The unhappy tinker begged he would not rob him. If he did, he said, he must needs be forced to beg his way home, over a hundred miles.
But the "Golden Farmer" had no mercy. "D——n you," said he, "I don't care if you have to beg your way two hundred miles, for, if a tinker escape Tyburn and Banbury, it is his fate to die a beggar."
So saying he made off with the tinker's money and wallet too.
At last the "Golden Farmer" met his long-deferred doom, and in his own district. The Exeter Road, in the neighbourhood of Bagshot, had long been haunted by a highwayman, who robbed impartially the early coaches of that age, or the travelling chariots of the great. This highwayman had his peculiarities. Others might risk stealing notes and jewellery, but he refused all trinkets, and took coin only. The strange thing is that no one in Bagshot or round about seems to have exercised the simple art of putting two and two together and making a total sum of four; or, in other and less metaphorical phrase, of deducing the "Golden Farmer," who paid only in gold from the unnamed, masked highwayman who took only gold. The two were, of course, one, and so much was discovered one night when, the highwayman having as usual stopped and plundered a coach, a traveller who had secreted a pistol shot him in the back as he was making off.
Bound hand and foot, the wounded man was taken to the "King's Arms," where, to the astonishment of all, he was recognised as the "Golden Farmer."
Fact and fiction are so intermingled in these stories of the "Golden Farmer's" exploits, that it would be almost as easy to unravel the real history of Robin Hood himself, as to present a biography of him that should have much pretence to truth in detail. It seems we are not even on sure ground when we set his name down as William Davis, for in a collection of old printed trials at the British Museum we find a William Davis, identified with the "Golden Farmer," executed in September, 1685, for being the principal figure in a burglary and felony committed in company with one John Holland and Agnes Wearing at the house of a minister, one Lionel Gatford, in Lime Street, City of London. Agnes Wearing suffered with him, but Holland was reprieved.
Yet, although this Davis was turned off in 1685, we find, by the London Gazette of September 9th, 1689, that there were then in custody at Newgate two persons suspected of being housebreakers and robbers, several instruments for breaking into houses having been taken with them: "one calling himself William Freeman, whose right name is William Hill, commonly called the 'Golden Farmer,' an indifferent, tall, black Man, well set, with black hair, has a shaking in his Head, and is between 50 and 60 years of age." This advertisement proceeds to notify that "those robbed may have a sight of them at Newgate." [5]
EXECUTION OF THE GOLDEN FARMER.