16th Century… Gamaliel Ratsey (d.1605): The Man whose Life Kick-started the “True Crime” Genre 18 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo Gamaliel Ratsey was born in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire, during the late sixteenth century.[1] Little is known of Ratsey’s early life; his father, Richard, and his wife had…
17th century… Claude Du Vall: The Ladies’ Highwayman 21 Feb 2020 By Stephen Basdeo In 1671 the poet and satirist wrote an ode ‘To the Memory of the Most Renowned Du-Vall’.[1] It celebrated the bravery and heroism of an English highwaymen…
18th century… Bandits and Robbers of India 9 Feb 20199 Feb 2019 By Stephen Basdeo During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company established a number of fortified trading settlements—“factories”—in various parts of the Indian subcontinent. The trading company…
11th Century… The Virgin and the Outlaw 5 Jun 2018 By Stephen Basdeo In modern popular culture, heroes often possess some supernatural powers, or at other times they are so skilled at what they do that their superiority often appears…
18th century… Jack ‘Sixteen-String’ Rann (1750–74) 23 Apr 2018 The eighteenth century was without a doubt the golden age of highwaymen, being the era in which robbers such as Jack Sheppard (1702–24), Dick Turpin (1705–39), and James Maclaine (1724–50).…
17th century… Criminality and Animal Cruelty in 18th-Century England 17 Dec 201717 Dec 2017 I am currently in the final stages of editing a book chapter I have written for Prof. Alexander Kaufman’s and Penny Vlagopoulos’s forthcoming work entitled Food and Feasting in Post-1700…
