Dick Turpin

The case

The man hanged on the Knavesmire outside York on 7 April 1739 had been arrested the previous autumn as John Palmer, a horse dealer living at Brough on the Humber who had shot a neighbour's game cock in the street and threatened to shoot its owner too. Nobody in Yorkshire knew who he was. He was found out by his handwriting. A letter he sent from York Castle to his brother-in-law in Essex was refused at the post office, and a man who had taught Richard Turpin to write when they were at school together recognised the hand.

Turpin was baptised at Hempstead in Essex on 21 September 1705, the son of an innkeeper and butcher, and probably trained in the butcher's trade. In the early 1730s he was dealing with a gang of deer poachers in Epping Forest, the Gregory gang, and by late 1734, with several of them caught or scattered, the survivors turned to breaking into isolated houses around the edges of London. The raids were brutal. On the evening of 4 February 1735 Turpin and four others forced their way into Earlsbury Farm at Edgware, tied up the maidservants and beat and burned the 70-year-old farmer, Joseph Lawrence, to make him say where his money was. They left with less than £30. Three days later they did much the same at a farm in Marylebone.

Rewards and an informer ended the gang within weeks. Arrests began on 11 February, a teenage member named John Wheeler confessed, and the London Gazette printed a description of Turpin: a butcher, about 26, five feet nine inches tall, heavily marked with smallpox. Three of the gang were hanged at Tyburn on 10 March 1735 and their bodies hung in chains on the Edgware Road; Samuel Gregory followed in June. Turpin got away.

Through the second half of 1735 he robbed travellers on the roads and commons around London with Thomas Rowden, a former counterfeiter. In 1737 he was riding with Matthew King, later remembered wrongly as Tom King, and Stephen Potter. That May, after a stolen horse was traced to a Whitechapel inn, King was shot in a struggle with the men waiting for him and died days later; early reports blamed Turpin's pistol, though the papers soon retracted it. Turpin fled to Epping Forest, where on 4 May 1737 Thomas Morris, a servant of one of the forest keepers, tried to take him, and Turpin shot him dead with a carbine. A royal proclamation offered £200 for his capture.

He then vanished north. As John Palmer he lodged at Brough, crossed the Humber to deal in horses in Lincolnshire and hunted with the local gentry, apparently paying for it by stealing horses. After the game cock incident in October 1738 magistrates committed him first to Beverley and then, as suspicion grew, to York Castle. In February 1739 James Smith, the old schoolfellow who had recognised his writing, travelled to York and identified him.

He was tried at the York Assizes on 22 March 1739 before Sir William Chapple, not for murder but for stealing a mare, a foal and a gelding from Thomas Creasy of Heckington. He had no counsel, as was usual for felony defendants, and asked repeatedly for more time to bring witnesses. The jury convicted him without leaving the court, and he was sentenced to death. He spent his last days receiving paying visitors in the castle, bought a new coat and shoes, and hired mourners. On the scaffold, by the contemporary account, he spoke briefly to the hangman, himself a pardoned highwayman, and threw himself off the ladder.