Contemporary accounts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century provide vivid descriptions of the hazards of road travel in England. Many of these concern the state of the roads themselves. In 1555 the first Highway Act was passed. This made each parish responsible for the upkeep of the roads within its own boundaries. Little improvement took place because many parishes resented spending money to better roads that were used almost exclusively by travellers passing through the district and doing little or nothing for the local economy. Also a system was brought in whereby local labourers were required to spend six days each year repairing the local roads. This enforced work, known as statute labour, was unpaid and performed, if at all, grudgingly and carelessly. In 1654 Parliament allowed parishes to levy rates to employ surveyors to supervise the work. This resulted in some small improvements in road surfaces but these were increasingly negated by the growing number of vehicles with narrow wheels that seriously damaged the road surface, especially in areas of clay soil and in periods of wet weather. Parliament then turned its attention to measures intended to cut down on the use of such vehicles and to encourage those with considerably wider wheels which it was hoped would help to roll and flatten the road surfaces.
The poor condition of the roads during this period proved an advantage to the highwaymen because it reduced coaches and carriages to speeds of 4 or 5 miles per hour, which made their interception comparatively easy. Road travellers of the time constantly bemoaned both the conditions of the roads and the prevalence of highway robbery. The frequency of complaints raises the question of what the authorities were doing about it. The answer is very little. Although the country’s highways were theoretically under the suzerainty of the Crown, the citizens of each hundred (the sub-division of a county) could be called to account for all offences committed during daylight hours on the roads in their area. The sum involved in such a robbery had to be a considerable one and the claim for compensation needed to be lodged before sunset on the day of the crime. The authorities had to produce the body of the offender, alive or dead, within forty days of a robbery, and if unable to do so they were collectively fined to make up the cost of what was stolen, which was then given to the victim. In the middle of the sixteenth century this collective indemnity was reduced to 50 per cent of the traveller’s loss, clearly indicating that the system was not working effectively. In the same century the Sunday Trading Act removed the liability incurred for hundreds of offences that took place on Sundays, probably because Sunday travelling was seen as something unnecessary and even as morally reprehensible.
The Statute of Winchester in 1285 had been aimed at curbing the activities of highway robbers, mostly footpads, but was largely ineffective against them. Although the nuisance created by footpads should not be underestimated, the emergence of the highwayman was clearly seen as an altogether more serious issue. More and more travellers were using the roads, reflecting the country’s industrial and commercial development. The total value of what was being stolen increased steadily and the hundreds were unable to pay up in full, so those who were robbed faced fewer and fewer chances of getting adequate compensation. Incidentally, the law clearly distinguished between robbery during daylight hours and robbery at night. The hundreds had no obligation whatever to recompense travellers who were foolish enough to find themselves robbed during the hours of darkness.
A host of contemporary writers found road travel and its attendant hazards as well as its pleasures a subject of inexhaustible interest. From their writings we learn that the most dangerous roads for travellers were those that converged on London, and of these four in particular stand out. Of the four, Hounslow Heath seems to have attracted the most attention from highwaymen, or ‘Knights of the High Toby’ as they were often called. The great wen of Heathrow Airport has now largely covered the area concerned but in earlier times it constituted a wild tract of country on London’s outer margin through which the important highway westwards to Bath and Bristol passed. Mention of the activities of highwaymen on Hounslow Heath goes back to at least 1552 and provides a good example of a robber being outwitted by his intended victim. A highwayman stopped a tailor jogging along on a somewhat winded old nag. Thinking that he had found easy game, he told the tailor to hand over all valuables on his person. The tailor agreed to do so but asked if he could take his hat off and hold it up while the robber peppered it with shot from his pistols. The tailor explained that he did not want his friends to ridicule him for being robbed without putting up any kind of a fight. The riddled hat would prove what a doughty fighter he was. The highwayman, who was clearly extremely gullible, then blazed away, emptying his pistols and turning the hat into a very fair imitation of a sieve. The tailor, who proved to be less of a hick than he looked, then produced a firearm of his own!
Second only to Hounslow Heath were two hazardous spots on the London to Dover road, Shooter’s Hill and Gad’s Hill. One fine moonlit night in the early eighteenth century, three notorious highwaymen named Will Ogden, Tom Reynolds and Jack Bradshaw were lurking among the trees at Shooter’s Hill while commanding an unobstructed view of the road in both directions. Not one single traveller put in an appearance as the hours ticked slowly by. Eventually, a single pedestrian came into sight, a servant-girl by her appearance. Usually they would have let her pass but they were bored and she was carrying a box. The other two told Bradshaw to accost the girl and find out if the box contained anything worth having. Bradshaw dismounted from his horse, strode up to the girl, grabbed the box and rifled through its contents. They included a number of women’s garments, a hammer and at least 15s. Disgusted with the hammer, Bradshaw cast it to one side and continued to root about in the box. In a flash the girl picked the hammer up and dealt him a cracking blow on the forehead. When he fell to the ground she manoeuvred the hammer round in her hand and with the claw proceeded to rip his throat open. As Bradshaw lay expiring on the ground, a gentleman rode up and asked if he could be of assistance and suggested that he might as well go through the man’s pockets. This produced only a little loose change and a whistle. The stranger raised the whistle to his lips and extracted a few notes. Ogden and Reynolds had retired to a spinney a small distance away and had not seen the worsting of their colleague at the hands of this formidable serving wench. The sound of the whistle was the agreed call for help and they rushed headlong to assist Bradshaw and seeing their mutilated colleague clearly expiring, they kept on galloping. The identity of the girl was never ascertained.
The third location infested by highway robbers was Finchley Common on the Great North Road. This place will forever be associated with Dick Turpin, of whom more later. It remained a place to be avoided long after Turpin had been hanged. For example, in 1790, the Earl of Minto coming south to London, wrote to his wife that when he arrived near Finchley, instead of proceeding on to the city that night, he would put up at an inn. He was not prepared to put the place’s sinister night-time reputation to the test. There is a story that a little-known highwayman called Curtis buried a collection of booty, then valued at £1,500, on the common. Apparently he never had the opportunity to recover it and rumour says that it is still there.
Shotover Hill, close to Oxford on the road to London, was another spot favoured by highwaymen. John Cottington’s resourcefulness in holding up and robbing the Army payroll wagon at this point is mentioned elsewhere. On another occasion pickings must have been meagre because a highwayman with nothing better to do stopped a dishevelled foot traveller who turned out to be a barber claiming to be down on his luck. He produced a purse that was clearly empty. The highwayman was unimpressed and was about to let the wretched man go when he decided to make use of his professional expertise and have a shave. Many would question the wisdom of demanding a shave with a cut-throat razor from a man you have just tried to rob. The barber was extremely nervous and quivered so much that he dropped his shaving pot on to a stone whereupon it shattered into smithereens. Among the fragments were twenty golden guineas. It was a good day for the highwayman after all!
Other places much frequented by highwaymen were Wimbledon Common, Barnes Common, Blackheath, and further away from London, Bagshot Heath. Salisbury Plain also had a sinister reputation. Favoured spots were those where coaches, wagons and other conveyances had to ascend hills which meant that they were travelling even more slowly than usual. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, highwaymen were still holding up travellers at locations as close to the centre of London as the Strand and St Paul’s. Fashionable parts of the Metropolis offered no safe haven from highwaymen and as late as the 1780s robberies occurred in districts like Knightsbridge and Kensington, sometimes in broad daylight. Rich pickings could be had at the right time of the year on the roads into and out of the fashionable spas such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells and also the venues of prestigious sporting events, including Newmarket in Suffolk. This was famous for its horseracing and gambling which attracted the patronage of the more rakish and disreputable elements of fashionable society.
Associated with the highwaymen’s haunts were the inns catering for road travellers. Many were used as safe havens by highwaymen and as sources of the information about who was on the road, who was carrying worthwhile amounts of cash and valuables and who was likely to put up an effective fight. The landlords of these establishments sometimes colluded with the highwaymen, taking a share of the proceeds without the unpleasantness of having to go out at all hours and in all weathers. Examples of these inns were the White Swan at Whitechapel and the Saracen’s Head at Aldgate, both in the City of London, the Green Man at Putney Heath and the George at Woolwich.
What could the traveller do to prevent highway robbery? Travellers on horseback and by private carriage were likely to be at least moderately well off and they might travel with armed retainers. Stagecoach owners came to employ guards but the cost had to be borne by the travellers in the fares they paid. Some coach travellers carried pistols such as Queen Anne flintlocks, but the sight of these often provoked a normally non-violent robber to start getting nasty. One clever ploy used by those carrying large numbers of banknotes was to cut them in half and send one half by a later coach while carrying the other half with them. The two pieces could be reunited later. Some carried a few coins in their pockets and hoped by surrendering these to divert the attention of a robber away from more valuable items hidden away. This was risky because short-tempered highwaymen took great exception to any victims they thought were being less than co-operative. Foot-warmers were metal or earthenware bottles filled with hot water and used to provide some comfort on cold journeys. When not in use they were often housed in decorated wooden boxes and a lady traveller might secrete a small firearm in one of these.
Another trick was for the traveller to fill his purse with counterfeit money. Clearly any robber who discovered such a ploy was unlikely to let it pass by. In 1793 a Mr Burdon, travelling from London to Durham on banking business, was stopped by a highwayman and forced to surrender the 25 guineas in his purse. The robber must have thought that it was his lucky day to pick up so much easy money. On the contrary, Burdon knew that it was his lucky day. Hidden under the seat of his postchaise was the sum of 25,000 guineas! This may be a record for the amount unknowingly left behind by a highwayman.
Not all travellers submitted quietly to their attackers. Sometimes travellers engaged in shoot-outs with highwaymen. One gloomy November evening in 1774, Lord Berkeley was travelling in his carriage across Hounslow Heath when it was stopped by three armed riders. One of them thrust a pistol through the window, which Berkeley promptly seized and pushed aside, firing his own weapon at point-blank range. The luckless highwayman moved a few yards away and then fell off his horse, dead. His accomplices fled instantly. Seventy years earlier in 1701 Tim Buckley’s career as a highwayman was brought to a dramatic and abrupt end. He held up a stagecoach near Nottingham and had his horse shot from under him. Undaunted and on foot, he let loose with each of his eight pistols in succession and managed to kill two of his opponents before sheer weight of numbers and his injuries proved too much. He was just twenty-nine.
Some highwaymen lacked the courage of their convictions, however. The Stourbridge coach was held up in 1764 by what seems to have been a particularly squeamish highwayman. He shot the guard through the head and was so appalled by what he had done that he rode off in haste without bothering to rob the passengers. Occasionally victims were able to wreak revenge on their attackers, but not always in conventional ways, as happened at Ripley in 1742. Two highwaymen stopped a lone traveller on the road near Ripley in Surrey but let him go unscathed. Elated by his lucky escape but outraged at their audacity, the traveller rode into Ripley and raised the alarm. A posse was quickly assembled which found the highwaymen and chased them on to the village green where a cricket match was taking place. They were assailed by the players with a flurry of bats and stumps. One robber escaped, but the other, having been knocked off his horse, managed to shoot a player fatally before himself being overpowered.
These episodes highlight the enormous risks that highwaymen took. Especially in the dark, unless armed with prior knowledge, they had no real idea of the sex, age or potential fighting mettle of the occupants of a coach or carriage. When thrusting their heads through the open window they might be assailed by hysterical screams, pitiful pleas for mercy or a deadly hail of bullets. They had to be brave to take such risks, but they also needed luck.
Not only live highwaymen could be found by the King’s highway but dead ones too. The barbaric practice of gibbeting was reserved for the very worst scoundrels and was both punishment and execution. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people were greatly concerned to be laid to rest with dignity which is exactly why this punishment was so dreaded. Strangely, gibbeting only received parliamentary sanction in 1752 for those guilty of robbing the Royal Mail, but it had been widely practised before that time. Indeed, it is first mentioned in the reign of King Henry III who ruled from 1216 to 1272. The gibbet was supposed to be a deterrent. Gibbets with their grisly human remains were located in conspicuous public places, either out in the countryside at such locations as crossroads or placed on the walls of towns, usually near gateways. In 1791 William Lewin had been hanged at Chester for robbing the mails and his body was gibbeted on Helsby Tor, a prominent bluff on which it could probably have been seen with a telescope from three counties other than Cheshire itself.
Gibbets were eye-catching and they drew crowds of the sort of people who enjoy revelling in the misfortunes of others. To preserve them, the bodies were sometimes immersed in tar and then the eyes removed. These corpses would then gaze out into space as mute sermons on the foolishness of criminal activity. Although many of those who suffered the indignity of being gibbeted may have been villains without any redeeming features, their relations often tried to take down their remains to ensure they were given a decent burial. Without this, the souls were thought to be condemned to wander forever. The simplest way of securing the body was to saw down the gibbet-pole but the authorities got wise to this trick and started encasing the poles in iron. The alternative involved shinning up the pole, no mission for the faint-hearted. The act of trying to take the corpse away, daunting in itself, became a capital offence. However, despite understandable aversion to this kind of nocturnal activity and the use by the authorities of ranks of sharp spikes placed at intervals on the gibbet-poles, the contents of the cages at the top somehow continued to be removed. As the Annual Register of 3 April 1763 gloomily commented, ‘All the gibbets on the Edgware Road, on which many malefactors hung in chains, were cut down by persons unknown.’
On one occasion in Derbyshire the friends of the deceased hit on the idea of burning the gibbet-pole down. In this case the gibbet held three highwaymen who were known to have worked together. However, it ignited with far more gusto than had been expected and was soon blazing away out of control. Located on a hilltop, it acted like a beacon, the tar, flames and strong winds combining to create a sight that could be seen for miles. What had been intended as a rescue attempt on the mortal remains turned into a wake following a cremation. At first light, only the links of the iron chains, which had held the bodies, remained. Occasionally, convicted murderers would be hanged alive in chains, which is what happened to John Whitfield. He was apparently a highwayman of the most egregious character and was placed, while still breathing, in a gibbet on a prominent hill just south of Carlisle. He hung there for several days, shrieking in pain and desperation until by a strange irony a good Samaritan in the form of a mail coachman passed by and humanely decided to end his suffering by simply shooting him. The last person to be gibbeted was George Cook, who met his end near Leicester in 1832. The practice was abolished in 1834.
Among the lesser known highwaymen of the seventeenth century was Francis Jackson. As a highway robber he cut a poor figure, having a short and undistinguished career and being hanged at Hampstead in 1674. However, he unwittingly made a valuable contribution to history by writing an autobiography, which provides an interesting and detailed insight into the everyday actualities of highway robbery. It contains material intended to warn the traveller how to recognise a highwayman and it provides a wealth of material for the aspiring highwayman. It explains that an effective intelligence system was vital for success and that time spent watching and listening in the parlours of wayside inns and employing reliable spies in such places was the best way to acquire information about which travellers to go after and which to leave well alone. His book contains a somewhat unprincipled attack on his former colleagues as a bunch of ne’er-do-wells and wastrels, and he indignantly states that under the guise of being gentlemen highwaymen often claim for themselves titles, especially military ones, to which they have no right. However, he also explains how highwaymen should make emotional appeals for clemency in the unhappy event of being taken to court and the ways to use disguise to reduce the likelihood of detection. He even includes hints on masking the voice and suggests that in a gang of robbers only nicknames should be used so that real names cannot be extracted under duress by the authorities.
Despite the glamorous image bestowed on highwaymen, their careers were frequently short and inglorious. Tim Buckley from Stamford in Lincolnshire drifted to London, got into bad company and turned to house-breaking. With a price on his head he left London in 1701, robbed a house at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and bought a horse at Derby with the proceeds. He then went out and unwisely stopped a coach containing three gentlemen accompanied by two riders. He killed one of them before receiving eleven bullet wounds and being overpowered. A few days later his body was hanging in chains at the scene, a few miles outside Nottingham. Highwayman needed courage, experience and luck. The careers of many, however, would have been no more auspicious than Buckley’s.
In spite of the threat posed by highwaymen and other robbers on the road and in the urban streets and alleys, it is evident that in the seventeenth century there were people, although few in number, who were prepared to travel for pleasure, intent on passing on their experiences to a wider public. Such a traveller was Fynes Moryson. He was intelligent and perceptive and his writings provide interesting information about the various regional dishes that a long-distance traveller might encounter as he journeyed around the British Isles at that time. Moryson regales his readers with mention of inns where a selection from such delights as woodcock, duck, snipe, plover, pigeon, partridge, great bustard, hare, boar, peacock and venison could be found to tempt the most jaded of palates. As far as fish are concerned, Moryson describes menus containing lampreys, elvers, sturgeon, pike, chub and carp. Fruits on offer included medlars, quinces, mulberries, nuts and various fungi. He seems to have been particularly fascinated by regional dishes and makes mention of Cambridge brawn, Kentish huffkins (a kind of muffin), Somerset laver (an edible seaweed), Banbury cheese and the Cornish pasty, among others. He marvels that a traveller probably had to go no further than 50 miles from his home to find that he was surrounded by different customs, different types of building and building materials, different clothes, unfamiliar items of diet and accents and dialects that might be almost incomprehensible.
As well as the occasional traveller like Moryson who was on the road for his own enjoyment, there were carriers who led a horse and small cart. They delivered a range of smallish consignments on a local basis as well as letters, verbal messages and the latest news, but were not to be confused with waggoners who drove stage-waggons. These transported much larger loads that were usually for more distant destinations, and also carried passengers when there was space available. Those who travelled by this means did so because they could afford nothing better and they would pay about a halfpenny per mile in return for which they proceeded at about 2 miles per hour. Some ballads and popular songs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries make much of the character of the ‘jolly waggoner’, which was meant as a joke because waggoners were known to be saturnine and mistanthropic individuals.
Highwaymen obviously favoured robbing wealthy travellers wherever possible. Currency in the form of coinage was the ideal plunder because it did not require the services of a receiver. However, gold and silver items such as watches, pieces of jewellery and anything made from expensive cloth such as silk were all eagerly snapped up because they were light and easy to carry. Sometimes they seized items of baggage but these could be bulky, difficult to handle and might not contain anything worth stealing. Cheques and bills of exchange were taken once an effective banking system had been established in Britain, which did not occur until the end of the eighteenth century. However, redeeming these for cash was potentially dangerous because the robber’s description would be circulated and the transaction could only be negotiated personally.
Postboys on horseback were worthwhile victims of robbery. They represented the most common means of transporting the mail until the late eighteenth century, and because they travelled alone and were unarmed they were particularly vulnerable to attack. The General Post Office offered extremely generous rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those who held up postboys. The first recorded hold-up of the mails was in 1650 when a gang of highwaymen apparently stole a letter containing the sum of 11d from a stagewagon on Hampstead Heath. Thomas Lympus was an ex-postboy turned highwayman who himself robbed a postboy outside Reading in 1721. The Postmaster General offered a reward of £200 in addition to the normal reward for the arrest of a highwayman. Lympus escaped to France and claimed immunity from extradition by converting to Roman Catholicism. He later returned clandestinely to England and robbed another postboy between Sherborne and Crewkerne in the West Country, but this time he was caught and there was no escape.
In the seventeenth century the first stagecoach took to the road but there is doubt about the exact date. Contemporary accounts explain that in the mid-1660s there were coaches running from Holborn in London. They served such places as Exeter, a distance of 170 miles that took eight days, and York a distance of 196 miles that also took eight days. They ran only in what could be loosely described as the ‘summer months’, being taken off in early November and not reappearing until the end of March. These early coaches lumbered along at very slow speeds and better-off travellers preferred to move more quickly and flexibly on horseback or in their own horse-drawn conveyances. By the end of the 1680s many coach routes were operating throughout the year. However, not all travellers welcomed the development of the stagecoach system. In the first decade of the eighteenth century a certain John Cresset issued a pamphlet calling for the suppression of the stagecoaches. It is clear that he has nothing good to say about them:
What advantage is it to men’s health to be called out of their beds into their coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in them from place to place till one, two or three hours after dark, inasmuch that sitting all in the summer-time stifled with heat and choked with dust, or in the winter-time starving or freezing with the cold, or choked with filthy fogs? They are often brought to their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get a supper, and next morning they are forced into a coach so early that they can get no breakfast . . . is it for a man’s health to travel with tired jades, to be laid fast in foul ways, and forced to to wade up to the knees in mire; afterwards to sit in the cold till teams of horses can be sent to pull the coach out? . . . Is it for a man’s pleasure, or advantageous to their healths or business to travel with a mixt company that he knows not how to converse with; to be affronted by the rudeness of a surly, dogged, cursing, ill-natured coachman; necessitated to lodge or bait at the worst inns on the road, where there is no accommodation fit for a gentleman; and this merely because the owners of the inns and the coachmen are agreed together to cheat the guests?
The writer of this jaundiced tirade omits even to mention the menacing threat of robbery. However, the industrious diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) was robbed on the highroad and he duly noted the fact in his diary. Two footpads apprehended him near Bromley in Kent. They caught hold of his horse, snatched the reins from his hands, pulled him off, took his sword and dragged him into a thicket nearby where they rifled through his pockets and his baggage. They then took off his riding boots and tied him to a tree along with his horse, which had such distinctive markings that they did not dare to steal it. The robbers disappeared and for two hours Evelyn had to endure exposure to the sun and the unwanted attentions of flies and ants until he eventually managed to struggle free. He learned from this experience and a later diary entry recorded how he travelled from London to Dover with an ambassador’s party. Mindful of his previous unpleasant experience near Bromley, Evelyn armed himself with a basket-hilt sword, a blunderbuss, a Turkish scimitar, a bag of bullets and a horn of gunpowder. The party encountered no robbers.
Most hold-ups occurred during daylight hours because this made it easier for an individual or gang of highwaymen to keep an eye on the coach, its occupants and the road. However, it also increased the chance of identification. Perhaps the ideal conditions were those to be found on a mild night with a lot of moonlight. Open country was favoured but in the event of a chase this might mean a long ride to find a suitable refuge. It explains why many highwaymen preferred to haunt the outskirts of towns, especially London. As late as 1715 there was still open countryside between Westminster and Kensington to the west of London and there were many occasions on which travellers were robbed in this vicinity.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, as a result of the ever-increasing flow of road traffic, the first of what came to be known as turnpike roads was established. This was on a stretch of the Great North Road that passed through Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. At first travellers had to pay a tollkeeper but because there was no physical barrier to access some travellers would simply dash past the attendant without paying. For that reason, in 1695 authority was given for the erection of turnpikes. These consisted of a barrier of pikes fastened to a frame, which stretched across the road. When the traveller had paid his toll, the frame could be turned on a central pivot, clearing the way. In the eighteenth century the actual turnpikes began to be replaced by tollgates but the name was retained.
The invention of the turnpike gate and of the turnpike road itself was a significant step in the process of modernising the road system to enable it better to serve the needs of an industrialising nation. It was just one of a host of inter-related factors that came together over a period of about one-hundred years and were to render life very difficult for the ‘gentlemen of the road’. Before that happened, however, highwaymen were to enjoy their glory days.