The Lives & Exploits of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Rogues and Murderers
160
The Lives & Exploits of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Rogues and Murderers
160eBook
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Overview
For as long as human societies have existed there have always been people who have transgressed the laws of their respective societies. It seems that whenever new laws are made, certain people find ways to break them.
This book will introduce you to some of the most notorious figures, from all parts of the world, who have committed heinous crimes such as highway robbery, murder, and forgery. Beginning with Bulla Felix, the Roman highwayman, this book traces the careers of medieval outlaws such as Robin Hood and Adam Bell. Early modern murderers also make an appearance, such as Sawney Beane, whose story inspired the cult horror movie The Hills Have Eyes. Learn also about the crimes and daring escapes of Jack Sheppard, an eighteenth-century criminal who escaped from prison on several occasions, and find out if the “gentlemanly” highwayman Dick Turpin was truly a gentleman.
This book also includes an appendix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thieves’ cant, as well as several historical poems, songs, and ballads relating to the subjects discussed, and the work is prefaced with an essay highlighting the significance of crime literature throughout history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781526713186 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 594,616 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Robin Hood: 'That Celebrated English Outlaw'
'In this our spacious isle I think there is not one, But he of ROBIN HOOD hath heard, and Little John; And to the end of time the tales shall ne'er be done Of Scarlock, George-a-Green, and Much the Miller's son, Of Tuck, the merry friar, which many a sermon made In praise of ROBIN HOOD, his out-laws, and their trade.'
Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612)
'Honour to the old bow-string!
Honour to the bugle-horn!
Honour to the woods unshorn!
Honour to the Lincoln green!
Honour to the archer keen!
Honour to tight little John,
And the horse he rode upon!
Honour to bold Robin Hood,
Sleeping in the underwood!
Honour to Maid Marian,
And to all the Sherwood-clan!'
John Keats, Robin Hood: To a Friend (1818)
Everybody in Britain has heard of Robin Hood. He is the archetype of the noble robber who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. According to the legend, his true love is a woman named Marian. His fellow outlaws include Little John, Will Scarlet, Allen-a-Dale, and Friar Tuck. His arch enemies are the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gisborne, and Prince John. The story of Robin Hood has been immortalised in books, films, and television series, and at the time of writing, there is a movie forthcoming starring Taron Egerton as the titular hero. Thus, it seems Drayton's prophecy that 'until the end of time the tales shall ne'er be done' will continue to ring true. This chapter briefly discusses some of the historical outlaws whom researchers have identified as being possible candidates for the 'real' Robin Hood.
We will never know if there was an outlaw named Robin Hood who inspired the stories that were subsequently told about him. There will never be a definitive answer simply due to the paucity of evidence surrounding his life. That said, this has not stopped people attempting to identify a historical outlaw. Likely candidates for a real Robin Hood have been identified. The late Professor James C. Holt in Robin Hood (1982), believed that a man listed in the Yorkshire Assize Rolls between 1225 and 1226 as 'Robert Hod, fugitive' is probably the man whose life gave rise to the legend. The same outlaw turns up years later under the nickname of 'Hobbehod'. There are several other candidates who have, at one time or another, been identified as the real Robin Hood. Among them is one Robert of Wetherby who is listed in the Court Rolls as 'outlaw and evildoer of our land'. Other potential candidates include a Robert Hood from Cirencester who, sometime between 1215 and 1216 murdered a man named Ralph in the local Abbott's garden. And in 1354 there was a Robin Hood who was incarcerated in Rockingham gaol for forest offences. A Robin Hood from Wakefield was identified in medieval records by a nineteenth century antiquary, Joseph Hunter (1783-1861). Hunter was appointed as the Assistant Keeper of the Public Record Office, or National Archives as we know it today. In a tract entitled The Great Hero of the Ancient Minstrelsy of England, Robin Hood, (1852), he argued that Robin Hood was from Wakefield. Hunter aimed to fit known facts to the early tales of Robin Hood. He first identified a Robert Hood who with his wife Matilda appears in the Court Rolls of the manor of Wakefield in 1316 and 1317. Without any evidence, he argued that this Robert Hood became an outlaw between this time and 1324, when Hunter discovered that there was a valet de chambre to Edward II named Robyn Hode. For Hunter, this seemed to confirm that that this man was the same Robin who enters into the King's service at the end of the fifteenth-century poem A Gest of Robyn Hode, when the King travels into the forest and meets Robin, and asks him to join his service. There are two problems with this approach; there is no indication that this Robyn Hode from 1324 was ever an outlaw; the idea of a monarch going into the woods, as the king does at the end of the Gest, was a common trope in medieval ballads, and it is highly unlikely that the King ever went incognito among the populace. This has not stopped some local historians from sticking to Hunter's assertions that Robin Hood was a man from Wakefield. To say that the real Robin Hood was from Wakefield, however, is to mix shaky historical methodology with wishful thinking. The fact of the matter is this; yes, there was a man named Robin Hood who lived in Wakefield, but we do not know if he was an outlaw. Another thing which complicates the search for a historical thief is the fact that the name of Robin Hood was often used as an alias by criminals in the late medieval period, and it was used by a variety of people whose actions challenged state authority. In 1448, a mob in Norfolk chanted 'We are Robynhodesmen' as they threatened to kill a local official. In 1498, Roger Marshall appeared in court, having been charged with inciting over 100 people to riot. Surviving records indicate that Marshall used the alias of Robin Hood. Perhaps even the earliest mention of Robin Hood in court records, then, was simply an alias.
Thus, it is near impossible for anybody to identify a historical outlaw whose life and deeds match those of the legendary Robin Hood. Historians pursuing the matter really are dealing with scraps of information such as little notes in court rolls, complicated by the fact that criminals often used the name of Robin Hood as an alias. The very paucity of evidence regarding a real outlaw, however, has allowed the legend to grow over time, and be adapted continually by different people in different ages. Thankfully, academic scholarship has now moved beyond trying to identify a historical outlaw, and this is a move in the right direction. In the words of Professor Alexander Kaufman, 'the origins of Robin Hood the person and his original context are perhaps best left to those individuals who wish to search for that which is forever to be a quest'. The impossibility of tracing a historical Robin Hood, however, does not prevent us from constructing a literary biography of his portrayals in literature from the medieval period to the present.
Stories about Robin Hood circulated at an early period of English history. In the B text of William Langland's poem The Vision of Piers the Plowman (c.1370), we meet a lazy clergyman named Sloth. Poor Sloth is not a very good cleric. He cannot read or write and he does not even know his Lord's Prayer by heart. However, the one thing that he can recite from memory is 'rymes of Robyn Hode':
'I can noughte parfitly my Paternoster as the prest it syngeth, But I can rymes of Robyn Hode, and Randalf Erle of Chestre.'
These words from are the first literary reference to Robin Hood. They make clear that during this period 'rymes of Robyn Hode', were in circulation. Transmission of these tales was often by word of mouth, for England was not a predominantly literate society in the fourteenth century as the skill of reading and writing was mainly confined to members of the Church and the upper classes. In time, these 'rymes of Robyn Hode' were written down. We have four surviving examples of these early rhymes, or ballads, of Robin Hood, and these are: Robin Hood and the Monk which survives in manuscript form and is dated c.1450; Robin Hood and the Potter, which survives in a single manuscript of popular and moral poems that can be dated to c.1500; Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne is an early modern poem, but the story dates from the late-medieval period; and there is A Gest of Robyn Hode, which is dated c.1450 but only survives in printed copies from the sixteenth century.
The Robin Hood of these early ballads is very different from the outlaw that we would recognise today. While modern audiences are used to seeing Robin Hood portrayed as the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon, Robin is not a nobleman in these early texts but is described as a 'yeoman'. Broadly speaking, a yeoman was a member of the medieval middle classes, for want of a better term, occupying a social position between the aristocracy and the peasantry:
'Lythe and listin, gentilmen,
That be of frebore blode;
I shall you tel of a gode yeman,
His name was Robyn Hode.'
[Attend and listen, gentlemen,
That are of freeborn blood;
I shall tell you of a good yeoman,
His name was Robin Hood]
It is in the Gest that we first see hints of Robin having a social mission. The poem is divided into eight 'fyttes', and in the first, as we saw in the introduction, Robin sets out a code of conduct for the outlaws, telling them to not to harm women or ploughmen, but permitting them to steal from corrupt clergymen and sheriffs. The Gest is the most significant of all the medieval texts. It is also the longest Robin Hood poem, standing at nearly 2,000 lines, and appears to have been constructed from a variety of existing tales to which somebody, at some point, endeavoured to give unity. It is a type of the 'good outlaw' tale. Robin will help poor, honest people whom he meets; the first 'fytte' (section) of the poem sees him lending money to an impoverished knight named Sir Richard of the Lee, whose lands have been mortgaged to pay a debt to the Abbot of St. Mary's in York. Later on in this poem, many familiar scenes occur, such as the archery contest and his meeting with the King and subsequent pardon. At the end of the poem, Robin falls ill and goes to Kirklees Priory to be bled. The prioress, in league with Sir Roger of Doncaster, bleeds him to death. The poem then ends with a benediction:
'Cryst have mercy on his soule That dyed upon the rod.
For was a good outlawe,
And dyde pore men moch gode.'
[Christ have mercy on his soule The died upon the cross.
For he was a good outlaw,
And did poor men much good].
Although the idea that Robin steals from the rich and gives to the poor is not fully articulated in the poem (it was not until John Stowe's Annales of England in 1592 that this idea would become current), it is in the Gest that we first get the idea that Robin is kind to the poor and 'dyde pore men moch gode'.
In the other early ballads, all of Robin's fellow outlaws such as Little John and Much the Miller's son hail from the same social class of yeomanry. And Robin and his men are quite violent characters; in Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, he cuts off Guy's head, mutilates his face with a knife, and sticks his head upon the end of his bow:
'Robin thought on our Ladye deere,
And soone leapt up againe,
And thus he came with an awkwarde stroke,
Good Sir Guy he has slayne.
He tooke Sir Guy's head by the hayre,
And stickt itt upon his bowes end:
"Thou has beene a traytor all thy liffe,
Which thing must have an ende."
Robin pulled forth an Irish kniffe,
And nicked Sir Guy in the face,
That hee was never on a woman borne,
Could tell who Sir Guye was.'
Having said this, the violence is justified to a certain extent as Guy is a bounty hunter hired by the Sheriff in order to capture and kill Robin Hood. In Robin Hood and the Monk, two of Robin's men, Much the Miller's son and Little John, kill a travelling monk and his young page:
'John smote of the munkis hed,
No longer wolde he dwell;
So did Moch the litull page,
For ferd lest he wolde tell.'
[John cut off the monk's head,
No longer would he live,
Much did the same to the little page,
For fear that he would tell].
There are also characters whom we would count as staples of the Robin Hood legend today that actually appear nowhere in these early texts. Maid Marian is conspicuous by her absence in all of the Medieval poems. In fact, Robin has no love interest at all. Marian entered the legend via a different route to the ballads. The first time that two people named Robin and Marian were associated together was in a French pastoral play entitled Jeu de Robin et Marion, dating from c.1282. It is unclear, however, whether the Robin and Marian of this play were understood to be outlaws. There is certainly no proven link between the play and the Robin Hood tradition. We do know, however, that Marian appears alongside the 'proper' Robin Hood in sixteenth-century Tudor May Day celebrations. It seems from thence she made her way into Anthony Munday's two plays The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington and The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon written between 1597 and 1598. Marian's place in the legend, however, is only really cemented in the nineteenth century, when a short novella by Thomas Love Peacock entitled Maid Marian, was published in 1822.
Robin moved up in the world during the seventeenth century. In the plays by Anthony Munday, Robin is cast for the first time as an earl. There was no precedent in the medieval ballad tradition for this. Munday did this because he was catering to a primarily aristocratic audience. Although largely forgotten about today outside of academic circles, these plays established a new narrative in the Robin Hood legend: Robin is depicted as an aristocrat; he is outlawed because of a plot against him by rival courtiers; and instead of having been a bold rebel, the reason that Robin is outlawed is because he has stayed loyal to King Richard. Hence any subversive political traits are extracted from his character. This was at a time when the established order was very shaky. Elizabeth I was old, London had experienced intermittent riots, and in the year that the plays were printed, 1601, the Earl of Essex mounted his rebellion. Thus, instead of challenging the establishment, in these plays Robin becomes an upholder of the established order.
During the seventeenth century, the Robin Hood legend was kept alive in cheaply printed and forgettable broadside ballads and chapbooks. Were it not for Joseph Ritson's Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795), Robin's fame might have gone the way of other now largely forgotten medieval outlaws such as Adam Bell. Ritson (1752–1803) was born in Stockton-on-Tees and was a conveyancer by trade. In his spare time, however, he was an antiquary. He was interested, not in the 'high' culture of people in times past, but that of the common people. He published many collections of ancient ballads and songs such as A Select Collection of English Songs (1783) and Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry (1791). And he quickly established himself as an authority on many historical subjects, owing to his willingness to seek out obscure primary sources from archives and libraries across the country. He was also cantankerous, and fiercely critical of his rivals such as Thomas Percy who took it upon himself to edit and 'refine' Old and Middle English texts. Ritson's work is significant in the overall development of the Robin Hood legend because, as his title suggests, he collected together and made accessible in printed form every Robin Hood text he could find ranging from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The most important part of Ritson's work was the section entitled 'The Life of Robin Hood' which he prefixed to the collection of ballads. In this, Ritson laid down the 'facts' of the legend, saying:
'Robin Hood was born at Locksley, in the County of Nottingham, in the reign of King Henry the Second, and about the year of Christ 1160. His extraction was noble ... he is frequently styled, and commonly reputed to have been Earl of Huntingdon.'
With respect to Robin's character, Ritson says that:
'It is sufficiently evident that he was active, brave, prudent; possessed of uncommon bodyly [sic] strength, and considerable military skill; just, generous, benevolent, faithful, and beloved or revered by his followers and adherents for his excellent and amiable qualities.'
Another thing about Ritson is that he is a bit of an armchair revolutionary. His letters from the 1790s are full of praise for the French Revolution and Ritson reimagines Robin Hood as a medieval revolutionary, almost a Wat Tyler type of figure:
'In these forests, and with [his] company, he for many years reigned like an independent sovereign; at perpetual war, indeed, with the king of England, and all his subjects, with an exception, however, of the poor and needy, and such as were 'desolate and oppressed,' or stood in need of his protection.'
And finally, Ritson tells us that Robin steals from the rich and gives to the poor:
'That our hero and his companions, while they lived in the woods, had recourse to robbery for their better support, is neither to be concealed nor to be denyed [sic]. Testimonies to this purpose, indeed, would be equally endless and unnecessary [...] But it is to be remembered ... that, in these exertions, he took away the goods of rich men only; never killing any person, unless he was attacked or resisted: that he would never suffer a woman to be maltreated; nor ever took anything from the poor, but charitably fed them with the wealth he drew from the abbots.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lives and Exploits of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Rogues and Murderers"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Stephen Basdeo.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Chapter 1 Robin Hood: 'That Celebrated English Outlaw',
Chapter 2 Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie,
Chapter 3 Gamaliel Ratsey: The Repentant Highwayman,
Chapter 4 Captain James Hind: The Royalist Highwayman,
Chapter 5 Claude Du Vall: The Ladies' Highwayman,
Chapter 6 Sawney Beane: 'A Picture of Human Barbarity',
Chapter 7 Rob Roy: 'The Highland Rogue',
Chapter 8 Jack Sheppard: The Original 'Jack the Lad',
Chapter 9 Jonathan Wild: London's First Mob Boss,
Chapter 10 Dick Turpin: The Knight of the Road,
Chapter 11 Dr William Dodd: The Rogue Clergyman,
Conclusion,
Appendix: Bulla Felix: The Roman Robin Hood,
Further Reading,
Notes,