Women of the Road: The Real Highwaywomen of the 17th Century by Katherine Clements

When you picture a highwaywoman, you probably think of something like this…

Margaret Lockwood as The Wicked Lady, 1945.

Or this…

Illustration by Eric Fraser from Folklore Myths and Legends, 1973.

We’re all familiar with the romantic folklore figure of the dashing highwayman – from Dick Turpin to Adam Ant, it’s an image that has excited the popular imagination for generations. It was certainly part of the attraction when I first started researching the legend of an infamous female highway robber, the Wicked Lady, for my novel, The Silvered Heart.

The story of Lady Katherine Ferrers is brimming with classic romance: the young, orphaned heiress, forced into a marriage of convenience, turns to a scandalous life of crime with her handsome lover. You can read about the legend and my take on it here. The myth is entertaining enough, but I wanted to explore the reality behind the romance, and I had to answer one question first: Were there really women working as highway robbers in the 17th century?

The concept of the gentlemen thief has been around for centuries, but the famous examples are all men, with swooning female accomplices – or victims – falling under their charismatic spell. I was convinced the reality could not be so neat. But is there any evidence?

As early as the 13th century, there are records of female robbers working the highways, usually as part of a gang or with their husbands. Whole families might make a living this way, with wives and children acting as lookouts or decoys. Sometimes women were more than just convenient bait. The Middlesex Session records, covering 1549-1688, contain several cases of women accused of ‘robbery with violence’. In one case of 1564, one woman was hanged for robbing another at Hammersmith, then no more than a village on the road out of London. But in most cases, the nature of these crimes is not elaborated.

Famous female criminals could certainly make a name for themselves. Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, became a notorious, celebrated figure of the London underworld in the 17th century. She made a living through thievery, and other dubious activites, but stories of her career as a highwaywoman during the Civil Wars are almost certainly invention. The Newgate Calendar (a compilation of accounts of criminals and their crimes, published in the 18th century) claimed that Moll, a passionate Royalist...

‘went on the highway, committing many great robberies, but all of them on the Roundheads, or rebels, that fomented the Civil War against King Charles I … A long time had Moll Cutpurse robbed on the road; but at last, robbing General Fairfax of two hundred and fifty jacobuses on Hounslow Heath, shooting him through the arm for opposing her, and killing two horses on which a couple of his servants rode, a close pursuit was made after her by some Parliamentarian officers quartering in the town of Hounslow, to whom Fairfax had told his misfortune. Her horse failed her at Turnham Green, where they apprehended her, and carried her to Newgate.'

Moll would have been in her fifties by this time; an unlikely age to have taken up a such a risky and physically demanding enterprise, and there is no documentary evidence to support these flights of fancy, reported long after her death.

But there is evidence of women working as accomplices in highway robbery if we look hard enough. Susan, Lady Sandys, wife of infamous gentleman robber Sir George Sandys, was implicated in his crimes several times and charged twice, though she escaped her husband's eventual comeuppance. After his execution in 1618 it’s believed she continued to act as accomplice to her son and even, possibly, in her own right. A broadside ballad of 1626 describes her as the ‘wicked Lady wife’. Is this our first Wicked Lady of legend?

Indeed, the transgressive figure of the cross-dressing, lawless woman became a feature of sensationalist literature and broadside ballads of the Restoration period (perhaps explaining the exaggeration of Moll Cutpurse’s exploits). Richard Head’s novel of 1665, The English Rogue, tells the story of the fabulously monikered Meriton Latroon, and includes encounters with several such female robbers, all loose-moraled and sexually voracious. The book was a huge success, proving that the appeal of the gentleman thief was well established, but telling us more about the public appetite for scandalous, titillating content than it does about any real woman committing such crimes.

If we look to a later but more reliable source, the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1681 – 1800, there are around 300 transcripts reporting female highway robbers. Only one case, in 1744, involves a woman, heavily disguised, acting alone and on horseback, displaying all the expected attributes of the gentleman highwayman.

The accused, Ann Hecks, was eventually acquitted on insufficient evidence, but the sheer volume of other records suggests that this was probably not a one off. If this is the case in the 18th century, it follows that the same likely applies to earlier decades, especially during the anarchic years of the English Civil Wars, when people sometimes turned to a life of crime to make ends meet. The threads of evidence, though tenuous, stretch back through the centuries, suggest that highway robbery was not the realm of men alone.

But what of my Wicked Lady? What of Katherine Ferrers? Is it possible that a woman of aristocratic birth, finding herself poverty stricken and abandoned, with very little left to loose, might take matters into her own hands? On balance, I’d say yes. Is it likely? I’ll leave that to my readers to decide.

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'A Grave Story' by Karen Maitland

Maggoty Johnson's grave.
Photographer: Peter Johnson

One night when I was child camping up on the moors on Dartmoor, I rolled out of the shelter in my sleep and woke up a few feet away to find myself lying against a grave, which I hadn’t noticed when we’d set up camp in the dark. It was a bit unnerving at the time, but I think that was the start of my fascination with gravestones and now as a writer, I often find inspiration for scenes and intriguing characters from inscriptions on graves in churchyards. But I am equally fascinated by the graves that lie on unconsecrated ground.

Near Beckhampton, in Wiltshire on the London to Bath road is a stone that marks the grave of a highwayman who was shot dead whilst trying to hold up the stagecoach. He was buried where he fell, face down. Face-down burial was common practice for the corpses of felons, not simply to punish them by giving their bodies a degrading burial, but also as a means of stopping their spirit rising from the grave to haunt the living.

Bodies of murderers or suicides were often buried at crossroads, and the bodies spun round several times by the corpse bearers before burial so the spirits of the dead would be disorientated and wouldn’t be able to find the road back to the village. For good measure the bodies might also be sprinkled with salt or had iron nails hammered into the feet to stop the corpse walking and some were even impaled with a wooden stick to fix them in the grave.

At Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, legend has it that one such stake, took root and grew into an elm tree, though it is more likely that a seed simply fell on the dug-over soil and sprouted. Nevertheless the tree was known as Maude’s elm, because it marked the grave of a young girl who never returned after being sent from Swindon to Cheltenham by her mother to deliver skeins of wool. The following day, she was found drowned in river, while on the bridge above lay the body of her uncle, Godfrey Bowen, a man with a wicked reputation. He was found shot through the heart by an arrow and died still clutching a piece of cloth ripped from Maude’s dress. The coroner decided Maude had committed suicide, so the unfortunate girl was buried at the crossroads. Many years later, in 1778, it was revealed that a man called Walter, a skilled archer, had shot the uncle when he saw him molesting the girl Walter secretly loved on the bridge. Maude had tried to flee, but had slipped, hit her head and drowned.



Jay's Grave, Dartmoor. Photographer: Fiona Avis

 Another tragic story lies behind a granite stone on Dartmoor at point where a road and track cross. It is known as Jay’s grave. Around 1790, a baby was delivered to the workhouse at Newton Abbot. She was given the name Mary Jay, an unkind name for ‘Jay’ meant prostitute. Once she was old enough to work she was sent as apprentice to Canna farm near Manaton. They called her ‘Kitty.’

But the farmer and his wife dismissed her when they discovered that she was pregnant, probably by their own son. Rather than return to the workhouse, she hanged herself in one of the barns at Canna. As a suicide, she was buried on the moors not far from Hound Tor Inn. But the strange thing is for over two hundred years fresh flowers or greenery have regularly appeared on her grave. Many people have kept watch, but no one ever sees who leaves them.

Close-up of Jay's Grave. Photographer: Smalljim

Flowers were also left on that highway man’s grave in Beckhampton, Wiltshire too, by travellers on their way to Tan Hill Fair, because they maintained he was an innocent man shot by the coach guards who thought they were being held up when he was simply trying to control his horse.

But not every burial in unconsecrated ground is a tragic story. Samuel Johnson, known as ‘Maggoty’ because of his pockmarked face was professional jester, singer and playwright born in 1691. When he died, aged 82, he was initially buried in the churchyard, but his friends had him removed as he had requested and reburied in woods, now known as Maggoty Johnson’s Woods, near Gawsworth, Cheshire. He had asked not to be left in the churchyard, because he particularly disliked a quarrelsome old woman who was buried there, and joked that on the Day of Resurrection she would pick a fight over his leg bones, claiming them to be hers. So he wanted to be buried safely away from her, so she couldn’t snatch them.

The Real Wicked Lady by Katherine Clements

Today is paperback publication day for my second novel The Silvered Heart, so between sips of celebratory fizz (or more likely a huge pot of tea) it seems only right to post about the woman, and the legend, that inspired the book.

Here’s the book blurb…

1648. Orphaned heiress Lady Katherine Ferrers is forced into marriage for the sake of family honour … but with Cromwell’s army bringing England to its knees, her fortune is the real prize her husband desires. As her marriage becomes a prison and her privileged world crumbles, Katherine meets her match in Rafe – a lover who will lead her into a dangerous new way of life where the threat of death lurks at every turn…

Enter Kate Ferrers, highwaywoman, the Wicked Lady of legend – brought gloriously to life in this tale of infatuation, betrayal and survival.

The popular legend of Lady Katherine Ferrers is classic high romance: a young, orphaned heiress is forced into a marriage of convenience, her inheritance squandered by a neglectful, dissolute husband. Desperate and frustrated, she finds escape and adventure with a dashing local highwayman.

But there is no happily ever after for our heroine. Her lover is hanged. Driven insane with grief, she dies tragically, shot during a hold up. Her body is discovered at the foot of a concealed staircase, at her family home, Markyate Cell. She is buried, shrouded in secrecy and shame, to be remembered ever after as the wandering ghost of Hertfordshire folklore: the Wicked Lady.

It’s a swashbuckling adventure that has inspired novels and films, the most famous, a 1945 version starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood. But the life of the real woman with whom the legend has most often been associated, tells a different tale. Katherine Ferrers certainly suffered grief, hardship, and the devastation of a family fortune, as did many women during the English Civil War and its aftermath, but did she really turn to crime? And what does her story tell us about the position and fate of women during this tumultuous time in British history?

Margaret Lockwood as The Wicked Lady

Those are the questions that intrigued me when I first encountered the legend some years ago. Delving deeper I found that we know very little about the real Katherine, but there is enough information to piece together a picture of her life. We can trace her from Hertfordshire origins, via Oxford, Cambridgeshire and London, to her final resting place at Ware. Her family connections to prominent Royalists gave me insight into her intimate circle and her likely experiences and attitudes during the civil wars and the difficult years that followed. We know something of her financial hardship, her husband’s involvement in Royalist conspiracy rings and military uprisings, and his resulting imprisonment in the Tower. The challenge and opportunity for me was to merge these tantalising facts with the fiction.

The only known portrait of Katherine Ferrers, recently restored at Valence House Museum

It’s easy to imagine the scenario as legend tells it. The English Revolution really did turn the world upside down for many people, and for more than a decade, aristocratic families who believed they had a right to their inherited status and wealth found their estates taken away, heavy fines and taxes imposed, and in some cases, no choice but to live a life of poverty in exile. Married women, considered the property of their husbands, and with no means of their own, were forced to cope with painfully reduced circumstances that were the very opposite of the life they had been raised to expect. It’s not unreasonable to conceive that some may have taken matters into their own hands.

And such women were not necessarily powerless. Many rose to the challenges of war and misfortune, exhibiting great fortitude and strong political views, changing the world around them through a variety of means. Katherine's relative by marriage, Anne Fanshawe, who appears in the novel, is just one example of a woman who suffered great loss, adversity and danger but wielded considerable political influence via her husband. Her writing still influences our view of Civil War women today.

In other social spheres, women were prominent in radical political movements, some demanding equal rights with men. Female preachers and prophets played key roles within new religious sects and published their ideas in pamphlets and tracts. Women took over family businesses, defended their homes and even took to the battlefield. Once sampled, these freedoms might have been hard to give up.

I’ll be clear: The Silvered Heart is not a biography; it’s a work of imagination and I make no claim that my version of Katherine’s life is the truth. The mystery of how she became the Wicked Lady of legend remains obscure. The book is my attempt to answer these questions: What if Katherine really was a highway robber? What would have driven a woman to such extreme lengths? And what might have been the devastating results?

Me reading from The Silvered Heart with Katherine looking on

Katherine Clements

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