Britain's Outlaws: Highwaymen, Pirates and Rogues

BBC Four HD

2:50 AM to 3:50 AM

Wednesday 16 October

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Historian Sam Willis explores the criminal underworld of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, beginning with the arrival of the highwayman in the wake of the English Civil War. Heavily romanticised in literature, these glamorous gangsters became a social menace on the roads and a political thorn in the side of the creaking British state, but a far darker reality lay underneath the dashing image of stylish robbers on horseback