TURPIN'S BAPTISMAL REGISTER OF HEMPSTEAD.
John Turpin at that time kept the inn that even now, somewhat altered perhaps in detail, looks across the road to the circle of pollard trees known as "Turpin's Ring," and thence up to the steep church-path. It was then, it appears, known as the "Bell," but at times is referred to as the "Royal Oak," and is now certainly the "Crown." Such are the difficulties that beset the path of the historian. Nor has this mere nomenclature of the ancestral roof-tree been the only difficulty. Were there not seven cities that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer? In like manner at least one other place, Thaxted, is said to have been Turpin's native home; but with the register as witness we can flatly disprove this, and give the honour of producing the famous person to Hempstead.
The youthful Turpin was apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel, and soon afterwards set up in business for himself at Waltham Abbey, at the same time marrying at East Ham a girl named Hester Palmer, whose father is said to have kept the "Rose and Crown" inn at Bull Beggar's Hole, Clay Hill, Enfield.
As a butcher, he introduced a novel method of business by which, except for the absurd and obstinate old-fashioned prejudices that stood in his way, he might soon have made a handsome competence. This method was simply that of taking your cattle wherever they might best be found, without the tiresome and expensive formality of buying and paying for them. It might conceivably have succeeded, too, except that he worked on too Napoleonic a scale, and stole a herd. It was a herd belonging to one "Farmer Giles," of Plaistow, and unfortunately it was traced to his door, and he had to fly. More restrained accounts, on the other hand, tell us it was only two oxen that were taken.
The Plaistow-Waltham Abbey affair rendered Turpin's situation extremely perilous, and he retired north-east in the Rodings district, generally called in those times "the Hundreds of Essex"—to "Suson," say old accounts, by which Seward-stone is meant.
But although a comparatively safe retreat, it was exceedingly dull, and nothing offered, either in the way of the excitements he now thirsted for, or by way of making a living. He was reduced to the at once mean and dangerous occupation of robbing the smugglers who then infested this, and indeed almost every other, country district. It was mean, because they, very like himself, warred with law and order; and dangerous, because although he might only attack solitary "freetraders," there was that strong fellow-feeling among smugglers that made them most ferociously resent interference with their kind. Turpin probably ran greater risks in meddling with them than he encountered at any other period in his career.
Sometimes he would rob them without any beating about the bush: at others he would make pretence of being a "riding-officer," i.e. a mounted Revenue officer, and would seize their goods "in the King's name."
But that line of business could not last long. Writers on Turpin generally say he wearied of it: but the truth is, he was afraid of the smugglers' vengeance, which, history tells us, could take fearful forms, scarcely credible in a Christian country, did we not know, by the irrefragible evidence of courts of justice, and by the terrible murders by smugglers in Hampshire, duly expiated in 1749, to what lengths those desperate men could go.
He turned again, therefore, to the neighbourhood of Waltham, and, with a few chosen spirits, haunted Epping Forest. There they established themselves chiefly as deer-stealers, and soon formed an excellent illicit connection with unscrupulous dealers in game in London, to whom they consigned many a cartload of venison, which generally travelled up to town covered over with an innocent-looking layer of cabbages, potatoes, or turnips.