Other Definitions
dick turpin (dict)
|
Dick TurpinRichard (Dick) Turpin (1706 - April 7, 1739), English robber and highwayman, was born in 1706 at Hempstead, near Saffron Walden, Essex, where his father kept an alehouse. He was apprenticed to a butcher, but when he was caught stealing livestock, he joined a notorious gang of deer-stealers and smugglers in Essex. This gang also made a practice of robbing farmhouses and terrorizing the women in the absence of their husbands and brothers, and Turpin took the lead in this class of outrage. Upon the breakup of the gang, 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 - 'John Palmer' - as a horse dealer. 'Palmer' was bound over to keep the peace having threatened to shoot a labourer and killed a tame fowl in October 1738. He showed petulance in refusing to provide sureties so that he would be released and this triggered further investigation of the mysterious young man who lived well yet had no apparent source of income. He was traced through horses he had sold on and revealed as Dick Turpin. He was convicted at York assizes of horse-stealing and hanged at the Knavesmire on April 7, 1739. The hangman was Thomas Hadfield, a pardoned highwayman. His father was cleared a few days earlier at the Essex assizes of horse-stealing, one of Turpin's stolen horses having been found at his alehouse. Turpin was said to have been buried, after securing his body from anatomists, in St George's churchyard, York. 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 connection 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 (near Rochester, Kent) to York (some 190 miles) in about 15 hours. Both stories are possibly only different versions of an old north road myth. External link References - Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman (2004), James Sharpe. ISBN 1-86197-418-3
Turpin, Dick Turpin, Dick Turpin, Dick
|
 |