Lisa Hendrix

Photo credit: Asterion

Gotham (pronounced GOAT-um — not that I ever hear it that way in my head)  lies about 7 miles south of Nottingham. It became famous when King John came to town.

Some stories say John intended to build a hunting lodge nearby, others that he meant to build a royal highway through the town, some that he merely intended to visit on progress. In any event, the village would be expect to support and maintain the king and his property, a huge burden for such a tiny village. Fortunately, someone had an idea…

Everywhere the king’s advance men went, they saw men playing the fool. Some tried to fence the cuckoo in by holding hands around the bush so that summer would never end (the tale Marian tells Steinarr in IMMORTAL OUTLAW),  others tried to kill an eel in the town pond by drowning it; yet others burned down an entire house to get rid of a wasp’s nest in the thatch. One man, headed home with a sack of meal, threw it over his own shoulder to spare his horse — but didn’t bother to dismount. When twelve men of Gotham went fishing, the man assigned to count them up afterward neglected to count himself, making the number eleven, so that they were all sure one of them had drowned.  (The full stories and more can be found here.)

On hearing these stories, John, fearing the contagion of madness, decided to go elsewhere, leaving the wise men to boast, “we ween there are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.” (A reminder here: they were talking about the king who later lost the crown jewels in The Wash <g>)

The fools of Gotham were first mentioned in writing during the early 1400s, with the full tales compiled about a century later. However,  the King John references indicate they were likely circulating as unrecorded folk tales long before they were written down — much as the Robin Hood stories probably did.  Today, the legend of the Wise Men is kept alive in the name of one of the town’s pubs, The Cuckoo Bush Inn.

Three Wise Men of Gotham became the subject of a short Mother Goose rhyme that first appeared in 1765 (image, R, from the 1901 collection illustrated by W.W. Denslow, famous for his illustrations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). A few years later, Washington Irving gave the name Gotham to New York  City in his Salmagundi Papers because of the city’s foolish ingenuity. Later, the creators of the Batman comic books appropriated it as the name of the fictionalized city where the Dark Knight resides.

While Gotham’s fame and name have spread far and wide, it’s hardly the only home for fools. There’s a long tradition of attributing folly to the residents of certain locales, real or fictional.  The ancient Greeks laughed at the men of Boeotia. The Germans have the “Schildbürger” (from Schilda, between Dresden and Potsdam), who similarly played pranks to convince outsiders they were fools, in order to keep the king from stealing away their sons. The Dutch have Kampen, and the US has hillbillies of Dogpatch and the rednecks, for which Jeff Foxworthy is eternally grateful.

Next up: Tuxford