In the mid-1850s, the villagers of Silwan were paid £100 annually by the Jews in an effort to prevent the desecration of graves on the Mount of Olives. Nineteenth-century travellers described the village as a robbers' lair. Charles Wilson wrote that the houses and the streets of Siloam, if such they may be called, are filthy in the extreme. Charles Warren depicted the population as a lawless set, credited with being the most unscrupulous ruffians in Palestine.