knight of the road

Despite his eloquent praise of the gentlemanly qualities of the highwayman, Ainsworth's robber is more coarse-grained than Bulwer's Paul Clifford. In the best traditions of the ideal knight of the road, he is loath to hurt or kill anyone—but he reserves the right to do so in self-defence.

[T]he tatterdemalion knight of the road, who sleeps in haystacks and mends broken china in exchange for food, runs afoul of the gendarmerie and probably would have been sent off to the Bastille had not the banking Rothschilds, hearing of their ragged namesake, been so amused that they gave him a check drawn on the family house for 2,000 francs.