Editing Dick Turpin (section)

== Early life ==
[[File:Dick turpin parish register.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|right|alt=A monochrome image of a piece of paper with several handwritten entries, with the details organised in columns. |21&nbsp;September 1705 entry of Turpin's name in the parish baptism register for [[Hempstead, Essex]] (fifth line down).]]
Turpin was born at the Blue Bell Inn (later the Rose and Crown) in [[Hempstead, Essex]], the fifth of six children to John Turpin and Mary Elizabeth Parmenter.  He was [[baptised]] on 21&nbsp;September 1705, in the same parish where his parents had been married more than ten years earlier.<ref name="ODNB">{{Cite ODNB | last = Barlow | first = Derek | title = Turpin, Richard (Dick) (bapt. 1705, d. 1739) | url = http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27892 | format = Registration required | year = 2004 | doi = 10.1093/ref:odnb/27892 | access-date = 6 November 2009}}</ref>

Turpin's father was a butcher and innkeeper.  Several stories suggest that Dick Turpin may have followed his father into these trades; one hints that, as a teenager, he was [[apprentice]]d to a butcher in the village of [[Whitechapel]], while another proposes that he ran his own butcher's shop in [[Thaxted]].  Testimony from his trial in 1739 suggests that he had a rudimentary education and, although no records survive of the date of the union,<ref name="Sharpep109">{{Harvnb|Sharpe|2005|p=109}}</ref> that in about 1725 he married Elizabeth Millington.{{refn|Bayes' 1739 account suggests that Turpin married "the daughter of one Palmer" but Barlow (1973) suggests that this is unlikely.<ref name="Barlowpp1819">{{Harvnb|Barlow|1973|pp=18–19}}</ref>|group="nb"}}  Following his apprenticeship they moved north to [[Buckhurst Hill]], Essex, where Turpin opened a butcher's shop.<ref name="ODNB"/>