1612, attributed to Thomas Dekker, "O Per Se O" in A. B. Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld - a Collection of Tudor and Early Stuart Tracts and Ballads, Routledge, 1930, reprinted 2002, p. 371, https://books.google.ca/books?id=3e77AQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false The abram cove is a lusty strong rogue, who walketh with a slade about his quarroms trining to his hams, bandolierwise, for all the world as cutpurses and thieves wear their sheets to the gallows, in which their trulls are to bury them.
Source: wiktionary