Turpin
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Turpin. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a French clergyman; Archbishop of Rheims, friend and companion of Charlemagne, the suppositious author of the "History of Charlemagne and Roland." According to Gaston Paris, this falls into two parts: the first (1050) dealing in five chapters with Spain with- Charlemagne's conquest of est of out reference to Roland; the second iving the legend of Roland, the treachery of Ganelon, (early in 12th century) giving Roland's heroic death at Roncevaux, and the king's vengeance on the Saracens. In the "Song of Roland" itself Turpin dies beside its hero, and is buried with him and Oliver at Blaye near Bordeaux. There was actually an Archbishop Tilpinus of Rheims (753-800); but there can be no doubt that the romance in its present form was put together in the first third of the 12th century, most probably with a view to the glory of St. James of Compostella. From internal evidence it has seemed to critics highly probable that Pope Calixtus II. either wrote or at least inspired the work himself while yet Guy de Bourgogne, Archbishop of Vienne. Turpin died Sept. 2, 800.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Dick, a notorious English highwayman. He was bred a butcher's apprentice, but turned cattle thief and highway robber. He and his famous trick mare, Black Bess, were the terror of drovers returning with money and of gentlemen riding across country without a guard. He was a lawless, daring man, guilty of many brutal crimes. He is supposed to have been hanged for murder in 1739. His stirring adventures have been drawn upon by various writers, all of whom depict him as a friend of the common people--the hero of the countryside.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 sketch has Dick Turpin "supposed to have been hanged for murder in 1739" on his "famous trick mare, Black Bess" — and modern research has taken both away. Turpin was hanged at York on 7 April 1739 for horse-stealing, having been arrested under the alias John Palmer and identified when a letter in his hand was recognised; the mare Black Bess and the celebrated overnight gallop to York were invented by Harrison Ainsworth in his 1834 novel Rookwood, the ride itself borrowed from the earlier legend of "Swift Nick" Nevison. Historians now stress the squalid reality Aiton half-glimpsed in "many brutal crimes": Turpin's Essex gang burgled isolated farmhouses and tortured elderly householders, and the "friend of the common people" is a Victorian fiction, dismantled in detail by James Sharpe's Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman (2004). On the other Turpin, Collier's 1921 guess that Pope Calixtus II wrote or inspired the pseudo-Turpin chronicle has been dropped: the work survives as Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus and is treated as anonymous, and Gaston Paris's neat two-stage scheme is no longer standard.
Written for this edition, 2026.