Dick Turpin (TV series) the son of a farmer, returns to England after three years military service in the Mediterranean, he discovers that he and his parents have been cheated out of their farm and his inheritance by the unscrupulous Sir John Glutton, and that consequently his parents have died of starvation. Turpin, who is now bitter and poor, becomes a Highwayman. Cleverly, Richard Carpenter has the series take place after the real life Dick Turpin has been hanged in 1739; the series is set between 1739 and 1740, leaving his fictional TV incarnation to be an anarchic freedom fighter who has been badly
Dick Turpin trusty colleagues Claude Duval, Tom King, and Jack Rann. These narratives, which transformed Turpin from a pockmarked thug and murderer into "a gentleman of the road [and] a protector of the weak", followed a popular cultural tradition of romanticising English criminals. This practice is reflected in the ballads written about Turpin, the earliest of which, "Dick Turpin", would appear to have been published in 1737. Later ballads presented Turpin as an 18th-century Robin Hood figure: "Turpin was caught and his trial was passed, and for a game cock he died at last. Five hundred pounds he gave so free, all