Elizabeth Keysian

Without giving away too many spoilers, the principal villains in Lyon on the Loose committed a catalogue of offences that would have attracted the attention of the authorities. Depending on the evidence available, they could have faced charges including fraud, conspiracy, theft, assault and the unlawful taking of a carriage.

The Regency legal system was far harsher than that of the modern day. England was still living under the notorious "Bloody Code", when more than two hundred offences...

One of the inspirations behind Mundlingham Castle in Lyon on the Loose was Stokesay Castle in Shropshire: not quite a castle in the military sense, but something perhaps even more intriguing—a fortified medieval house.

Set in a peaceful valley near the Welsh border, Stokesay is one of the best-preserved fortified manor houses in England. Most of what visitors see today was built in the late thirteenth century by Laurence of Ludlow, a wealthy wool merchant who bought the manor in 1281. His...

No figure is more closely associated with the romance—and the reality—of the English highwayman than Jerry Abershawe. Although he died in 1795, twenty years before the Battle of Waterloo, his reputation lingered well into the Regency. Long after his execution, travellers passing Putney Vale could still remember the place where his body had hung in chains, and novelists continued to invoke his name as a byword for danger on the road.

Born Louis Jeremiah Abershawe around 1773, Jerry was no...