Dick Turpin in York in 2009. Turpin is best known for his exploits as a highwayman, but before his execution the only contemporary report of him as such was in June 1737, when a broadsheet entitled "News news: great and wonderful news from London in an uproar or a hue and cry after the Great Turpin, with his escape into Ireland" was published. Although some of his contemporaries became the subject of chapbooks, names such as James Hind, Claude Duval and William Nevison, are not nearly as well-known today as the legend of Dick Turpin, whose fictionalised exploits first began to appear
Dick Turpin plus a pardon for those thieves who gave up their colleagues. Following a series of nasty incidents, including the threatened murder of a keeper and his family, in 1733 the government increased the reward to £50 (about £ as of 2019). The Essex gang (sometimes called the Gregory Gang), which included Samuel Gregory, his brothers Jeremiah and Jasper, Joseph Rose, Mary Brazier (the gang's fence), John Jones, Thomas Rowden and a young John Wheeler, needed contacts to help them to dispose of the deer. Turpin, a young butcher who traded in the area, almost certainly became involved with their activities.