18th century… “Confusion, horror, and bloodshed”: Joseph Ritson’s Eye-Witness Account of the Gordon Riots in 1780 12 Jan 201912 Jan 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have noticed that across the English Channel in France, quite a few people are very, very annoyed…
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…
1381… The Last Dying Speech and Confession of Jack Straw 23 Sep 201723 Sep 2017 In 1381, one of the most important events in English medieval history occurred: the Peasants’ Revolt. Under the leadership of a former soldier, Wat Tyler (d. 1381), a radical priest,…
18th century… The First Robin Hood Novel: Robert Southey’s “Harold, or, The Castle of Morford” (1791) 13 Jun 2017 (This is an updated version of an earlier post I made) Scholars generally point to 1819 as the year that the first Robin Hood novels appeared, these being the anonymous…
18th century… Unruly Apprentices 9 Apr 20179 Apr 2017 During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many criminals recorded in works such as Alexander Smith’s History of the Highwaymen (1714), and Charles Johnson’s History of the Highwaymen (1734), as…
