is not especially close to Nomansland Common, had actually been sold five years earlier. Apart from robbery, a catalogue of mayhem in the area was later attributed to Katherine that included burning houses, slaughtering livestock, even killing a constable or other officer of the law. Much of the supposed activity might be blamed on bands of brigands and the unrest relating to the Civil War, and there is no confirmation as to whether the mayhem and robberies in the area ceased with Katherine's death. J.E. Cussens suggested in his History of Hertfordshire (1870–81) that the term "wicked" came to be linked with Katherine Ferrers long after her death not through any nefarious actions on her part, but through confusion with the "Wicked" Lord Ferrers, who was not related to her. The last member of the House of Lords hanged in England, the "wicked" Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, was executed at Tyburn for the murder of his manservant in 1760, one hundred years after Katherine's death. Cussans notes that there is no contemporary mention of her career and death as a highwayman in histories published before the 4th Earl Ferrers's execution, such as Alexander Smith's Complete History of the Lives of the most Notorious Highwaymen (1714), or even some 60 years after it, such as The Newgate Calendar and Richard Clutterbuck's The History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford (1815–27). While it has also been proposed that the term "wicked" could have been applied to Katherine solely because she allowed the family estates to fall into ruin, this is unlikely since many Royalist families suffered many of the same reverses without this nomenclature being applied to them. In addition, it was Katherine's husband who controlled, and sold off, most of the Ferrers family assets; as his wife she would have been powerless to stop him. Literature, film and stage A popular novel by Magdalen King-Hall, The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1944), was loosely based on Katherine's life. A 1945 film version called The Wicked Lady, with Margaret Lockwood in the lead role and James Mason as Ralph Chaplin's alter ego Jerry Jackson, broke all British box office records for the time. The film was remade in 1983 with Faye Dunaway and Alan Bates in the respective roles. Deborah Swift's young adult novel Shadow on the Highway (2014, ) is a retelling of Katherine's story. Katherine Clements