the very evening in which he was robbed; and that apprehending them to be loose and disorderly persons he took more than ordinary notice of their faces; that about a mile from Edmonton church they came up with him, and notwithstanding he told them he knew them, they pulled him off his horse and robbed him of five pounds and sixpence; that returning the next day to the place where he was robbed, he found sevenpence, which he supposed they had dropped in their hurry.

On the second indictment it was desposed by one Mr. Hyatt that he suspected the prisoners, from the description given by Mr. Barker and Doctor Hulse, to be the persons who had robbed them; he thereupon apprehended them upon suspicion, and that Mr. Barker, as soon as he saw them, swore to their faces.