The earliest certain reference to such a group appears in a sermon preached by Stephen Gosson at St Paul's Cross on 7 May 1598, when he claimed that a gang of roisterers of that name – "menne without feare, or feeling, eyther of Hell or Heauen, delighting in that title" – had all been drowned together when the boat in which they were sailing down the Thames had been upset near Gravesend.
[1] Another, possibly earlier reference, is in the work of the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, who in 1592 described a vain young man attempting to give himself an air of singularity by wearing his hat pulled low over his eyes “like one of the cursed crue”.
After a scuffle they were overpowered, disarmed and marched to the Counter prison, Baynham shouting that "he cared not a fart for the lord mayor or any magistrate in London."
Instead of being tried by the ordinary London authorities however they were remitted to Star Chamber on the personal intervention of the Queen, "for the more exemplar punishment of so great and outrageous disorder."
[3] A contemporary satirical poem, The letting of humors blood in the head-veine by Samuel Rowlands, describes the triumph of the watch and the discomfiture of the Damned Crew.