TURPIN, RICHARD [Drcx] (1706-1739)
This article appears in Volume V27, Page 482 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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TURPIN, RICHARD [Drcx] (1706-1739) , English robber, was born in 1706 at I-Iempstead, near Saffron Walden, Essex, where his father kept an alehouse. He was apprenticed to a butcher, but, having been detected at cattle-stealing, joined a notorious gang of deer-stealers and smugglers in Essex. This gang also made a practice of robbing farmhouses, terrorizing the women in the absence of their husbands and brothers , and Turpin took the lead in this class of outrage. On the gang being broken up Turpin went into partnership with Tom King, a well-known highwayman. To avoid arrest he finally left Essex for Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, where he set up under an assumed name as a horse dealer. He was convicted at York assizes of horse-stealing and hanged on the 7th of April 1739. Harrison Ainsworth , in his romance Rookwood, gives a spirited account of a wonderful ride by Dick Turpin on his mare, Black Bess, from London to York , and it is in this connexion that Turpin's name has been generally remembered. But as far as Turpin is concerned the incident is pure fiction. A somewhat similar story was told about a certain John Nevison, known as " Nicks," a well-known highwayman in the time of Charles II., who to establish an alibi rode from Gad's Hill to York (some 190 m.) in about 15 hours . Both stories are possibly only different versions of an old north road myth.
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