Gad's Hill, on the Dover Road, had from the earliest times a peculiar prominence in these matters, and even obtained its name from the rogues who lurked there. But, indeed, it is not going beyond the strictest bounds of truth to say that all the hills on the Dover Road were of evil repute. There were the cut-throats and footpads who lurked in the wayside trees and rushed out from the leafy coverts of Shooter's Hill, with terrifying cries. They were not politeful, those footpads, and the title of "gentlemen of the road," which was accorded those exquisite thieves, Claude Du Vall and Captain Hind, must needs be withheld from them. We read in the entertaining and instructive diary of Samuel Pepys how on April 11th, 1661, with a lady, he rode along the Dover Road, "under the man that hangs upon Shooter's Hill, and a filthy sight it is to see how his flesh is shrunk to his bones."
Six men were hanged here, and their bodies exposed on gibbets, in times not so very remote, for robbery with murder upon the highway. The remains of four of them decorated the summit of the hill, while the other two swung gracefully from tall posts beside the Eltham Road. The Bull Inn, which stands on the crest of Shooter's Hill, was in coaching times the first post-house at which travellers stopped and changed horses on their way from London to Dover. The Bull has been rebuilt of recent years, but tradition says (and tradition is not always such a liar as some folk would have us believe) that Dick Turpin frequented the road, and that it was at the old Bull he held the landlady over the fire, in order to make her confess where she had hoarded her money. The incident borrows a certain picturesqueness from lapse of time, but, on the whole, it is not to be regretted that the days of barbecued landladies are past.
The usual stories of highway encounters give the courage to the highwaymen and abject cowardice to their victims, but the positions were reversed in an affray that took place on this particularly bad eminence in 1773. A Colonel Craige and his servant were attacked about ten o'clock one Sunday night by two well-mounted highwaymen, who, on the Colonel declaring he would not be robbed, immediately fired and shot the servant's horse in the shoulder. On this the servant discharged a pistol, and, as a contemporary account has it, "The assailants rode off with great precipitation." That they rode off with nothing else shows how effectually the Colonel and his man, by firmly grasping the nettle, danger, plucked the flower, safety.
Don Juan was equally bold and successful. He was stopped with "Damn your eyes! Your money or your life!" by a party of footpads. He did not comprehend the language: but the meaning of their actions was plain enough:
Juan yet quickly understood their gesture;
And, being somewhat choleric and sudden,
Drew forth a pocket pistol from his vesture,
And fired it into one assailant's pudding—
Who fell, as rolls an ox o'er in his pasture,
And roar'd out, as he writhed his native mud in,