The story was that he was captured and put in a country gaol but then smashed his way to freedom. But fate caught up with him and he was taken at a house near Mancoth. There, the landlord turned informer (in true Billy the Kid tradition) and the law arrived.

Flemming was hanged in Dublin on 24 April 1650. His body suffered the indignity of being hanged in chains, as with the English gibbet tradition, for birds to peck at and for other aspiring villains to see and shudder at, on a public road not far from town. Some said that the landlord who informed on him even wet all the firearms of Flemming and his gang.

The course of his career is entirely typical, with all the elements of a good story told around the fire from the oral tradition. One of the distinctive features is the fact that he was betrayed by someone who knew him. That he was the king of his own little patch of ground, making people pay tolls to pass, is entirely in keeping with the Robin Hood and the O’Hanlon tales.

But the Dublin highwaymen do not stop in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the tradition went on in the Australian bushrangers, where one of the most infamous, a Dubliner called Jack Bradshaw, taken from Dublin to Melbourne by a relative; and there, when he grew up, highway robbery became his trade. The title of his autobiography says it all: Highway Robbery Under Arms without Shedding Blood. Of course, as with all these misguided heroes of popular tales, the truth is that they were often locked away, as Bradshaw’s sub-title says: ‘Twenty years of Prison Life in the Gaols of New South Wales.’