[Picture: Turpin’s Oak] Turpin, of course, is the greatest of all the rascals who made the name of the Great North Road a name of dread. Before him, however, the redoubtable Jack Sheppard figured here, but not, it is sad to relate, in an heroic manner. In fact that nimble-fingered youth, after escaping from the Stone Jug (by which piece of classic slang you are to understand Newgate to be meant) had the humiliation to be apprehended on Finchley Common, disguised in drink and a butcher’s blue smock. That was the worst of those roystering blades. The drink was the undoing of them all. If only they had been Good Templars, and had sported the blue ribbon, it is quite certain that they had not been cut off untimely; and might, with reasonable luck, even have retired with a modest competence in early years. It was in 1724 that Jack Sheppard was arrested by Bow Street runners on the Common, and the fact somewhat staggers one’s belief in the wild lawlessness of that place. To capture a highwayman in his own peculiar territory! One might just as soon expect to hear of the Chief Commissioner of Police being kidnapped from Scotland Yard. And yet it is quite certain that Finchley was no safe place for a good young man with five pounds in his pocket and a mere walking-stick in his hand, whether he proposed to cross it by night or day. Even sixty-six years later this evil reputation existed; for, in 1790, the Earl of Minto, travelling to London, wrote to his wife that instead of pushing on to town at night, he would defer his entry until morning, “for I shall not trust my throat on Finchley Common in the dark.” Think of it! And Dick Turpin had been duly executed fifty years before! Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not possible to say much. There was the courageous and resourceful Captain Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks, and Claud Duval. Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.