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…
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… “Robin Hood’s Rescue of the Three Squires” and the Political Economy of Banditry 30 Mar 2018 Many Robin Hood ballads were printed as broadsides during the seventeenth century. The majority of them depict Robin Hood as a rather inept outlaw who, every time he stops somebody,…
18th century… Mack the Knife: The “True” Story Behind the Song 28 Oct 2017 The popular song Mack the Knife was based upon the story of an eighteenth-century highwayman named Captain Macheath. This post traces the literary life of this fictional character. Most people,…
19th Century… Post-Apocalyptic Bandits: Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” (1826) 7 Aug 20171 Sep 2017 I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presents itself to my mind,…
