Everyone loves a romantic rogue whose exciting exploits feature a cheeky disregard for the law, narrow escapes and lots of love interests. Even at the height of highway robbery activity, it was thought that the death penalty was too harsh for these wayward scoundrels and that a more fitting deterrent would be to have them chained to the very highways they had haunted, reemployed in breaking stones for the road's surface. This book offers a delightful assortment of these knights (and ladies) of the road. There is the ever-courteous Claude du Vall, the epitome of gentlemanliness; the infamous Katherine Ferrars, who was the inspiration for the film The Wicked Lady, Dick Turpin, the most famous highwayman of them all; and lesser-known characters like William Gordon, whose corpse was subjected to an experiment in reanimation. All these and more in an entertaining volume that will keep the reader glued to the page following the mounted thief in his, or her, endless match against the law and a death by public hanging.

Fiona McDonald is a writer and illustrator with a diverse range of interests. She has illustrated The Little Book of Genius by Keith Souter and is writing a history of Britain in the 1920s.