English robber who became celebrated in legend and fiction.

Son of an alehouse keeper, Turpin was apprenticed to a butcher, but, having been detected at cattle stealing, he joined a notorious gang of deer stealers and smugglers in Essex. When the gang was broken up, Turpin in 1735 went into partnership with Tom King, a well-known highwayman, whom he accidentally killed while firing at a constable (or, by some accounts, an innkeeper). To avoid arrest he finally left Essex for Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, where he set up under an assumed name (John Palmer) as a horse dealer. He was finally convicted at York assizes of horse stealing and hanged in 1739.

Harrison Ainsworth, in his romance Rookwood (1834), gave a spirited account of a ride by Dick Turpin on his mare, Black Bess, from London to York, but the incident is pure fiction.