Picture the romantic outlaw in a velvet coat on a black horse, robbing the rich and charming everyone else. Now erase it, and replace it with a pockmarked, insecure thug dragging a 70-year-old man bare-bottomed across a roaring fire.

This episode peels back 300 years of folklore to reveal the gritty reality of Dick Turpin, a man whose greatest heist was stealing his own legacy, and explores why society still prefers the charming myth to the vicious truth.

• How Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth invented the 200-mile ride to York and the horse Black Bess, lifting the legend from a different criminal
• The real Turpin: a butcher who joined the Essex Gang’s deer poaching, then escalated to sadistic home invasions
• His incompetent turn as a highwayman, including accidentally shooting his own partner Matthew King
• The absurd downfall, getting himself jailed over a shot gamecock and exposed by an unstamped letter recognized by his old schoolmaster
• His final showman’s performance on the gallows, hiring mourners, and how pamphlets and penny dreadfuls built his folk-hero legend