RICHARD [Drcx]

See also:

• TURPIN (d. c. 800)
• TURPIN, FRANCOIS HENRI (17og-1799)
• RICHARD [Drcx] TURPIN (1706-1739)

TURPIN (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 .