Why is the highwayman perceived as a romantic and glamorous figure? Why have heroes been made out of men who were violent bandits and sometimes murderers and rapists as well? This book attempts to move towards an explanation by examining the activities of some of the best-known highwaymen in England and by trying to describe highway robbery while placing it in its social and economic context. Unlike most other works, it examines highway robbery generally, not just the activities of highwaymen. It covers the period from medieval times to the 1860s, when the citizens of London went in fear of being attacked and robbed by the dreaded garotters.
Mention the word ‘highwayman’ and everyone has the image of a masked, caped, tricorn-hatted, cavalier-like figure astride a handsome roan, moving out of a wayside thicket, pistols at the ready and uttering the immortal command, ‘Stand and Deliver!’. His victims, at least in popular mythology, are well-to-do travellers in their own carriages, on horseback or being conveyed by stage or mail coach. The travellers include a damsel of bewitching beauty who goes into a dramatic, well-timed swoon on catching sight of this menacing yet tantalising robber. The myth continues. The highwayman, because he rides a horse, is likely to be a gentleman by birth. He is gallant and considerate towards his victims, as any gentleman would be. Rumour says that he donates some of the proceeds of his robberies to the district’s most needy citizens. Fashionable and wealthy ladies intercede in court on his behalf when he stands trial and visit him in the condemned cell, fulfilling their own fantasies and providing some last-minute succour to the still defiant miscreant about to embark on his awful last journey.
Highwaymen feature in countless folk-tales and ballads, nearly always cast in this kind of romantic light. Novels, plays and films have consistently placed the highwayman in the role of hero, as a dashing gallant or at the very worst, a likeable rogue. Similar adulation is not extended to other highway robbers such as footpads, pickpockets or those now called muggers. How often do we hear of popular songs celebrating the activities of other members of the criminal fraternity such as pimps, embezzlers or burglars? The reality is that many highwaymen were ruthless cut-throats who had no intention of disbursing the proceeds of their robberies to the meek and needy. For such people they had total contempt. They could stay where they always had been, down at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Meanwhile, fortune favoured the bold and so the highwayman grabbed whatever he could and did so totally without scruple or concern for his victims.
The received wisdom that sees crime as antisocial and deviant sheds little useful light on how the common people saw the activities of reprobates like highwaymen. Neither does it illuminate popular perceptions of the nature of criminal activity and of the role of the authorities in attempting to maintain ‘their’ law and order, ‘their’ property and privileges while all around them large sections of society went without many of life’s necessities. The helpful concepts of ‘social crime’ and the ‘moral economy’ were developed by historians such as E.P. Thompson in the 1970s. They denoted the kind of illegal activity that, even if not intentionally, represented a challenge to the status quo and may have enjoyed considerable support from the mass of the population. Most people warm to Robin Hood whenever he gets one over on corrupt and greedy people like the Bishop of Hereford or the Sheriff of Nottingham. Here is the folk-hero, popular because he cocks a snook at those in positions of power and wealth thereby helping to undermine a status quo that the common people know is deeply flawed. Smugglers and poachers are other criminals whose activities have enjoyed widespread popular approval. The ‘social crime’ concept goes some way towards explaining the selective and irrational nature of popular attitudes towards the different kinds of criminal activity. It is hard to believe, however, that many highwaymen saw themselves as striking a blow against social injustice. The highwayman was there for the money. Many also enjoyed the excitement and the notoriety.
The highwayman may personify some of the aspirations that lie, often well hidden, in most of us. He is a freebooter, a libertarian, a devil-may-care individualist who scorns stifling conventions. Not for him the crushing tedium of a life of diligent but unrewarding toil. His purpose in life was to fill his belly and acquire enough money to enjoy the good life whoring, gambling and drinking with little thought for the morrow, and to do so at the expense of others who may have worked hard for what little they had. In reality the highwayman was a very unlikeable character whose intentions differed little from those of the basest cut-throat or pickpocket also out on the road. For that reason it is hard to grasp why he seems so greatly to have endeared himself to the public.
It undeniably took courage to hold travellers up and highwaymen needed to exude confidence as well as an air of menace and ferocity with which to browbeat their victims. Force of personality could help to avoid the use of physical force. The job required superb horsemanship and stamina because of the need to be out in all weathers and perhaps to ride pell-mell over long distances when being chased. Patience was also needed because the highwayman might wait hours for a suitable opportunity whereupon he would suddenly leap into violent and possibly hazardous action.
Society might have felt some sympathy for the dashing but demobilised cavalry officer after the English Civil War and excused his taking to highway robbery because he had no other useful skill. They did not feel equal compassion and toleration for his subordinate who was a robber on foot, a footpad, a pickpocket or other street nuisance. The highwayman therefore occupies a unique and somewhat contradictory place in that collective consciousness called history.
What kind of society is it that provides the conditions in which highway robbery can thrive? It has flourished in this country at times when the hold of government and of law and order has been tenuous and incomplete. However, society will not have been in a state of complete breakdown, because a prerequisite for the robber was a supply of travellers, preferably affluent, and that required at least some degree of political stability and economic prosperity. Such a situation was to be found in the England of the fourteenth century, frequently wracked by internecine struggles between king and nobility and among the nobles themselves. However, in spite of political and social instability, the country’s trade and commerce were growing and there were abundant pickings along the highways for the bold opportunist. Likewise, in the middle of the seventeenth century the Civil War disrupted the tenor of government but continued economic expansion saw traffic on the roads running at unprecedented levels. A factor that partly helps to explain the public perception of the highwayman is that he frequently operated at times when the forces of government were unpopular and enjoyed no real legitimacy. This made it easy to transform a brutal bandit who was handsome, mysterious, rode a fine horse and was outside the law into a popular hero.
The heyday of the highwayman was unquestionably the eighteenth century and Dick Turpin and others of his ilk benefited from the country’s burgeoning economic expansion which, however, was well ahead of the corresponding development of its judicial, penal and policing systems. Until the nineteenth century these were appropriate to a largely rural and agricultural society but were proving hopelessly inadequate for a society that was undergoing the traumatic changes associated with large-scale population growth and unplanned industrial and urban development. This was the temporary situation that the highwaymen of legend were able to exploit very effectively until overcome by the economic, social and technological changes that were the product of the Industrial Revolution. By the 1830s the highwayman and his modus operandi had become a complete anachronism.
Much that has been written about the highwaymen has been enormously embellished by time and in the telling. The legends that are sometimes the only source of evidence, certainly for the seventeenth century and earlier, provide accounts that are incomplete and with dates and details that often differ. There is no doubt that most if not all of the characters mentioned in the text actually existed and that while there is some basis in fact for the actions with which they are credited, many of the more extravagant details of these adventures can be readily dismissed. They are included for the sake of completeness and because they are frequently entertaining. It should be borne in mind that no official statistics on crime existed in Britain until 1805. A history of highway robbery that dealt only with information that is totally verifiable would be incomplete and probably dull.
Highway robbers were not unique to Britain. The Wild West of the USA has many legendary characters who were bandits or ‘road agents’ and who held up stage coaches and individual travellers, rustled livestock, robbed banks and even, in a few cases, railway trains. Among the pantheon of such characters are notorious outlaws such as Jesse James, the ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’, John Wesley Hardin and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Australia, too, had its ‘Bushrangers’, the most notorious of whom were probably the gang led by Ned Kelly. Their activities were similar but they enjoyed the lucrative bonus of sometimes ambushing and capturing large consignments of gold. Europe also had its highway robbers, frequently operating in gangs. In France, Italy and Spain at least they often seem to have combined banditry with rebellion against an oppressive political system or in some cases foreign domination. As nationalists or freedom fighters they may well have used the proceeds of their robberies to finance their guerrilla activities and have enjoyed the support of substantial sections of the population. It is easy to see how they would become invested with the same aura of popularity as folk-heroes, such as that so readily bestowed on Robin Hood.
Few of these robbers, wherever they were, lived long enough to bask in the adoration and respect of their grandchildren. The majority died young and ingloriously at the hand of the executioner, by injuries sustained when their intended victims retaliated or in shoot-outs with the agents of the law. What distinguishes the British mounted highway robber was that he is reputed to have behaved with a gallantry and courtesy towards his victims that is lacking among his equivalents in other countries. He also seems to have gone to his execution displaying a much greater swagger and an open contempt for the authorities, thereby providing a more entertaining piece of theatre. Finally, the British mounted highway robber seems to have been much less likely to kill his victims than his foreign counterparts. While robbery by highwaymen was commonplace enough to be an everyday event, violence and murder perpetrated during its commission were much less frequent than might be expected where the robber’s own life was at stake if he was caught.
Much of the material in this book concerns events within the orbit of London and that cannot be avoided given the domination of London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1700 its population was fast approaching half a million, while England’s second city by size, Norwich, could boast no more than 20,000 souls. In the period when highwaymen were most active London contained at least one-tenth of England’s population and much more than one-tenth of the criminal activity. London society was turbulent and violent with a popular culture based around what would now be regarded as excessive drinking and short-term pleasures of an escapist nature. However, it was not just London’s size and wealth that made it the centre of the country’s underworld and criminal activity. These provided motives and opportunities for the criminally inclined. Also significant was the cosmopolitan and ever-changing nature of its population, a consequence of which was its lack of ‘roots’ and of the deference to community, familial and other icons of traditional authority which provided some social cement in the small towns and rural communities of the provinces. London’s economy, despite the diversity of its industrial base, was particularly susceptible to economic fluctuations, meaning that much work in the capital was of a casual, uncertain nature, especially among what we would now categorise as the ‘unskilled’. London had a large underworld that lived exclusively off the gains of criminal activity but it also contained substantial numbers of people who went to and fro between legal and illegal activity in response to the opportunities available. A substratum of people who obtained their income from criminal activity was, of course, not unique to London but the capital’s size and complexity meant that it generally offered richer pickings than anywhere else. For those reasons, robbery around London features largely in these pages.