"Turpin Hero" is an English song about the notorious highwayman Richard Turpin. Richard Turpin (bapt. September 21, 1705 – April 7, 1739) was an English highwayman whose exploits were romanticized following his execution in York for horse theft. Turpin may have followed his father's trade as a butcher early in his life but, by the early 1730s, he had joined a gang of deer thieves and, later, became a poacher, burglar, horse thief and killer. He is also known for a fictional 200-mile (320 km) overnight ride from London to York on his horse Black Bess, a story that was made famous by the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood almost 100 years after Turpin's death. Turpin seems to be regarded as a hero not because he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but simply because he stole from the rich, “robbed that judge as he sat in his coach” and because he was portrayed as the classic dashing highwayman in a popular fiction some forty-odd years after his death. In fact he not only stole from the rich but from the poor too. By all accounts he was violent and inept, on one occasion accidentally shooting dead his partner instead of the officer holding him. He finally gave himself away while in quite profitable hiding in Yorkshire by shooting his landlord's cockerel in the street in a fit of bad temper. It was recorded by Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger's on Chorus from the Gallows and John Roberts & Tony Barrand on Heartoutbursts: English Folksongs collected by Percy Grainger. It is in Roud Folk Song Index as #621. It was printed in Williamson's English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish Fiddle Tunes (1976). I learned the tune from Williamson. The lyrics are from MacColl who sings a slightly different melody. The lyrics fit Williamson's melody if you sing the chorus words twice.