According to popular legend, he abhorred violence, showing courtesy to his victims and chivalry to their womenfolk, thus spawning the myth of the romantic highwayman, as taken up by many novelists and playwrights.

The legend goes that before long, Duval became a successful highwayman who robbed the passing stagecoaches on the roads to London, especially Holloway between Highgate and Islington and, that unlike most other highwaymen, he distinguished himself with rather gentlemanly behaviour and fashionable clothes.

One of his victims was Squire Roper, Master of the Royal Buckhounds, whom he relieved of 50 guineas and tied to a tree.

A particularly famous one – placed in more than one location and later published by William Pope – claims that he took only a part of his potential loot from a gentleman, when the man's wife agreed to dance the "courante" with him in the wayside, a scene immortalised by William Powell Frith in his 1860 painting Claude Duval.

On 17 January 1670, judge Sir William Morton found him guilty of six robberies (others remained unproven) and sentenced him to death.

[2] A memorial at the church reads: The apparently gallant highwayman inspired a number of biographers and playwrights to add to his legend, including claims of alchemy, gambling, and much womanising.

James Sharpe in Dick Turpin regarded Duval as the most significant figure in the shaping of the highwayman myth.

[citation needed] John and Philip Sugden's The Thief of Hearts reconstructs what is known of the historical Duval, using much fresh evidence, and shows that the traditions about the Frenchman were used by such literary luminaries as Samuel Butler (A Pindarick Ode), John Gay (The Beggar's Opera) and William Harrison Ainsworth (Rookwood and Talbot Harland) to create the iconic image of the gentleman highwayman still beloved today.