Early Life
Richard "Dick" Turpin was born at the Blue Bell Inn (later the Rose and Crown) in Hempstead, Essex, the fifth of six children to John Turpin and Mary Elizabeth Parmenter. He was baptised on 21 September 1705, in the same parish where his parents had been married more than ten years earlier.
Turpin's father was a butcher, and also an inn-keeper. Several stories suggest that Dick Turpin may have followed his father into these trades; one story hints that as a teenager he was apprenticed to a butcher in the village of Whitechapel, and another suggests that he ran his own butcher's shop in Thaxted. Testimony from his trial in 1739 suggested that he had a rudimentary education and, although no records survive of the date of the union, in about 1725 he married Elizabeth Millington. Following his apprenticeship they moved north to Buckhurst Hill, Essex (on the modern boundary of north east London), where Turpin opened a butcher's shop.
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