In She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith, Mrs Hardcastle twice addresses her husband as ‘good Mr Highwayman’, believing him to be a highway robber. In The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, Ratty reinterprets...

The word highwayman is first attested from the year 1617.[1] It means 'a man who robs travellers on the road', and applies especially to robbers who operated in Great Britain and Ireland from the Elizabethan period until the early 19th century. The term...