A rather startling sidelight on these old-time aspects of inns was the discovery, in 1903, of an ancient and long unsuspected staircase at the “Bush,” Farnham. In the course of extensive repairs the builders came upon a staircase that had once led up among the rafters of the oldest part of the house; and it was presumed by those learned in the history of that picturesque Surrey town that, by connivance of the landlord at some distant period, it was used by highwaymen as a hiding-place when hard pressed. Near by the stairway a number of old coins were found, but most of them were so worn and obliterated, that it was an impossibility to read the date or any other part of the inscription.
THE “CROWN” INN, HEMPSTEAD.
The most famous highwayman of all time—famous in a quite arbitrary and irrational way, for he was at the bottom, rather than at the head of his profession—is Dick Turpin, who was born at Hempstead, in Essex, in 1705, at the “Crown” inn, his father being landlord of that hostelry, which still faces the road, and looks on to the lane that winds up to the village church. There is much that is appropriate, if you do but consider it, in one who is to be a highwayman and finally to be hanged, being born in a place called Hempstead; but this by the way. The ring of old trees planted on an ancient circular earthwork beside the lane opposite his birthplace (and seen in the illustration) is known locally as Turpin’s Ring.
The youthful Turpin began his career as apprentice to a Whitechapel butcher, and while still serving his indentures started his course of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow farmer. Fleeing from justice, he joined a band of smugglers and sheep-stealers who had their head-quarters in Epping Forest, and their store-house in a cave in the neighbourhood of Chingford; a spot now occupied by a singularly commonplace modern beer-house, like a brick box, named from this romantic circumstance, “Turpin’s Cave.”
A reward of fifty guineas was offered for the arrest of this precious gang, but it was not until the amount was doubled that things grew dangerous, and the unholy brotherhood was broken up. Turpin then took to scouring the roads singly, until he met with Tom King, with whom he entered into a partnership that lasted until he accidentally shot King dead when aiming at a police-officer who was endeavouring to arrest both, at the “Red Lion,” Whitechapel, in 1737.
“TURPIN’S CAVE,” NEAR CHINGFORD.
His partner dead, Turpin, finding London too hot to hold him, removed quietly to Welton, a Yorkshire village ten miles from Beverley, where he set up as a gentleman horse-dealer, Palmer by name. He had not long been domiciled in those parts before the farmers and others began to lose their horses in a most unaccountable way, and so they might have continued to lose and not discover the hand that spoiled them, but for the coarse and brutal nature that was Turpin’s undoing. Returning from a shooting excursion in which he had apparently not succeeded in shooting anything, the self-styled “Palmer” wantonly shot one of his neighbours’ fowls. The neighbour remonstrated with him and probably suggested that it required a good shot to bring down game but that the domestic rooster was an easy mark for a poor sportsman, whereupon the “gentlemanly horse-dealer” threatened to serve him in the same way.
