The Damned Crew was a class of roisterers in London from the early 1590's to the late 1620's, their self-styled captain being at one time Sir Edmund Baynham, who was also involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Represented in literature as perjurers, assassins, dissidents, and revellers, they were thought to be reprobate with the damned crew of devils in hell. Indeed, they may have thought so themselves, reacting from misconstrued predestinarianism as desperate libertines with a limited Manichean outlook. Some such interpretation explains their title and behaviour and the view of them taken by theological controversialists such as Dove, Kellison, and Sutcliffe, and by playwrights like Chapman.