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Your Story: The Arms of Dunstable and The Legend of Dunne The Robber |
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Nearly forty years went by before another version appeared. In 1859 a local schoolmaster, Charles Lamborn, wrote a full history of the town, which he called Dunstapelogia. Chapter IV ‘Modern History’ is his version of the robber’s tale. He tells us that the details have been handed down from father to son and strongly warns us not to rely on the etymology. He has taken his version from the national register of crime.
His hero is called Thomas Dun, is of mean extraction and whose life of crime starts while he is still a boy. Although working out of Dunstable most of his crimes take place in and around Bedford. After a while he finds it easier to work as a confidence trickster than as a highway robber and wearing clothes stolen from his victims finds his way into the houses of his potential victims. After twenty years he and his gang of twenty men are getting too well known and are constantly under attack.
This time the story ends with Dunn swimming down the Ouse, sword in his teeth, and eventually being captured on an island. From Bedford gaol he is taken to a scaffold in the market place when his body is chopped into small pieces and ‘fixed up’ in different places around the county.
But even that wasn’t the last version of the story, in 1898 Arthur Mooring, the then editor of the Dunstable Borough Gazette, published the poem of 1600 in full and then, in instalments, followed it with his romantic story ‘The Legend of Dunne The Robber’. In this new version a wealthy Saxon landowner who was forced off his land by an overbearing Norman knight and who then became the leader of about fifty similar men, was living in the woods around Dunstaple crossroads. One day, riding through the woods, they captured a party of knights escorting a lady to St Albans Abbey. The knights were dragged away to their hideaway in the forest but the lady and her maid were taken to comfortable lodgings deep in the chalk caves at nearby Totternhoe. Soon after this Dunne was seriously wounded and the captive lady, Alicia, nursed him back to health and they became friends.
Words: Vivienne Evans
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