Richard Turpin, known as Dick Turpin, was an Essex butcher who joined a gang of deer poachers, took part in the gang's burglaries around London in 1734 and 1735, and was later named in a royal proclamation for the death of a man in Epping Forest. He was never tried for that death. In March 1739, using the name John Palmer, he was convicted at the York Assizes of stealing a horse, a crime punishable by death, and he was executed at York on April 7, 1739.
The figure that most readers know is largely a later creation. The ride from London to York on a mare named Black Bess belongs to a novel of 1834 and to a much older tale told of another man. The documents of the period show something plainer: a butcher turned burglar, a wanted man with a price on his head, and a horse thief who was caught because of a letter.
Turpin was born in 1705 in Essex, reputedly at the Blue Bell inn at Hempstead, and the parish register records his baptism at St Andrew's, Hempstead, on September 21, 1705. His father also worked as a butcher, and Turpin followed him into the trade. Around 1725 he set up as a butcher at Buckhurst Hill, on the edge of Epping Forest.
His first offense was selling stolen meat. The forest around Buckhurst Hill was royal hunting ground, and its deer attracted poachers who sold venison on to dealers in London. A butcher was a useful contact for men who needed carcasses taken off their hands. Turpin began by handling the gang's deer and fencing the meat, and so came to know the men he would later be named with.
Deer stealing was a serious matter in these years. The Waltham Black Act of 1723 had made it a capital offense to hunt deer armed and disguised, and the statute was regarded by contemporaries and later lawyers as one of the harshest of the century. A gang of deer stealers in Essex in the 1730s was therefore operating under a law that carried a death sentence for much that they did.
The group is usually called the Essex Gang or the Gregory Gang, after three brothers, Samuel, Jeremiah and Jasper Gregory. Its other members included Joseph Rose, John Jones, Thomas Rowden, John Wheeler and a woman named Mary Brazier. When the price of poached venison fell and the risks stayed the same, the gang changed its business. From October 1734 it carried out a series of burglaries on the outskirts of London, the first at Woodford in Essex. At least seven such burglaries are recorded between then and February 1735.
In 1734 a notice in the London Gazette named Turpin with other members of the gang, giving his trade as butcher and offering rewards of 50 pounds. It was the first time his name appeared in a public appeal, and it described him as a man who had left deer stealing for burglary.
On February 1, 1735 five men, one possibly Turpin, broke into a house at Traps Hill, Loughton, and took about 100 pounds and some silver. Three days later, on February 4, 1735, five members of the gang, Turpin among them, entered a farm at Edgware, in Middlesex, belonging to Joseph Lawrence, and took money from him. The Edgware burglary was the gang's last.
On February 11, 1735 three of the group, among them John Wheeler, the youngest, were arrested at an inn at Edgware. Wheeler gave information on the others and turned king's evidence, which was the usual price of avoiding the same fate. Jasper Gregory was taken and executed in late March 1735. Samuel Gregory was arrested on April 9, 1735 and executed on June 4. Within a few months everyone connected with the burglaries except Turpin was in custody. He is thought to have left the country for a time, probably for Holland.
Turpin was back in Essex by the summer of 1735. On July 10, 1735 he was identified in the forest in the company of Thomas Rowden, and the two were taken for highway robbers. In July 1736 Rowden was caught and sentenced to transportation. Turpin was by then working alone, and the description published in the 1735 notices was widely known: a man of fresh complexion, very much marked by smallpox, about five feet nine inches tall.
By the spring of 1737 he was again living in the forest. It is from this period that the charge of murder comes.
On Wednesday, May 4, 1737, Thomas Morris died in Epping Forest. The Crown attributed his death to Turpin, who was never indicted, tried or convicted for it.
The allegation rests on a royal proclamation issued at Whitehall, dated June 25, 1737 and printed in the London Gazette, issue 7612. It states that it had been represented to the King that Richard Turpin had murdered Thomas Morris on May 4. The proclamation offered a reward of 200 pounds to any person who discovered Turpin, and it promised the King's pardon to any of his accomplices who gave information leading to his conviction. The same notice described him as about thirty years of age, a butcher by trade, and about five feet nine inches tall. The sum was four times the reward offered for the gang in 1734.
A printed pamphlet of 1739 includes a confession said to have been made by Turpin to the executioner, in which he admitted the crimes for which he was executed and a murder in Epping Forest. No court heard evidence on Morris's death, and the conviction that ended Turpin's life was for something else.
A second death in May 1737 has been linked to Turpin. Matthew King died on May 19, 1737 after an encounter involving Turpin and a man named Tom King, with whom Turpin is said to have worked on the highways around London. The event is thought to have been an error, and no charge followed.
After the proclamation Turpin left Essex for the north. In Yorkshire and Lincolnshire he used the name John Palmer and presented himself as a gentleman and horse dealer. The horses he sold were generally stolen. A Lincolnshire theft in July 1737 involved three horses taken at Pinchbeck.
The long journeys needed to get stolen horses away from the districts where they would be recognized may have given rise to his later reputation as a rider. A contemporary broadsheet of the time, which called him "the Great Turpin" in a story of the hue and cry, is the only contemporary account that describes him as a highwayman. The documents of the years 1737 to 1739 show a horse dealer, not a rider on the roads.
In the autumn of 1738 Turpin was arrested in Yorkshire for an incident involving a game cock and a threat to a bystander who objected. The charge was a breach of the peace. He was held at Beverley, and the justices at first took him for John Palmer, a man of means who stood a good chance of acquittal.
The question of his horses changed that. When the justices linked Palmer to horse theft he was moved to York. While there he received visitors and, according to later accounts, gave gifts to people.
What remained was to show that Palmer was Turpin. While held at York he wrote to his brother-in-law in Essex, probably hoping to find character witnesses. The brother-in-law refused to accept the letter and pay the postage, saying he knew no one at York. The letter was seen at the post office by a man who had taught Turpin as a boy, who recognized the handwriting, and word of it reached the authorities. The reward of 200 pounds was later paid to James Smith for naming him.
Turpin was tried at the York Assizes on March 22, 1739, on the site now occupied by York Crown Court. A shorthand writer, Thomas Kyll, took down the trial in court, and his account was printed at York by Ward and Chandler as a pamphlet, to which were added a preface on Turpin's life in Yorkshire, a letter from his father written while he was under sentence of death, and an account of his behaviour at his execution.
The Assize indictment survives in the National Archives, in the class ASSI 44/54, under the heading of horse stealing. It names the defendant as John Palmer otherwise Pawmer otherwise Richard Turpin, labourer, late of the castle of York. It charges that on March 1 in the twelfth year of the reign of George II, in the parish of Welton in the county of York, he feloniously stole, took and led away a black gelding worth three pounds, the property of Thomas Creasy. A note on the indictment reads "Puts guilty. No goods." The outcome was a conviction for horse theft and a sentence of death.
Turpin was not tried for the Essex burglaries, for Morris or for King.
Turpin was executed at York on April 7, 1739, aged 33. A whistle in the York Castle Museum is traditionally linked to him; it was stolen from the museum in the early 1950s and turned up again at an auctioneer's showroom in 2002.
The ride to York on a mare called Black Bess is not in the record. No contemporary source names his horse, and the name appears to be a later invention. The ride itself was attributed to another highwayman, John "Swift Nick" Nevison, who was said to have covered about 200 miles from Kent to York in a day in 1676 and to have used the journey as an alibi. Daniel Defoe's Tour told a similar story of a highwayman whose alibi ride from Chatham to York a jury refused to believe.
The tale became attached to Turpin in stages. Chapbooks from about 1800 credited him with the exploits of other highwaymen. The Newgate Calendar of 1779 added that spectators were moved by his looks. William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Rookwood (1834) gave him an overnight ride to York on a black horse, and cast him as a chivalrous rogue; in the novel Turpin commits no crime. Rookwood appeared three years after the last recorded highwayman robbery in England, when fears of the roads may have faded enough to be enjoyed as a story. A penny serial of about 1886, Black Bess, ran to 254 volumes.
The historian James Sharpe, in his study of Turpin, describes the real man as a thug who was not brave or daring, not a romantic figure and not a Robin Hood. The court records and the press of the time do not support the picture of a gentleman of the road.
Horse stealing was a capital offense, as was deer stealing under the Black Act of 1723. By the end of the century more than 200 offenses carried the death penalty, though juries were often reluctant to convict, and transportation grew more common as a punishment as the century went on. Turpin's own case shows the system at both ends: a poacher who might have been executed under the Black Act, and a horse thief who was.
The state relied on rewards and on informers. An Act of 1692 for apprehending highwaymen had set a monetary reward for capturing them and had given immunity to those who informed on their accomplices. Wanted men were advertised in the London Gazette. The proclamation of 1737 followed this pattern: a reward of 200 pounds for Turpin and a pardon for any accomplice who helped to convict him. John Wheeler's evidence in 1735 and James Smith's reward in 1739 are the same system working at two ends of Turpin's career.
The trial took place at the York Assizes, and the indictment describes the defendant as a laborer, although he had lived as a gentleman under the name Palmer.
Whether Turpin caused Morris's death is untried. The proclamation of June 1737 is an allegation made to the Crown and published in the Gazette, and the confession in the 1739 pamphlet is a statement said to have been made at the end of his life. Neither is a verdict. The same applies to the death of Matthew King, thought to have been an error.
His role in the Essex burglaries rests on the notices of 1734 and 1737 and on the evidence given by Wheeler. Turpin was not tried for them.
His birth is placed at the inn his father kept in Hempstead, but the claim is a tradition; the baptism in September 1705 is the firm date. Later stories have him born in or drinking at inns that did not exist in his lifetime.
September 21, 1705: Turpin baptised at Hempstead, Essex.
About 1725: marries and works as a butcher at Buckhurst Hill.
1734: Gazette notice names him with the Essex Gang; rewards of 50 pounds offered.
October 1734: the gang's series of burglaries begins at Woodford.
February 1, 1735: Loughton burglary.
February 4, 1735: Edgware burglary.
February 11, 1735: three gang members arrested at Edgware; John Wheeler turns king's evidence.
March to June 1735: Jasper and Samuel Gregory executed.
July 10, 1735: Turpin identified in Epping Forest with Thomas Rowden.
May 4, 1737: death of Thomas Morris in Epping Forest, attributed to Turpin.
May 19, 1737: death of Matthew King.
June 25, 1737: royal proclamation offers 200 pounds for Turpin.
July 1737: horses taken at Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire.
Autumn 1738: arrested in Yorkshire as John Palmer; held at Beverley, then York.
March 22, 1739: tried and convicted of horse theft at the York Assizes.
April 7, 1739: executed at York.
1834: Rookwood places Turpin on the ride to York.