TURPIN, DICK

byname of Richard Turpin (baptized Sept. 25, 1705, Hempstead, Eng.d. April 7, 1739, Knavesmire, near York), English robber who became celebrated in legend and fiction. Son of an alehouse keeper, Turpin was apprenticed to a butcher, but, having been detected at cattle stealing, he joined a notorious gang of deer stealers and smugglers in Essex. When the gang was broken up, Turpin in 1735 went into partnership with Tom King, a well-known highwayman, whom he accidentally killed while firing at a constable (or, by some accounts, an innkeeper). To avoid arrest he finally left Essex for Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, where he set up under an assumed name (John Palmer) as a horse dealer. He was finally convicted at York assizes of horse stealing and hanged in 1739. Harrison Ainsworth, in his romance Rookwood (1834), gave a spirited account of a ride by Dick Turpin on his mare, Black Bess, from London to York, but the incident is pure fiction.