Some of the Turpin legend can be sourced directly to Richard Bayes' "The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin" (1739), a mixture of fact and fiction hurriedly put together in the wake of the trial, to satisfy a gullible public. The speeches of the condemned, biographies of criminals, and trial literature, were popular genres during the late 17th and early 18th centuries; written for a mass audience and a precursor to the modern novel, they were "produced on a scale which beggars comparison with any period before or since". Such literature functioned as news and a "forum in which anxieties about crime, punishment, sin, salvation, the workings of providence and social and moral transgression generally could be expressed and negotiated."