There was never any lack of evidence as to the complicity of innkeepers in the doings of highwaymen. When John Nevison and his associates were tried at York in 1684, for highway robbery, their headquarters were stated, on oath, to have been at the “Talbot,” Newark, where the landlord was “supposed” to be cognisant of their business, and the ostler was known to have been in their pay. Nevison, it should be said, was the man who really did ride horseback to York in one day. He achieved the feat, and established the celebrated _alibi_ by it, in 1676, before Turpin (who never did anything of the kind) was born. But at last, in 1684, the end came. He was arrested at the still existing “Three Houses” inn, at Sandal, near Wakefield, and being found guilty, was executed on Knavesmire, York, on May 4th, in that year. [Illustration: THE “THREE HOUSES INN,” SANDAL.] A rather startling sidelight on these old-time aspects of inns was the discovery, in 1903, of an ancient and long unsuspected staircase at the “Bush,” Farnham. In the course of extensive repairs the builders came upon a staircase that had once led up among the rafters of the oldest part of the house; and it was presumed by those learned in the history of that picturesque Surrey town that, by connivance of the landlord at some distant period, it was used by highwaymen as a hiding-place when hard pressed. Near by the stairway a number of old coins were found, but most of them were so worn and obliterated, that it was an impossibility to read the date or any other part of the inscription. [Illustration: THE “CROWN” INN, HEMPSTEAD.] The most famous highwayman of all time--famous in a quite arbitrary and irrational way, for he was at the bottom, rather than at the head of his profession--is Dick Turpin, who was born at Hempstead, in Essex, in 1705, at the “Crown” inn, his father being landlord of that hostelry, which still faces the road, and looks on to the lane that winds up to the village church. There is much that is appropriate, if you do but consider it, in one who is to be a highwayman and finally to be hanged, being born in a place called Hempstead; but this by the way. The ring of old trees planted on an ancient circular earthwork beside the lane opposite his birthplace (and seen in the illustration) is known locally as Turpin’s Ring. The youthful Turpin began his career as apprentice to a Whitechapel butcher, and while still serving his indentures started his course of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow farmer. Fleeing from justice, he joined a band of smugglers and sheep-stealers who had their head-quarters in Epping Forest, and their store-house in a cave in the neighbourhood of Chingford; a spot now occupied by a singularly commonplace modern beer-house, like a brick box, named from this romantic circumstance, “Turpin’s Cave.”