Their operations were of the most roving description. By way of Trowbridge, they made for Yorkshire, raiding the country as they went with all manner of rogueries. Nothing came amiss. At Halifax they netted twenty-five guineas from a clergyman by an eighteenth-century ancestor of the thimble-rigging fraud, called "pricking in the belt." At last they found themselves at Chester: place of evil omen for Poulter. There, at the house of a confederate, they heard on the evening of their arrival of a train of pack-horses laden with Manchester goods, due to pass that night. Watch had been kept upon them, said the confederate, and a man would point out to our friends which, among all the animals of the pack-horse train, was best worth robbing of his load. It would be best, he said, to do the work on the country road, and to take the horse into a field.
As it happened, they pitched upon the wrong horse, and got only a load of calamancoes, fabrics woven of wool with an admixture of silk, popular in those times; but the pack contained over a thousand yards, and they cut it off after some difficulty in the dark, and got away safely with it; although greatly alarmed by the horse's loud neighing when he found himself separated from his companions.
The robbers went off at once out of the neighbourhood, and that same night reached a village near Whitchurch, eighteen or twenty miles distant. There they obliterated all distinguishing marks on the goods, and divided them.
At Grantham, which Poulter and Tobin next favoured with a visit, they relieved a credulous farmer of fifteen guineas by the "pricking in the belt" device. At Nottingham several of the accomplices met, but they had bad luck, and Poulter went on the sneak and stole a silver tankard, without a lid, from the "Blackamoor's Head" inn: and that was all the scurvy town of Nottingham yielded them. They then made for Yorkshire, where they remained for a considerable period, and then left, only because their widespread thefts of all kinds made a continued stay dangerous. York, Durham, and the north, including Newcastle, comprised a tour then undertaken.
They then made their way to Bath, the general rendezvous of the gang, and thence in what Poulter calls "three sets," or gangs, moved independently and by easy stages into Devonshire: attending the cattle-fair at Sampford Peverell, with marked success to themselves, and grievous loss to the farmers and graziers there assembled. Thence they moved on to Torrington and Exeter, and so back again to Bath, where twelve of them met at Roberts's house.