Gillian Spraggs was educated at Harrow County Girls’ Grammar School and Girton College, Cambridge. Her research into highwaymen began in the mid-1970s, while she was working towards a thesis on the figure of the Rogue in Tudor and early Stuart literature. In 1980, she received her Ph. D. from the University of Cambridge, and began a much wider investigation, of which this book is the fruit, into the literature and history of the English robber. She has published essays, poems and translations, and is the editor of Love Shook My Senses (1998), an anthology of poetry.