Lecture

Stand & Deliver

The Eighteenth-Century Highwayman with Prof. James Sharpe

The highwayman is a familiar figure to most people, and is generally regarded as a romantic hero, daring and flouting authority, well bred, elegantly clad, and as a Robin Hood, robbing the rich and sparing, if not actually helping the poor.

In this lecture with Professor James Sharpe will shall explore what can be discovered of this historical reality of the highway in the period when he flourished, between the mid seventeenth and the late eighteenth century. In so doing, we will find that the historical highwayman was very different from the highwayman of the historical imagination. And, of course, as befits a lecture on highwaymen in York, Dick Turpin will weave his way into the story.

Professor James Sharpe has researched and published extensive on crime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is author of Dick Turpin: the Myth of the English Highwayman (Profile Book, 2004).

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