There stands on the summit of the steep hill as you go westward out of Bagshot, along the Exeter Road, a commonplace inn at the fork of the roads leading respectively to Camberley and to Frimley. The "Jolly Farmer"—for that is the name of the inn—looks squarely eastward, down the hill, and seems no doubt, to most who pass this way, not worth even a glance. Nor, indeed, is it beautiful or interesting. Its former sign, however,—the sign of the "Golden Farmer"—enshrined an interesting story of the road. The forerunner of the present house stood on the right-hand side of the way, and was named the "Golden Farmer," in allusion to a highwayman, once only too well known in the neighbourhood.

William Davis flourished in the seventeenth century. Born at Wrexham, he was early taken to Sudbury, in Gloucestershire, where he eventually married the daughter of a wealthy innkeeper. He had eighteen children, and it would almost seem, by the tone of his early biographers, that this unfortunate fact went some way towards excusing his career. He was, to the day of his death, a farmer, and for a good many years cultivated land in the neighbourhood of Bagshot; a district remarkable in those times rather for wild heaths than for agricultural value. And long it remained of this character, and infested with highwaymen, for we find the poet Gay in 1715, in his fine narrative poem, A Journey to Exeter, writing:

Mr. William Davis was a man very greatly respected for his singular habit of always paying his debts in gold. Paper money—whether notes, bills, or cheques—never passed from him to his creditors. Good, honest guineas, of red, minted gold—tender no man refused—were his only medium. Those who did business with him thought this an eccentricity, but an amiable one; and as the years went on, he accumulated more and more respect.

But in all those years he was in reality a busy highwayman. Many stories are told of him, and by them it appears that he did by no means confine his activities to the neighbourhood of Bagshot. Prudence now and again sent him further afield, to till—to adopt a formula that would have appealed to him as a farmer—comparatively uncropped ground. Thus we find him once ranging so far as Salisbury Plain, and there bidding the coachman, who was driving the Duchess of Albemarle, to rein in his horses, or—presenting a pistol—take the consequences. He had "a long engagement" with postilion, coachman, and two footmen, and wounded them all. He does not appear to have suffered; which does not say much for the marksmanship, the courage, or the resource of the Duchess's guard, whose guardianship was thus proved so ineffectual. But it is a hero-worshipping biographer of highwaymen, who tells the story. The "Golden Farmer" seems on this occasion to have departed from his almost invariable custom, and to have torn the Duchess's diamond rings from her fingers. Probably he would have had her watch also, only the appearance of some other travellers made him prudently fly: followed by a torrent of bad language from Her Grace, who could hold her own with the best, or worst, in that line, having been, before she married General Monk, none other than Nan Clarges, washerwoman, and the daughter of a blacksmith, and well versed in abuse.

Anon, we have the "Golden Farmer" on Finchley Common. He had waited there one day, riding back and forth between four and five hours, hoping for some likely traveller, and none had come. Imagine him, shivering in the bitter blast, and angrily wondering what had become of every one. At last a young gentleman came riding along, unconscious of danger. Up rode the highwayman to him, and gave him a flap across his shoulders with the flat of his hanger.

"How slow you are!" he exclaimed. "A plague on you, to make a man wait on you all the morning! Come, deliver what you have, and be curst, and then go to Hell for orders."

The traveller declared he had nothing about him, but that, the highwayman remarked, was nonsense.

Then, searching the unresisting young gentleman's pockets and taking a gold watch and about one hundred guineas, he gave him three parting strokes on the back, and, telling him in future "not to give his mind to telling lies when an honest gentleman required a small boon of him," cantered away.

One day, having paid his landlord £80, he carefully disguised himself, and in a solitary situation met him with the command to "stand and deliver!"

"Come, Mr. Gravity from Head to Foot, but from neither Head nor Foot to the Heart," said he, "deliver what you have, in a trice."

The "old, grave gentleman" heaved a deep sigh, to the hazard of losing several buttons off his waistcoat. "All I have is two shillings. You would not take that from a poor man."

"Pooh!" rejoined the "Golden Farmer," "I have not the faith to believe you, for you seem by your manner and habit to be a man of better circumstances than you pretend; therefore, open your budget, or else I shall fall foul about your house."

"Dear sir," wailed the old gentleman, "you can't be so barbarous as to rob an old man. What! have you no pity, religion, or compassion in you? Have you no conscience? You can have no respect for your own body and soul, which must certainly be in a miserable case, if you follow these unlawful courses."

"D——n you," rejoined Davis, "don't talk of age or barbarity to me, for I show neither pity nor compassion to any. What! talk of conscience to me! I have no more of that dull commodity than you have; nor do I allow my soul and body to be governed by religion, but by interest; therefore, deliver what you have, before this pistol makes you repent your obstinacy."

There was no help for it, and the rent found its way back from landlord to tenant.

Again the "Golden Farmer" is found in a new setting; this time upon the Oxford Road. The particularly evil character of this road was enlarged upon in 1671 by Richard Brockenden, writing to Sir Richard Paston, and describing what he called "a new set of highwaymen," who robbed every night, unlike the old hands, who evidently rested frequently from their labours to enjoy the fruits of their shy industry, and must have resembled Sir W. S. Gilbert's lawless but light-hearted gang, who sang:

The infamous "new set," who robbed every night, cannot command our sympathy; they were too pushful. William Davis, however, belonged to no set. He was complete in himself; and if he too robbed without ceasing, he had those eighteen children of his to support. It was near the London end of the Oxford Road that the following adventure took place: at none other than the village of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge.

It seems, then, that the "Golden Farmer," dressed in appropriately rustic style, overtook near Gerrard's Cross a certain Squire Broughton, a barrister of the Middle Temple, and entered into conversation with him. When he learned the profession of this chance acquaintance, he pretended to be on his way to London to advise with a solicitor, and, expressing himself as fortunate in meeting one learned in the law, asked him if he could recommend counsel. Broughton, scenting business, bespoke for himself, and the "Golden Farmer," spinning a cock-and-a-bull story of some neighbour's cattle breaking into his fields and doing a vast amount of mischief, sought his opinion.

"It is very actionable," said the lawyer, "being Damage Fesant."

"Damage Fesant?" asked the highwayman. "What's that, pray, sir?"

The lawyer, with much show of learning, duly expounded the matter; and so, as evening drew in, they came to the "Red Lion," Hillingdon, discussing the Law of Trespass, the extent to which the farmer was probably damnified, and the pros and cons of the whole bogus affair.

Passing a very pleasant night at the "Red Lion," they set out together the next morning, still talking law.

"If I may be so bold as to ask you, sir," said the Golden Farmer, "what is that you call Trover and Conversion?"

"Why," said the lawyer, "that is easily explained. It is an action against one who has found any property, and, refusing to deliver on demand, converts it to his own use."

They were now on Hillingdon Heath, a lonely place, not yet lined with mean houses and paltry shops, and still to wait a matter of two hundred years before Mr. Whiteley's factory and stable-yards were built beside the road.

"Very well," said the Golden Farmer, "and if I should find any money about you, and converted it to my own use, that would be merely actionable?"

"That would be highway robbery," rejoined the man of law, "and would require no less satisfaction than a man's life."

"A robbery!" exclaimed the highwayman. "Why, then, I must e'en commit one for once; therefore deliver your money, or this pistol shall prevent you reading Coke upon Littleton any more!"

"You must be joking!" exclaimed the lawyer, edging away.

But the Golden Farmer, presenting the pistol to his breast, advised him to "down with the rhino, or he would get his mittimus by summary process." The man of law still hesitated.

"Do you think," said he, "there is neither heaven nor hell?"

"Why," rejoined the highwayman, "thy impudence is surely very great to talk of heaven or hell to me! D'ye think there's no other way to heaven but through Westminster Hall? Come, come, down with your rhino this minute, for I have other customers to mind than to wait on you all day!"

Thus adjured, the lawyer reluctantly handed over "thirty guineas and eleven broad pieces of gold," besides some silver and a gold watch.

The "Red Lion," Hillingdon, is standing to this day, and the crowds who frequent it in these times when the electric trams pass its door, may feel a romantic thrill as they connect the house with this story.

Hillingdon Heath figures also in the next adventure.

"Well overtaken, brother tinker!" exclaimed the "Golden Farmer," as one day he came up with an itinerant mender of pots and kettles; "methinks you seem very devout, for your life is a continual pilgrimage, and in humility you go about barefoot, thereby making necessity a virtue."

"Ay, master," replied the tinker, "needs must when the Devil drives, and had you no more than I, you, too, might go without boots and shoes."

"That might be," quoth the "Golden Farmer"; "but as for yourself; you, I suppose, march all over England with your bag and baggage?"

"Yes," said the tinker, "I go a great deal of ground, but not so much as you horsemen, and I take a great deal of pains for a livelihood."

"Yes," rejoined the highwayman, "I know thou art such a strong enemy to idleness that, mending one hole, you make three."

"That's as you say," retorted the tinker; "however, sir, I wish you and I were farther asunder, for i'faith I don't like your company, and have a great suspicion of you."

"Have you so?" said the highwayman; "then it shall not be without a cause: come, open your wallet forthwith, and deliver that parcel of money that's in it."

The unhappy tinker begged he would not rob him. If he did, he said, he must needs be forced to beg his way home, over a hundred miles.

But the "Golden Farmer" had no mercy. "D——n you," said he, "I don't care if you have to beg your way two hundred miles, for, if a tinker escape Tyburn and Banbury, it is his fate to die a beggar."

So saying he made off with the tinker's money and wallet too.

At last the "Golden Farmer" met his long-deferred doom, and in his own district. The Exeter Road, in the neighbourhood of Bagshot, had long been haunted by a highwayman, who robbed impartially the early coaches of that age, or the travelling chariots of the great. This highwayman had his peculiarities. Others might risk stealing notes and jewellery, but he refused all trinkets, and took coin only. The strange thing is that no one in Bagshot or round about seems to have exercised the simple art of putting two and two together and making a total sum of four; or, in other and less metaphorical phrase, of deducing the "Golden Farmer," who paid only in gold from the unnamed, masked highwayman who took only gold. The two were, of course, one, and so much was discovered one night when, the highwayman having as usual stopped and plundered a coach, a traveller who had secreted a pistol shot him in the back as he was making off.

Bound hand and foot, the wounded man was taken to the "King's Arms," where, to the astonishment of all, he was recognised as the "Golden Farmer."

Fact and fiction are so intermingled in these stories of the "Golden Farmer's" exploits, that it would be almost as easy to unravel the real history of Robin Hood himself, as to present a biography of him that should have much pretence to truth in detail. It seems we are not even on sure ground when we set his name down as William Davis, for in a collection of old printed trials at the British Museum we find a William Davis, identified with the "Golden Farmer," executed in September, 1685, for being the principal figure in a burglary and felony committed in company with one John Holland and Agnes Wearing at the house of a minister, one Lionel Gatford, in Lime Street, City of London. Agnes Wearing suffered with him, but Holland was reprieved.

Yet, although this Davis was turned off in 1685, we find, by the London Gazette of September 9th, 1689, that there were then in custody at Newgate two persons suspected of being housebreakers and robbers, several instruments for breaking into houses having been taken with them: "one calling himself William Freeman, whose right name is William Hill, commonly called the 'Golden Farmer,' an indifferent, tall, black Man, well set, with black hair, has a shaking in his Head, and is between 50 and 60 years of age." This advertisement proceeds to notify that "those robbed may have a sight of them at Newgate." [5]

Another story tells how he was pursued in Whitefriars, London, the old-time Alsatia of rogues and vagabonds behind Fleet Street. He shot dead a butcher who tried to stop him, but was tripped up and secured, at the corner of Salisbury Court and Fleet Street, where he was afterwards hanged, December 20th, 1689, in his sixty-fourth year: or, by another account, December 20th, 1690. His body was afterwards hanged in chains on the threshold of his own house at Bagshot.

On a broadsheet ballad, published on the occasion of his execution, entitled The Golden Farmer's Last Farewell, a rude woodcut appears at the head of the verses, in which you see a very small figure hanging most comfortably from a gallows-tree, with a thoroughly happy expression upon his face, while a small crowd (assorted sizes) contemplates his sad end with a variety of emotions, ranging from amusement to contempt. The verses are typical of the penny literature of the age, and do not necessarily follow his career with any slavish regard to truth: