Through all these years no attempt had been made by those in authority to remedy the dangerous state of the roads. All round the Metropolis, even at noonday, no traveller was safe. Barnet, Hoxton, the Hendon Fields, Finchley Common, Tottenham Court Road, Pancras Meadows, the Half-way House (Mother Red-Cap), Kilburn, and the Highgate Road, were all haunts of footpads and highwaymen, of whom, in 1736, Dick Turpin, especially in Epping Forest, was the most active and successful. Hence the crude co-operation of the inhabitants of Hampstead and other villages to defend themselves. A pamphlet written by Henry Fielding, the novelist, who had been himself a magistrate, lets us into the fact that the sympathies of the working classes were with the law-breakers, who, though publicly known for such, rode impudently through the streets[269] in the very sight of an officer who held in his pocket the warrant for their arrest, but dare not serve it for his life’s sake. It was verging towards the close of the eighteenth century before Sir Richard Ford established his plan of the horse patrol, or blind Sir John Fielding his system of Bow Street runners—his ‘black band,’ as they were called—and it was not till the fifteenth year of George III. (1774) that an Act was obtained for the lighting of the streets, roads, and public passages within the town of Hampstead, and for the establishment of a nightly patrol between the said town and London. With light, and the horse patrol, the vocations of footpad and highwayman very soon showed signs of decline; but intermediately we read such paragraphs as the following: ‘On Saturday night between eight and nine o’clock four men were attacked in a field between Tottenham Court Road and the Half-way House to Hampstead by a single footpad, who came to them with a pistol in each hand, and robbed them of what money they had.’ A Mr. Herman was robbed of eight guineas and some silver on Finchley Common, on his return from Barnet, by two well-mounted highwaymen. A man was stopped close to the barn near the Mother Red-Cap by some villains, who robbed and murdered him, leaving him under the eaves of the barn, and two ladies were robbed on Hampstead Heath by a young man who informed them that he was ‘a baronet’s son, but in great distress.’ Very often we read of persons dying from wounds received in these brutal encounters, the scene of which, as in the instances above quoted, was often very near to Hampstead. ‘Mr. Bocket, an old inhabitant, remembered the mail-coach being robbed opposite Pilgrim Lane in 1800’—a fact for which I am indebted to Martin H. Wilkin, Esq. CHAPTER XVII. _THE MODERN WELL WALK._