Sapphire Lebesque's Blog: Margin Notes - Posts Tagged "aristocrats"
Stand and Deliver! Highwaymen in Georgian London
Clay and Vasso travel to Putney Heath in the story of Kissing The Contessa. In 1796, the heath was not built-up like today and the landscape was a haven for highwaymen and the travelling public feared them. Jeremiah Abershaw was one of the most notorious and feared.
Abershaw often spent time in The Green Man pub (tavern, as it would have been known then) on the heath's north side, so Clay and Vasso, coming from a north-easterly direction (from Fulham) as they would have done, might have passed by it.
I mention a tavern which Vasso goes into to ask for directions, but I haven't named it as The Green Man, because I haven't researched that building in detail and also I felt it would distract from the story, but I had The Green Man in mind when I wrote that chapter.
The year before my heroes travelled to Putney Heath, Abershaw was arrested in The Green Man in 1795 and sentenced to death for his crimes, hanged in Kennington and his body strung up on a gibbet, no doubt as a lesson to others.
The rich guarded their property jealously, and in the climate of the time, when citizens could be put to death for stealing a sheep, or poaching deer from an aristocrat's land, this punishment wasn't seen as anything outstanding. Horse theft was a serious crime and punishable by death, also.
Putney Heath has a colourful history of highwaymen. Dick Turpin, probably the most famous, is said to have stashed guns in The Green Man, but he was active in the 1730s and outside of the scope of the novel.
The Heath was also famous for duels. In 1798, Prime Minister of England, William Pitt the Younger and an MP, William Tierney, tried to resolve their dispute over a Parliamentary Bill and faced each other off with pistols on the heath. However, they both missed and both survived.
Pistols were famously inaccurate in those days, so even if they chose not to 'delope', (and obsolete term meaning to deliberately miss the opponent by shooting into the air) the chances of shooting the other man dead with one shot were slim.
Abershaw often spent time in The Green Man pub (tavern, as it would have been known then) on the heath's north side, so Clay and Vasso, coming from a north-easterly direction (from Fulham) as they would have done, might have passed by it.
I mention a tavern which Vasso goes into to ask for directions, but I haven't named it as The Green Man, because I haven't researched that building in detail and also I felt it would distract from the story, but I had The Green Man in mind when I wrote that chapter.
The year before my heroes travelled to Putney Heath, Abershaw was arrested in The Green Man in 1795 and sentenced to death for his crimes, hanged in Kennington and his body strung up on a gibbet, no doubt as a lesson to others.
The rich guarded their property jealously, and in the climate of the time, when citizens could be put to death for stealing a sheep, or poaching deer from an aristocrat's land, this punishment wasn't seen as anything outstanding. Horse theft was a serious crime and punishable by death, also.
Putney Heath has a colourful history of highwaymen. Dick Turpin, probably the most famous, is said to have stashed guns in The Green Man, but he was active in the 1730s and outside of the scope of the novel.
The Heath was also famous for duels. In 1798, Prime Minister of England, William Pitt the Younger and an MP, William Tierney, tried to resolve their dispute over a Parliamentary Bill and faced each other off with pistols on the heath. However, they both missed and both survived.
Pistols were famously inaccurate in those days, so even if they chose not to 'delope', (and obsolete term meaning to deliberately miss the opponent by shooting into the air) the chances of shooting the other man dead with one shot were slim.
Margin Notes
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