"Your stories are but in vain,
For by our laws you are condemn'd,
And must receive your pain.
Repent, repent, young man, he said,
For what is done and past,
You say the hungry you've cloathed and fed,
But you must die at last."
It is of course possible that this ballad was not meant for Dick Turpin at all; for, so widespread in rural districts had his fame early grown, that "Turpin" became almost a generic name for local highwaymen, just as after Julius Cæsar all the Emperors of Rome were Cæsars. It was a name to conjure with: and this no doubt goes some way to explain the infinitely many alleged "Turpin's haunts" in widely separated districts: places Turpin could not have found time to haunt, unless he had been a syndicate.
Away down in Wiltshire, in the neighbourhood of Trowbridge, between Keevil and Bulkington, and in a soggy level plain watered by an affluent of the Wiltshire Avon, there stands in a wayside ditch a hoary object called "Turpin's Stone," inscribed, in letters now almost entirely obliterated,
Dick Turpin's dead and gone,