The curious "moral reflection" prefaced to Thomas Dun's entirely apocryphal adventures is itself worth reproducing. It says: "A man who is not forced from necessity or a desire of pleasure to become dishonest, but follows his natural dispositions in robbing and maltreating others, will generally be found to be destitute of every humane and generous principle. So will it be found with this character—a person of mean extraction—who was born in Bedfordshire, and who, even in childhood, was noted for his pilfering propensity and the cruelty of his disposition."
He lived, it seems, in the time of Henry the First, "and so many were his atrocities," writes Johnson, "that we can only find limits for the recital of a few." The limits were perhaps more accurately determined by Johnson's own powers of invention.
Johnson did not, of course, invent Thomas Dun. He is the child of the ages. Equally with Robin Hood, every generation, until the decay of folklore, added some new touch to him, and Johnson did but reduce him to print, add a little more, and shape him out of the somewhat formless but threatening figure he presented.
There is this much basis for him: that, on the site of the town of Dunstable, and for some distance along the Holyhead Road in that direction, there extended, from Saxon times until the reign of Henry the First, a dense thicket of scrub woods, overgrowing the ancient ruins of the Roman station of Durocobrivæ. From the time of the Norman conquest the neighbourhood had been infested with robbers, and it was to drive them out and establish some sort of order that the king had clearings made in the woods that afforded such safe harbourage for outlaws. Under Royal encouragement a new town was founded, and in 1131 given, with the rights of market, to a priory that had been founded in the meanwhile. The King himself had a residence at "Dunstaplia," as the town was named, i.e. the "hill-staple" or market, and his successors were often there. The wool market was the most important at Dunstable; the monks long maintaining great flocks of sheep on the adjacent downs.
The robbers became only a memory, but a memory that never faded. It merely took on another form, and in the course of time the name of the town itself was twisted into an allusion to them and to their leader. It needed the collusion of gross ignorance and wild legend to effect so much, but the thing was done; and for centuries Dunstable was, and perhaps even now is, locally said to owe its name to "Dun's Stable," a hollow in the chalk downs, pointed out as having been the place where "Dun," the entirely imaginary leader of the outlaws, stabled his horse. If you doubt this there is the town seal to convince the sceptical, showing as it does what is said to be a horseshoe (a shoe of Dun's horse!), but is really intended for a staple or hasp.
The legendary Dun was a kind of bogey to the children of the neighbourhood, and in Johnson's pages is a most blood-thirsty creature. There we read that his first exploit was on the highway to Bedford, where he met a waggon full of corn, going to market, drawn by a fine team of horses. He accosted the waggoner, and in the midst of conversation stabbed him to the heart with a dagger. He buried the body, and drove the waggon off to the town, where he sold the corn and the waggon as well, and then disappeared!
Dun had a great animosity to lawyers (or, rather, the authors of the legends worked into them their own dislike of the legal profession, and it is curious to note how this runs, like a thread, throughout all the fabric of highwaymen stories), and, hearing that some were to dine at a certain inn at Bedford, went hurriedly into the house about an hour before the appointed time, and desired the landlord to hasten with the dinner, and to provide for ten or twelve. The company soon arrived, and while the lawyers thought Dun a servant of the inn, the innkeeper thought him an attendant of the lawyers. He bustled about, and on the bill being called for, collected the amount, and walked off with it. The company, tired of waiting for him to return with their change, rang the bell for it, and then discovered him to be an impostor. And the hats and cloaks and the silver spoons had gone too.
Dun became such a terror, that the sheriff of Bedford assembled a considerable force to attack him and his band. But Dun, finding his own men to equal, if not actually to outnumber, those sent against him, assumed the offensive, and, furiously attacking the sheriff's expedition, routed it and took eleven prisoners, whom he hanged upon trees in the woods, by way of a hint how rash a thing it was to interfere with him. Removing the prisoners' clothing, they dressed themselves in it, and forming a plan to rob the castle of a neighbouring nobleman, appeared before it in the uniform of the sheriff's men and demanded admission, "to search for Dun." Failing to find him, they requested all the keys of the place, to make a narrower search, and so looted many costly articles. Upon a complaint being lodged with the sheriff, the ruse was belatedly discovered.
It would be wearisome to follow all the fables that tell of Dun's twenty years' bloodstained progress to the scaffold. There is this much to be said in commendation of the popular legends of bandits: that when they are shown to be really bad, without redeeming traits, the legends duly see to it that justice is satisfied. And so with Dun, who is made to end disastrously at Bedford, even without the advantage of a formal trial. "When two executioners approached him he warned them of their danger if they should lay hands on him," and when they insisted upon doing so he struggled with them so successfully that he flung them nine times upon the scaffold, before his strength gave way. The crowds who gloated horribly over executions at Tyburn and elsewhere never had so great a treat as pictured in this fictitious scene: but this was merely the appetiser, the anchovies, so to speak, before the more solid course. Better was to follow.