TURPIN AND HIS GANG IN THEIR CAVE IN EPPING FOREST.
But the prices they obtained for these supplies did not, in their opinion, pay them sufficiently for the work they did, or the risks they ran, and they then determined to throw in their lot with a notorious band of housebreakers and miscellaneous evil-doers, dreaded in Essex and in the eastern suburbs of London as "Gregory's Gang." The earliest of their exploits in this new class of venture was the robbing of Mr. Strype, who kept a chandler's shop at Watford, a district hitherto unaffected by them. They cleared the house of everything of any value, without offering Mr. Strype any violence (which was thought to be very good of them) and so disappeared; to reappear always unexpectedly in widely-sundered districts.
Nothing came amiss to them. In one night they robbed both Chingford and Barking churches, but found little worth their while; and then, in a manner most baffling to the authorities of those times, would for a time disband themselves and work separately, or some of them would lie entirely by for a while. An odd one or two would even be taken and hanged, which rendered it more than ever desirable for their surviving brethren to make themselves scarce for a time. But want of money was not long in bringing such generally spendthrift and improvident rogues back again to the calling they had chosen. Several among them were already too well and too unfavourably known as deer-stealers to the verderers of Epping Forest for their reappearance in those glades to be safe, but Turpin, among others, ventured. Mr. Mason, one of the chief of these verderers, rangers, or keepers, was especially active in putting down this poaching, and the gang vowed they would repay him for it. But more immediate schemes claimed their attention. First among these was a plan for robbing a farmhouse at Rippleside, near Barking. There would seem to have been eight or nine of them on this occasion. After their manner, they knocked at the door at night, and when, properly afraid of strangers coming after dark, the people refused to open, they rushed forward in a body and broke the door in. Having bound the farmer, his wife, his son-in-law, and the servant-maid, they ransacked the house, and stole £700.
"This will do!" exclaimed Turpin, captaining the band; adding regretfully, "if it were always so!"
The attack then made by the gang upon the house of Mr. Mason, the vigilant keeper of Epping Forest, was probably determined upon in the first instance from a desire rather to be revenged upon him for interfering with their earlier deer-stealing operations, than from the idea of plunder. Turpin was not present on this occasion, for although he had intended to take part in the act of vengeance, he was at the time in London, squandering his share of the Rippleside robbery, and in too advanced a state of intoxication to meet his accomplices as he had arranged to do.
Rust, Rose, and Fielder were the three concerned in the affair, and it clearly shows the spirit in which they entered upon it, when it is said that, before starting, they bound themselves by oath not to leave anything in the house undamaged. An oath would not necessarily be of any sacred quality of irrevocability with scoundrels of this or any other type, but when the compact fitted in with their own earnest inclinations, there was no difficulty in adhering to it.
Fielder gained admission to the house by scaling the garden wall and breaking in at the back door, then admitting the other two by the front entrance. Mason was upstairs, sitting with his aged father in his bedroom, when the three suddenly burst in upon them, and, seizing them, bound them hand and foot. They asked the old man if he knew them: he said he did not, and they then carried him downstairs and laid him, helplessly tied up, under the kitchen dresser. Mason, the keeper, had a sack forced over his head and tied round his waist; his little daughter, terrified at what she heard, slipping hurriedly out of bed and out of doors, and hiding in a pigstye.
The revengeful three then entered upon the work of wanton destruction upon which they had come. They first demolished a heavy fourpost bedstead, and then, each armed with a post, systematically visited every room in the house and battered everything to pieces. Carpets, curtains, bedclothing, and linen, and everything that could not be broken, were cut to shreds. Money had not been expected, but in smashing a china punch-bowl that stood somewhat out of the way, on a high shelf, down fell a shower of a hundred and twenty-two guineas, with which they went off, doubly satisfied with revenge and this unlooked-for plunder. They hastened up to London and joined Turpin at the Bun-House in the Rope Fields, and shared their booty fairly with him, although he had not been present to earn his portion—an unusual support of that generally misleading proverb, "There is honour among thieves."