Dick Turpin takes secret to the grave... but where exactly did they bury him?
The corner graveyard at St George Street, York is marked out by a headstone that did not appear until two centuries after Turpin was hanged, James Sharpe, emeritus professor of early modern history at the University of York and the author of a book about Turpin, said.
“It may have been put there as a tourist attraction. I am hoping that old council records may shed some light on it,” he added.
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Hide AdTurpin, who was tried in York under the pseudonym John Palmer, was “basically a nasty thug”, said Prof Sharpe, who is working with York Dungeon to establish more of the history.
The figure of legend was the invention of a Victorian novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth, who borrowed Turpin’s name and attached it to a fictitious character who rode to York on a horse named Black Bess, supposedly also buried at St George’s Graveyard.
In fact, Turpin was buried in an unmarked grave and his cadaver exhumed by body snatchers with a ready market among medical researchers.
Locals intervened and reinterred it with quicklime, to inhibit further grave robbery.
“Wherever Dick Turpin is buried is a mystery, but it seems very unlikely that he’s under the current headstone,” Prof Sharpe said.