John Austin (highwayman) John Austin (highwayman) John Austin (died 7 November 1783) was an English footpad who became the last person to be hanged at the Tyburn gallows outside London. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a labourer called John Spicer from Kent. The Recorder of London, James Adair, described it as a "robbery with violence" that involved "cutting and wounding [...] in a cruel manner." This hanging would mark the end of Tyburn, a village then in the county of Middlesex, being a place of executions for almost 600 years. Austin was brought from Newgate prison in the City
Highwayman Falstaff, the most famous highwayman in English drama is Captain Macheath, hero of John Gay's 18th-century ballad opera "The Beggar's Opera". The legend of Dick Turpin owes an enormous amount to "Rookwood" (1834), in which a heavily fictionalised Turpin is one of the main characters. Alfred Noyes's narrative poem "The Highwayman" has been immensely popular ever since its publication in 1906. From the early 18th century, collections of short stories of highwaymen and other notorious criminals became very popular. The earliest of these is Captain Alexander Smith's "Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen" (1714).