By james art These and many other questions come to mind following our articles on Ravensford, a farm which is in a hidden fold of the countryside south of Hamsterley, just off the A68.
As several readers contacted us to say that in this hidden fold, Dick Turpin would lie low, and one even suggested that the ghost of the infamous outlaw still walks there. Could it be true?
The golden age of outlaws was from the end of the Civil War in the mid-17th century, after which there were many ex-soldiers with horsemanship and weapons, until the late 18th century when traffic increased on the new highways which removed many hiding places.
But there are so many myths about robbers that it is difficult to tell them all. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so it takes a community to support an outlaw—he or sometimes she needed accomplices, needed food for his horse, needed fences for his stolen goods, needed from hiding places where the landlords turned a blind eye. In dandy myths, outlaws are portrayed as working-class heroes, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor – but this is often because they pay hush money to the people who keep them hidden.
This story also says that Turpin, fleeing to Yorkshire and using the alias ‘John Palmer’, stayed at Baydale on the night of 1 October 1738. He rode out at dawn on 2 October and was arrested later that day at Beverley in the East Riding, which led to his hanging at York on 7 April 1739.
For example, he is famous for robbing a man in Rochester in Kent and riding 200 miles to York, where he engaged the Lord Mayor in a bet for a game of bowls. He was arrested the next day, but presented the Lord Mayor as an alibi, as everyone knew it was impossible to be in Rochester and York on the same day.
Yet this feat was probably accomplished by another outlaw, John Nevison, nicknamed “Swift Nick” by Charles II for his ability to run at great speed. Nevison was known as Yorkshire’s Robin Hood, although it is doubtful whether the 15 butchers he and 20 accomplices robbed in 1674 on their way to Northallerton Fair thought so.
He was hanged in York in 1684 after shooting a policeman who tried to arrest him.
Most outlaws worked the rich roads leading to London – the Great North Road south of York provided rich profit for big names like Turpin.
But there were also local robbers.
In the 1660s the Bishop of Durham, John Cosyn, wrote of how one of his men had a clean shave when crossing the Tees south of Darlington.
“He named Barwick, for instance, a notorious thief, with others in his company, besides one Middleton and one Copperthwaite, who lay at Nysham for their spoils, and that he was made to ride at full speed four miles together to escape them their persecution by him,” wrote the bishop.
This self-styled knight of the kingdom was actually, like almost all outlaws, a violent criminal. In 1741 he was convicted by the Durham Assizes of barn-breaking and transported.
However, he quickly returned and on 8 August 1743 was executed at Westgate, Newcastle, for returning. He was sent away very soon after his trial because the authorities feared that members of Catton’s gang would try to break him out of prison.
So if there was an outlaw who used Ravensford as a hideout – and it was conveniently close to what is now the A68 – it was probably one of these local outlaws.
INCORRECT, a respected BBC history podcast says the word “hangover” came about because people saw hanging as a lively public entertainment during which they drank too much, leaving them with the effects of hanging the next morning.
It is true that the execution of the robbers, the most popular criminals, attracted huge crowds. When Jack Shepherd was hanged on 16 November 1724 in London, 200,000 people – a third of the capital’s population – gathered to watch and buy the pamphlets celebrating his four daring escapes from prison in one year.
A carnival atmosphere, with much drinking, saw his death and then the crowd stormed the gallows and ran off with his dead body, so it is likely that many of them were hungover after the hanging.
The Oxford English Dictionary, however, is actually American slang that didn’t come into use until 1894 – long after the end of the golden age of outlaws – and simply means ‘consequences’. So the inference linking him to the outlaws is an urban myth, just like many of the stories of their bravery.
