His myth persisted, particularly with the publication of William Carleton’s novel, The Irish Repparee, in 1862. But there is little of myth in the sordid and thoroughly nasty life of a more earthy and unscrupulous thug, Patrick Flemming, who figures in the celebrated Newgate Calendar and in the Old Bailey records. Flemming was one of Dublin’s worst rogues in the seventeenth century who, after an assortment of crimes in Dublin, began a reign of terror in the Bog of Allen.

Flemming, like O’Hanlon, began his working life in the service of the nobility, being a foot-boy with the household of the Countess of Kildare. The rebellious spirit was in him from early on, and he was reported to grow ‘not only careless but insolent’ and he was discharged. After that he managed to find some work at the home of the Earl of Antrim, and after becoming totally unmanageable, he was told to go, but according to his biography after his execution, Flemming ‘… found means, before he left the neighbourhood, to rob his lordship of money and plate to the value of two hundred pounds, with which he fled to Athenry…’.

After hiding out for a while, he decided to go to Dublin and there he joined a gang on the streets, housebreaking. The Old Bailey record says that in six years in Dublin he was ‘concerned in more robberies than had ever before been committed in that city in the memory of man’. In Dublin, he was very close to being hanged on a few occasions, and it looked as though his destiny would be the gibbet on Stephen’s Green. But he left town and moved to the place that would be forever linked to his name – the Bog of Allen.

There, he became the most feared robber of his age, willing to prey upon anyone, regardless of their status or power. He even robbed people such as the Archbishop of Armagh and the Bishop of Rapho. His biographer was fond of exaggeration, we have to say, because the claim was that Flemming, in just a few days, ‘robbed one hundred and twenty five men and women upon the mountain of Barnsmoor’. That was apparently his den where the gang assembled. After a kidnapping and blackmail campaign, he left the area and did the same reign of terror in Munster.