Dick Turpin and ten shillings (to be shared between them). On 7 April 1739, followed by his mourners, Turpin and John Stead (a horse thief) were taken through York by open cart to Knavesmire, which was then the city's equivalent of London's Tyburn gallows. Turpin "behav'd himself with amazing assurance", and "bow'd to the spectators as he passed". He climbed a ladder to the gallows and spoke to his executioner. York had no permanent hangman, and it was the custom to pardon a prisoner on condition that he acted as executioner. On this occasion, the pardoned man was a fellow highwayman, Thomas
Dick Turpin 18th and 19th centuries and in film and television of the 20th century. Richard Turpin was born at the Blue Bell Inn (later the Rose and Crown) in Hempstead, Essex, the fifth of six children to John Turpin and Mary Elizabeth Parmenter. He was baptised on 21 September 1705, in the same parish where his parents had been married more than ten years earlier. Turpin's father was a butcher and innkeeper. Several stories suggest that Dick Turpin may have followed his father into these trades; one hints that, as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a butcher in the village