Highwaymen in the Border by John Lang — Read

It can scarcely be said that the Border, either north or south of Tweed, has ever as a field of operations been favoured by highwaymen. Fat purses were few in those parts, and if he attempted to rob a farmer homeward bound from fair or tryst -- one who, perhaps, like Dandie Dinmont on such an occasion, temporarily carried rather more sail than he had ballast for -- a knight of the road would have been quite as likely to take a broken head as a full purse.

There has occasionally been some disposition to claim as a north country asset, Nevison, the notorious highwayman, who is said to have been the true hero of the celebrated ride to York, which, in his novel, _Rookwood_, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth assigns to Dick Turpin. Nevison, however, was a north countryman only in the sense that he was born in Yorkshire, and he never did frequent any part of the north country, but confined his operations chiefly to districts adjacent to London, where he flew at higher game than in those days was generally to be found travelling Border roads. Nor in reality was it he who took that great ride to York. The feat was accomplished in the year 1676 by a man named Nicks, if Defoe's account is to be relied on. Nicks committed a robbery at Gadshill, near Chatham, at about four o'clock one summer's morning. Knowing that, in spite of his crape mask, his victim had recognised him, Nicks galloped to Gravesend, where, together with his mare, he crossed the Thames by boat, then swung smartly across country to Chelmsford, and thence on, with only necessary halts to bait his horse, by way of Cambridge, through Huntingdon, and so on to the Great North Road. Without ever changing his mount, he reached York early that evening, having taken only fifteen hours for a journey of two hundred miles. If the time is correct, she must have been a great mare, and he a consummate horse-master. At his subsequent trial, as it was proved beyond question that in the evening of the day on which the robbery took place he had played bowls in York with well-known citizens, the jury, holding it to be impossible that any person could have been on the same day in two places so far apart as Gadshill and York, on that ground acquitted the prisoner.