Covent Garden Market

Two years after the Four Kings left London, there was an outbreak of gang violence in the area around Covent Garden Market. Men were assaulted, women were attacked, noses were cut, and people were put into barrels and rolled down streets. The most feared of these gangs allegedly called themselves the Mohocks, illustrating eighteenth-century ideas about savagery. That said, there is some evidence these gangs didn't exist, but were actually devices developed by satirists such as Jonathan Swift to critique certain elements of London society. Nevertheless, as late as the 1870s, vandalism and violence perpetrated by wealthy young men in places like Oxford was being reported in the local press as the action of “Mohawks,” so embedded did this image become. As has so often been the case, the spectacle of the Four Kings’ visit became a vehicle for Londoners to tell stories about themselves and their city.