John Locke (1632–1704) in writings such as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government acts as the ideological and intellectual mouthpiece of the emerging industrial and mercantile classes for whom the acquisition, possession and protection of property was sacrosanct. He equated the preservation of property with the common good and argued, with disarming frankness, that the purpose of political power was to make laws and create a system of legal penalties up to and including death in order to regulate and protect private property. Highway robbers were equally dedicated to the idea of private property but from a very different standpoint.
The golden era of the highwayman coincided with crucial stages in the process that transformed Britain from a pre-industrial, largely rural and agricultural economy into an urban, manufacturing, commercial and trading nation. In this process, known as the Industrial Revolution, there were far-reaching changes in land use and agriculture, the nature and development of industry, the employment, living and cultural patterns of the ordinary people and the political and legal framework in which property and social relations were embedded. It saw the completion of the process whereby capitalist methods came to dominate economic activity in Britain. The triumph of capitalism unleashed processes that created untold wealth but for which a high price had to be paid. The creation of this new society was carried through without the active consent of the bulk of the population and the period 1700 to 1850 is punctuated with examples of individual and collective protest as ordinary people demonstrated their hostility to the changes that were being made to so much of what they were familiar with.
The concept of the modern State evolved, an impartial arbiter between the interests of the various classes in society. To the State was arrogated the monopoly of legitimate internal violence. It was argued that this was available for use against those malevolent elements who sought to undermine the stability and welfare of society but this can be read to mean the rights of property and profits. The ‘Rule of Law’ therefore was used to legitimate established property relations and was portrayed as an impartial agency available to each and every citizen equally. In practice it was concerned first and foremost with the protection of property. Most people had none.
In the course of the Industrial Revolution the poor had their means of production appropriated as they mainly became landless labourers or industrial workers, a wage-earning proletariat. The fact that they resented this process is evident from the songs and ballads prevalent during the early nineteenth century and from the vast amounts of protest activity that took place. A clear articulation of the stresses created by these processes was confined largely to the more literate members of the working classes and some middle-class sympathisers. However, it is not surprising that people who saw their way of life coming under relentless attack made heroes of those who appropriated the property of the rich and did so with the panache so often ascribed to highwayman.
A surprising number of butchers seem to have become highwaymen and this may be explained by the fact that capitalist forms of organisation were brought into the meat industry comparatively early. Butchers found themselves reduced to the status of mere shopkeepers in a trade where supply, distribution and retailing were increasingly in the hands of large national concerns who dominated the industry and were able to dictate the terms under which butchers operated. Butchers can be seen as a microcosm of the kind of changes taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These rained down on ordinary people, on the way they made their living and every other aspect of their lives. Many felt powerless and some, including butchers, cast round for an alternative. In a largely unconscious defiance of the rich and powerful and their market forces and laws, some of them turned to highway robbery. Even among those that did not express the resentment they felt in this way, there was widespread admiration for highwaymen.
To become a highwayman was to make a personal statement about wanting to be a somebody, a freebooter, a person prepared to take control of his life and to use the power that went with a pair of pistols. It was also to defy the law to do its worst. The ballads and broadsides of the period give an insight into what ordinary folk thought about the events happening. It is probably no coincidence that the popularity of ballads about Robin Hood and the various eulogistic portrayals of highwaymen seem to have reached a height at the time when the impact of the Industrial Revolution was being felt with its full force. The carefree lives apparently led by the Robin Hoods and Dick Turpins of the world must have been contrasted with the drab, oppressive existence of the rural and urban labourers and their families. These people would have warmed, for example, to the actions of the Wiltshire highwayman Benjamin Child. In the early 1720s he carried out a series of audacious and profitable robberies and then used the proceeds to buy a number of debtors out of Salisbury Gaol. A few years earlier the self-styled ‘Captain’ Evan Evans and an accomplice were lying in wait for travellers on the Portsmouth Road. Along came a party of woebegone wretches swept up by the hated press-gang. Evans and his partner attacked the escort, tied them to a tree and released all their prisoners. As the liberated men disappeared swiftly and gratefully to all points of the compass, another page was written in the popular annals of the highwaymen heroes.
Social bandits who enjoy widespread support among the populace are products of periods when the equilibrium of society is upset and long-established and reassuring practices and customs are destroyed. The society of the eighteenth century was violent, corrupt and greedy and these traits were personified by the highwayman. He was at least open about it, but by contrast thousands of politicians and placemen used their positions to line their pockets and did so behind a veneer of authority and respectability. Highwaymen and other highway robbers went to their deaths for stealing what were frequently paltry sums while a politician like Sir Robert Walpole peculated to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds during his career. Soon after Jack Sheppard was hanged for his crimes against society, the Earl of Macclesfield, who had been Chancellor at the time, was impeached and subsequently dismissed from office for bribery and embezzlement to the tune of £100,000. He never stood trial for theft. Was there any significant qualitative difference between the violent expropriation of a rich man’s property by a robber on a horse and the legally sanctioned and forcible seizure of commons and wasteland by enclosure that deprived so many people of their living on the land? While the answer to this question may be no, the mystery, glamour and fascination accorded to highwaymen gives them a remarkable place in history.