Ravensdale Read online

  Wycombe

  Known now as 'High Wycombe', a market town in Buckinghamshire, in the south of England.

  'Lying under a tree and debating with yourself'

  A habit of the protagonist of the original robber novel ''Rinaldo Rinaldini' by Christian Auguste Vulpius (1798).

  'Everywhere, landowners enclose land, driving the people from the commons?'

  The forceful appropriation of the common land by landlords, through enclosing areas formerly used by local people for grazing cattle, etc, was a cause of much suffering, sometimes emptying whole villages. Various Enclosure Acts were passed to achieve this, particularly during the period 1750-1860

  Runners

  The Bow Street Runners were a London based force of thief takers started by Henry and John Fielding in the 1750's.

  Rumpskuttle

  A wild, boisterous girl; a tomboy.

  Hartshorn

  Another name for smelling salts, made from a distillation of hartshorn from deer hooves

  Get off with the lightest punishment

  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries especially, the courts and juries were notoriously lenient towards gentlemen charged with killing within the aristocratic code of honour enshrined in a duel.

  Mill

  A fist fight.

  Patrols

  In the 1790's various patrols were set up to guard roads out of the capital from highwaymen.

  Hoyden

  A wild, boisterous girl

  Excise

  A form of tax on domestic consumption, leading to a high level of smuggling of many goods, including luxury items like brandy and tobacco in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When he was a smuggler, Reynaud Ravensdale would have come up against the 'Excise Men' who enforced the law.

  High Toby

  A name for the practice of highway robbery.

  Speen

  A village some five miles south east of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England.

  Ha-Ha

  A deep ditch between the gardens of a house and surrounding fields designed to keep out cattle.