Lady Katherine Ferrers

Katherine Ferrers was born in 1634 into a Hertfordshire landowning family and inherited property while still young. She married Thomas Fanshawe, later Viscount Fanshawe, and died in 1660. Her short life fell across the English Civil Wars and the political and financial disruption that affected many gentry families.

Her posthumous reputation became a durable example of how local memory and popular culture can transform a real seventeenth-century woman into a criminal legend. Lady Katherine Ferrers was born in Bayford, Hertfordshire, England and died in Hertfordshire, England.

In Deborah Swift’s Shadow on the Highway, the first Highway Trilogy novel uses the later legend of Lady Katherine Ferrers as a starting point rather than a literal biography. In Deborah Swift’s Lady of the Highway, Desperate to repay her companions and restore their trust, she turns to robbery on the road, entering the territory of the highwaywoman legend later attached to Katherine Ferrers. Lady Katherine Ferrers is treated fictionally in Deborah Swift’s Spirit of the Highway.