Cony-catching

Cony-catching

Cony-catching was a practice in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare.

The Elizabethan author Robert Greene wrote a pamphlet about the subject. Kirby Farrell wrote a book called Cony-catching in 1971.


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