This list of places in England associated with highwaymen is by no means comprehensive. Tales with or without any basis in fact can be unearthed in every part of the country, and frequently the same story turns up time and time again but in different locations. The common origin may well be an actual event of an especially memorable nature, but the tale has been told and retold, the names of the people and the places involved gradually changed and over a period of many years two or more locations may have claimed to be the place where the famous event took place. What follows is a random sample of the places where these legends are said to have been created.
Legend has it that at the old manor Dick Turpin once discovered the corpses of the daughter of the family and her lover, both of which had been shot by the girl’s father. He agreed not to inform the authorities in exchange for which he was allowed to use the cellars whenever he needed to take refuge from pursuit. He was also allowed free access to the wine stored there. In Weathercock Lane nearby it is claimed that Turpin’s spectre can be seen on an equally ghostly ‘Black Bess’ riding pell-mell to the manor, but whether intent on hiding or enjoying a few glasses of wine nobody knows.
High on the list of tall stories told about highwaymen has to be one about The Crown Inn at Beaconsfield. It is said that Claude Duval was relaxing in the parlour of this establishment when he heard a farmer boasting about all the money he had made at Beaconsfield Fair. He bribed an accomplice, apparently generously, to dress up in cowhide with a pair of horns attached to his head, climb on to the roof and descend the flue into the parlour. This he did, causing a great commotion when he emerged from the fireplace. Many of the already inebriated customers mistook him for the Devil. In the confusion that ensued Duval was able to secure a bag containing £100 from the bragging farmer before slipping away unseen.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the ancient pilgrims’ inn The Ostrich, was run by John Jarman. He was a highway robber who did not need to go out on the road and thereby run all the risks attached to such activity. In the main guest’s room that stood above the brew-house was a bed, the feet of which were nailed to the floor while the mattress was fastened to the bed. This bed stood over a cleverly constructed trap door which could be opened by pulling back the bolts in the brew-house ceiling below. When these bolts were released, the bed tipped up, precipitating its unsuspecting occupant into a large vat of boiling ale directly below. When satisfied that the victim was dead, the landlord and his wife would go through his possessions, removing all the valuables. The genial host then cut the tail and mane of the traveller’s horse to change its appearance and sell it to a horse-dealer of flexible morals who never asked embarrassing questions. Back at the inn, enquiries on the whereabouts of the traveller would be answered by saying that he had left in the night without paying his bill, which was not untrue. No useful figure can be given for the number of Jarman’s victims. They range from half a dozen to fifty, a hundred, or more. The body of one victim failed to float away downstream and was identified. Mr and Mrs Jarman had a lot of explaining to do, but nobody was convinced by their story and they were hanged.
At Caxton Gibbet to the east of St Neots among the highway robbers whose mortal remains were set up as an awful testimony to the wages of sin were those of a young man called Gatward. He robbed a postboy journeying from Huntingdon to Royston and he was caught, hanged and gibbeted close to the scene of his crime. There is a story that one night in a storm the gibbet collapsed and a passer-by removed a button from the scarlet coat in which Gatward had been hanged. The button was taken to act as a lucky charm. This is entirely in keeping with the way in which all manner of items associated with hanged felons were considered to be talismans. One landlord of the inn at this site can be justifiably described as a highway robber. He took to thieving from the travellers who stayed there and on one occasion took on three guests all of whom were sleeping in one great bed. He murdered them, tore the rings from their fingers and threw their bodies down a well. There is still a replica gibbet-post nearby and assorted ghosts associated with these dirty deeds are said to appear in the area from time to time.
In the centre of the town is the handsome coaching inn, The Royal George. This contains a splendid assembly room as well as bars in which one Henry Higgins used to socialise in his role as a leading light of the town’s polite society. However, the debonair and eligible Higgins was not what he appeared to be. When fashionable balls were taking place he often absented himself for a few minutes, entered the ladies’ powder room and rifled through the purses, trinkets and other valuables that had been left there. On clear moonlit nights, he would fit woollen socks to his horse’s feet to deaden the sound and go off on forays to the neighbouring highways or carry out an occasional burglary. The people of the town were quite amazed when he was identified as a highwayman. He was hanged in November 1767. The attractive house in which Higgins lived still overlooks the Heath, the large expanse of open land adjoining Knutsford’s town centre.
A highwayman called Anthony Lingard was hanged at a nearby crossroads in 1812 for the murder of a widow who was a tollgate-keeper. For this dastardly deed he was gibbeted and his pendent corpse attracted such large crowds of unashamed voyeurs that the local clergyman gave up trying to minister to his flock in the church, cut his losses and took services at the gibbet instead.
Lewtrenchard Manor in the west of the county is home to the ghost of a highwayman’s mother. Captain Edward Gould, nicknamed ‘The Scamp’, was the young man of the family but was a wastrel, addicted to gambling and in danger of totally frittering away the family fortune, which was substantial. Smarting with humiliation for having incurred especially large losses on one particular occasion, he decided to disguise himself as a highwayman and ambush the man who had won all his money. He waylaid and shot the man, was caught and brought to trial, being defended by an exceptionally able but very expensive barrister by the name of Dunning. The only prosecution witness to the murder claimed that he had recognised Gould by the light of the moon. In response to this, Dunning produced an almanac in court that proved the impossibility of the witness’s statement because according to the almanac there was no moon on that night. Gould was discharged. The almanac, however, was a forgery and had been specially drawn up and printed for the trial, although this fact only emerged many years later. The cost of the trial reduced the egregious Gould to poverty in 1777 but his mother used every means possible to ensure that the estate remained in the hands of the family. She was successful, although her hard work was at the cost of her own life. She loved Lewtrenchard Manor and her presence in the form of a benevolent ghost remains there to this day.
This area practically groans under the weight of the Turpin legends. However, Turpin and his associate Tom King were not the only robbers who used the forest as a base. In 1698 a dangerous gang of ex-soldiers robbed, assaulted and murdered travellers on the Cambridge and Newmarket roads. Unsuccessful attempts were made to suppress this gang, which mocked these efforts to the extent of sending a letter of defiance to the Government. Eventually, a powerful detachment of dragoons was despatched to Epping Forest and they successfully rooted them out and destroyed them. Close to Theydon Bois on the edge of the Forest is a pub called Sixteen-String Jack, so named in memory of Jack Rann, the dandy of all highwaymen.
In The Rose and Crown, Dick Turpin’s birthplace, a copy of his birth certificate can be seen. Opposite the pub is a group of great oak trees known as ‘Turpin’s Ring’.
In Alma Lane the sound of someone running in heavy boots can be heard. This is reputed to be the ghost of a messenger who was bringing news of the wonderful victory at Waterloo in 1815 but was then rather ungraciously stopped, robbed and murdered by a gang of footpads.
The Royal Anchor Hotel was used as a base for the depredations of highwayman ‘Captain Jacques’, who operated along the Portsmouth Road. This hotel had a maze of secret rooms and Jacques came to a bloody end while desperately trying to open a hidden door in a fireplace. Had he been successful, he would have gone down a secret staircase to the cellar, under the main square of the town and up into the bar of another of the town’s inns. It would only have been a matter of waiting until the bar was quiet and then emerging, getting out of the building and away. On this occasion, his intentions were fatally thwarted.
Close to the road from Berkhamsted to London stands a stone that marks the burial place of Robert Snooks, said to be the last highwayman to be hanged in England, on 11 March 1802.
In 1772 two robbers, described as highwaymen broke into The Sun Inn and robbed the patrons and the landlord at gunpoint. On their way out they scratched their initials in brickwork by the main door and these initials can still be seen today.
This was the base from which the infamous Lady Ferrers used to emerge at night to rob travellers on the local roads. It is said that she sometimes tethered her horse, climbed up into a tree with branches that overhung the highway and dropped on to her victims. This method of attack alone puts her in a class of her own. One night she was shot and mortally wounded by one of her intended victims and she got home only to collapse and die as she reached the door. Her ghost is said to haunt the area around Markyate Cell. Her figure is seen riding hell-for-leather across the countryside, jumping fences, lurking in a number of suitable trees and also passing through the garden of Markyate Cell itself. Lady Ferrers is reputed to have amassed a fortune and local legend has it that this little rhyme gives a clue to where it is to be found:
Near the Cell, there is a well,
Near the well, there is a tree,
And ’neath the tree, the treasure be.
No one has yet found the treasure.
The sinister ghost of a highwayman is seen here, reputedly run through with a sword by his intended victim and impaled to a tree. In this case the ghost seems to have managed to detach himself from both tree and sword because the galloping hoofs of his horse are heard and he is glimpsed riding at full tilt as if his very life depends on it.
Hurst Green is a small settlement in the lovely Ribble Valley not far from Whalley and in about 1800 a highwayman lived there. He used a spyhole in a barn overlooking the yard of The Punchbowl Inn to estimate the wealth of the travellers who stopped there for hospitality. Satisfied that he had a rich one within his sights, he would then ride off and ambush him at a suitably lonely spot not too far away. Unluckily for him, in recognition of his success, the authorities put a price on his head and an informer revealed where he could be found. He was trapped in the barn, seized, carried away in irons and subsequently hanged.
George Davenport was a popular man in this small town south of Leicester and when he turned highwayman, making no secret of the fact, local people regarded his activities as peccadillos rather than the crimes they actually were. The locals particularly admired his trick of making friends with recruiting sergeants, getting them drunk and then stealing their horses. One day, however, he was out on the road and he called on a butcher to stop and render. This man was so incensed by this impudent request that he clubbed Davenport over the head, knocked him out and personally dragged him in front of the magistrate. Davenport was sentenced to death but he went out in style. To applause and huzzas from an appreciative crowd, he borrowed a chaise and pair and insisted on driving himself to the gallows just outside Leicester.
The Spaniards Inn is haunted by the ghost of Dick Turpin and the hoofbeats of ‘Black Bess’ can be heard. The pub contains Turpin memorabilia including the leg-irons in which he was reputedly shackled while awaiting execution. There is a small and apparently unnecessary tiny window on a staircase through which it is said that food was passed to Turpin when he was lying low at the inn. So many pubs claim associations with Turpin that it would appear that most of his life was spent carousing in convivial inns. On hearing the hue-and-cry, he would leap out of an upstairs window to land with consummate skill in the saddle of the faithful ever-patient and fleet-of-foot ‘Black Bess’. As she carried him off into the great blue yonder those who knew Turpin must have wondered how he ever found the time for highway robbery.
Here the road westwards out of London forded the Westbourne stream and travellers had to slow down and indeed often got stuck in the mud churned up at this busy point, which remained largely rural as late as the early nineteenth century. The location attracted highwaymen and it was particularly mortifying for travellers into London if they had crossed Hounslow Heath unscathed only to be robbed so close to the city. Sometimes highwaymen were gibbeted at this point and among those whose gory remains once looked down on travellers was William Hawkes, ‘The Flying Highwayman’.
The actual site of the gallows at Tyburn is now marked with a circular plaque set into the traffic island at the bottom of the Edgware Road, close to Marble Arch. The old ‘Triple Tree’ on which so many highwaymen and other highway robbers came to a wretched end had one leg in each of three adjoining parishes, these being St Georges’s in Hanover Square, St Marylebone and Paddington.
The Bath and Exeter Roads and the way to Windsor, where the King frequently held court, made their way across Hounslow Heath. It was one of the busiest places on Britain’s roads and it attracted large numbers of highway robbers. A line of gibbets was erected on the Heath to act as deterrents to robbers but there is little evidence that such gory sights had the effect for which they were intended. In 1899 when an electric tramway was being built, the stumps of these gibbet posts were unearthed. Close to Hounslow Heath an Irish bishop by the name of Twysden died from gunshot wounds strongly suggesting that he had been acting as a highwayman. However, to smooth possible ruffled feathers, it was said that he had died of an ‘inflammation’.
The pub in this village claims to have been used by Claude Duval. The sign depicts Duval himself along with a gibbet and a noose, while his ghost is said to wander about the place from time to time.
An old oak tree stands near the former inn known as Capp’s Lodge. Just visible on this tree are the carved initials ‘H.D.’ and ‘T.D.’ with the date ‘1784’. These refer to Harry and Tom Dunsdon who were highwaymen. A third brother, Dick, is said to have bled to death when Tom and Harry hacked off one of his arms to free him. It had been grasped by waiting constables when he had reached through a door shutter to slide back the bolt. They were both hanged at Gloucester in 1784.
This inn stands at the intersection of five roads and at one time had a landlord called Cannard. He was not content with the income he received as a publican and enriched himself by organising gangs of highway robbers and also by acting as a receiver. He became too ambitious and started dabbling in forgery and then realised that the authorities were on to him for crimes that carried the death penalty. He was unwilling to give himself up and so he hanged himself and was buried at the crossroads close to where he and his robbers had operated. His grisly death is commemorated in the signboard for the pub and a spectral Cannard has frequently been seen in the area.
The Royal Oak at Winsford has associations with Tom Faggus, a notorious highwayman who was probably a dispossessed Royalist and ex-soldier. His fame was such that the novelist R.D. Blackmore saw fit to make him a character in the most famous of his novels, Lorna Doone, which was published in 1869.
Monuments to highwaymen in burial grounds are few and far between. However, there is one in the churchyard at Nayland, in medieval times a wool town but now scarcely more than a village. The highwayman was called Edward Alston, who actually carried out most of his robberies outside Suffolk. The memorial is a punning one:
My friend, here I am – Death has at last prevailed,
And for once all my projects are baffled.
’Tis a blessing in disguise to know,
though, when once a man’s nailed,
He no longer has fear of the scaffold.
My life was cut short by a shot through the head
On His Majesty’s highway at Dalston;
So now ‘Number One’s’ numbered one of the dead
All’s one if he’s Alston or all-stone.
William Davis, also known as the ‘Golden Farmer’, was particularly associated with Bagshot Heath, which in the days of the highwaymen was a particularly lonely and inhospitable spot. A local pub was called The Golden Farmer but someone with little sense of history changed its name to the more prosaic, even banal, Jolly Farmer. Davis, incidentally, was commemorated in a contemporary ballad called ‘The Golden Farmer’s Last Farewell’ which was adapted as a play and staged as late as 1832.
Claude Duval was a frequent visitor at The Talbot Inn at Ripley. He used to stay overnight and he always booked into the same room from which he could make a quick escape if necessary via a chimney and the back door.
The Gaydon Inn was used by stagecoaches and other travellers in the eighteenth century. It was also the headquarters of the notorious and brutal Culworth Gang who came from the village of Culworth just over the border in Northamptonshire. Among their victims were farming folk, often people they knew personally, returning from market having had a lucrative day. On one occasion they took £450 from just three farmers. They used the inn for planning their robberies and dividing the spoils but were eventually brought to justice in 1787 because the drunken indiscretions of one of the gang were overheard by a public-spirited citizen.
Near this Wiltshire town on the Bath Road a naked footpad was known to operate.
Law enforcers were apparently closing in on ‘Swift Nicks’ Nevison who local legend says evaded capture by letting his horse drink at the nearby ‘Ebbing and Flowing Well’. His horse was so invigorated by the waters that it spirited Nevison away and out of the reach of his pursuers by dramatically leaping over the cliff still known as ‘Nevison’s Leap’.