Cotswold Ways: Fascinating tales of dashing highwaymen

It’s November. The nights have drawn in, and if we venture out on to the roads in the evening, there is a cloak of darkness across them. Today, with our bright headlights and hermetically sealed cars, we have little to fear from transversing the roads of the Cotswolds. Legend has it that it was a different story two or three hundred years ago, because highwaymen were about. I’ve had a soft spot for dandy highwaymen ever since Adam Ant danced across my TV screen in the early 1980s. But his face-painted bravado lip-glosses a dark tale of robbery and violence – and ghosts.

Perhaps the most famous and romantic of all highwaymen was Claude Duval, the gentleman highwayman. He was the courteous scourge of the roads from Oxford to London during the late 17th century. He came to England with a group of Royalists returning from exile after the Civil War, as a footman for Charles Stewart, the Duke of Richmond, and for seven years he did well. But Duval was a ladies’ man, and when his master remarried in 1667 he took a fancy to Frances, Charles’ young third wife, and she to him. He swiftly found himself out of a job, so with just his good looks to support him, he took to a life of crime – but very politely. Duval could charm the jewels off a lady’s neck, and if he took a ring from her finger, he would kiss her hand in thanks.

Claude Duval, by William Powell Frith, 1860 (Image: Supplied) Once, seeing that her carriage was about to be robbed with £400 in it – a fortune then, worth £80,000 today – a brave lady took out her flageolet and began to play. On hearing this, Duval whipped out his own instrument (ooer, missus) and played along. He complimented her furious husband, and then twirled her into a dance! In the end, he only took £100. The rest, he said, was payment for the dance. Despite – or because of – the ladies loving him, male travellers on the road were less than impressed and became Britain’s most wanted villain, but not in a good way! Duval retreated to France. But there were only thin pickings in that country, and in 1669 he returned with empty pockets, and was soon up to his old tricks. The law eventually caught up with him. His sentence – death. The ladies of London queued up to see the prisoner in Newgate Gaol and petitioned the king to pardon him. Charles II, who may well have remembered Duval from when he was a servant to his cousin, nearly agreed – but the judge threatened to resign, and Charles had to let him be sentenced. His tombstone in St Paul’s in Covent Garden allegedly once read: Here lies DuVall: Reader, if male thou art, Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.

Did he rest easy in Convent Garden? Dear reader, I must disappoint, for he was probably never buried there, so the question is moot! However, his ghost is said to be still actively seeking the ladies at the Holt Hotel between the Bartons and the Astons in Oxfordshire – you must particularly beware in Room number three. It seems that Duval has continued to be a ladies’ man after his death, as women often report that they feel like they are being watched…

Sir Francis Page's tomb at Steeple Aston, Oxfordshire. (Image: Kirsty Hartsiotis) In Steeple Aston church you can find the tomb of one of Oxfordshire’s own most notorious judges, Sir Francis Page of Middle Aston, whose house is said to be haunted by the widows of those he hanged in the form of owls, while he himself floats in ghostly form atop a beer barrel! He presided over the trial of poet Richard Savage, who had nothing good to say about him: ‘Of heart impure and impotent of head, In history, rhetoric, ethics, law unread…’ No surprise, because Page condemned Savage to die – but unlike Duval he was lucky. A petition to Queen Caroline saw him released. Did Page hang any highwaymen? Surely there must be one among the 100 men he had killed. It’s said that he refused to even pay Scheemaker, the sculptor of his overblown tomb, as he forgot to sculpt the wedding ring on his wife’s hand.

Not all Cotswolds’ highwaymen were gentlemen. The notorious Tom, Dick and Harry Dunsdon were three brothers from Fulbrook who all went to the bad. They robbed the Oxford to Gloucester coach, gathering £500 in that one night, and then came up with a scheme to rob Tangley Hall while the mistress and children were home alone. But they were indiscreet and bragged about their plan at the Bird in Hand pub. The tale was overheard, and carried back to the servants at the hall. It was the butler who came up with a plan to foil the robbers. The front door was heavy, and had a hole in it through which visitors could be inspected by the servants. Quite a big hole. It was large enough for a man – Dick – to put his arm through to turn the key to open the door. His groping hand never found the key as the butler looped a rope around the hand and tied it to the handle. No matter how hard Dick tried, he could not get it free and his brothers, impatient and afraid, cut his arm right off. Dick was never seen again. Tom and Harry continued in their trade until 1784 when they were captured. They were hanged in Gloucester, and their bodies were gibbeted at Capp’s Lodge on the A361 just north of Fulbrook, where the Bird in Hand pub once stood. The tree is still there, dead but still standing, a mute witness to those long-ago times. Tom and Harry’s ghosts don’t haunt the tree, however, but rather the George in Burford, where the driver of the cart carrying their bodies stopped for a drink – presumably their shades dismounted, too, and remained there sipping their ghostly pints.

Tom Long's Post on Minchinhampton Common. (Image: Kirsty Hartsiotis) Another highwayman, Tom Long, the Crickley Hill Highwayman, is commemorated at the post on Minchinhampton Common that bears his name. It’s said that’s where he was gibbeted, which seems a little strange if he worked on Crickley Hill, but his ghost haunts the Amberley Inn nearby, looking for his lost love, so perhaps he plied his trade at the crossroads there, too, before he would go a-courting. A spectral figure on a black horse has been seen on the Cirencester Road up there, where Tom robbed a clothier of the paltry sum of a guinea and a few bits of silver. Rather different to the 50 guineas Claude Duval took in an earlier age from one Squire Roper in Windsor Forest!

Perhaps though we should be grateful that today we are likely to only meet the ghosts of highwaymen, which while they may be scary, are not likely to leave us short of pocket!

Claude Duval is immortalised on the Holt Hotel's sign - along with the hangman's noose. (Image: Kirsty Hartsiotis) ESSENTIALS

Places to visit: Eat and drink at The Holt Hotel, Oxfordshire for Claude Duval; Fulbrook and Burford, the haunts of Tom, Dick and Harry, where you can shop in The George, now an antique shop; more eating and drinking await at The Amberley Inn, and you can walk it off to Minchinhampton Common for Tom Long’s Post; St. Peter and St. Paul, Steeple Aston for the hanging judge.

Further reading: The Folklore of the Cotswolds by Katharine Briggs (Routledge, 2003), and The Folklore of Oxfordshire by Christine Bloxham (History Press, 2005).