King of the Norfolk Poachers, The: His Life and Times

In the early 1930s an elderly mole catcher became the subject of one of East Anglia's best-loved tales of country life: 'I Walked by Night'. Over sixty years later, Norfolk writer Charlotte Paton became fascinated by this man and set out to find the truth about him, beginning with his name: Frederick Rolfe. Charlotte conducted exhaustive research provide a vibrant account with plenty of social history. This book is the biography of a difficult man who could inspire devotion but came to a tragic end.

A researcher and historian, Charlotte Paton is particularly interested in East Anglian rural history in the Victorian and Edwardian period. She writes regularly for a number of magazines and newspapers especially The Eastern Daily Press. She also undertakes research for people interested in finding out their own family history, or the history of the house in which they live. Charlotte gives talks allied to her interests, subjects include Frederick Rolfe, Victorian women and life in the workhouses. Charlotte lives with her husband Brian in West Norfolk,and is restoring a gypsy caravan, learning the Romany language and researching the part gypsies played in agricultural life before mechanisation. She grew up in Bungay, Suffolk, where she read 'I Walked by Night', a book she loved. Little did she realise that almost 50 years later she would discover that the author had at one time lived in a cottage where she too lived for many years. This led her onto research the life of the author Frederick Rolfe in a biography, The King of the Norfolk Poachers, published in 2009. She is now an expert on the ways of the poacher, having studied them in depth to try to understand what drove Rolfe to pursue his criminal activities.