WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

1
00:00:00.060 --> 00:00:02.679
I’ve got a story for you that stretches
over 700 years,

2
00:00:02.679 --> 00:00:05.960
and the best way to start it
is with a 16th century joke:

3
00:00:05.960 --> 00:00:09.060
"a man did ride to the market
with two bushels of wheat".

4
00:00:09.060 --> 00:00:10.950
But because his horse shouldn’t carry a
heavy load,

5
00:00:10.950 --> 00:00:14.540
he carried the wheat on his own neck, but
still rode the horse.

6
00:00:14.540 --> 00:00:17.150
I’m not saying it’s a great
16th century joke.

7
00:00:17.150 --> 00:00:20.509
But that is one of the
Merry Tales of the Mad-Men of Gotam,

8
00:00:20.509 --> 00:00:22.589
a 16th-century compilation of stories

9
00:00:22.589 --> 00:00:25.420
insulting the intelligence
of the people of this town.

10
00:00:25.420 --> 00:00:27.460
Which is pronounced "goat-um".

11
00:00:27.460 --> 00:00:30.239
The jokes compiled in that book date back
centuries more,

12
00:00:30.239 --> 00:00:33.470
and while the details have changed with retellings
over the years,

13
00:00:33.470 --> 00:00:35.940
the story behind them goes like this:

14
00:00:35.940 --> 00:00:39.010
Back in the early 13th century, King John –

15
00:00:39.010 --> 00:00:41.050
the King John from the tales of Robin Hood –

16
00:00:41.050 --> 00:00:43.370
wanted to travel through this town.

17
00:00:43.370 --> 00:00:45.880
The locals were worried,
because if the King travelled on a road,

18
00:00:45.880 --> 00:00:49.180
it would become a public highway,
and they didn’t want that.

19
00:00:49.180 --> 00:00:53.660
Or in other retellings, the King wanted to
build a hunting lodge somewhere nearby,

20
00:00:53.670 --> 00:00:56.030
and the locals would have to pay for it.

21
00:00:56.030 --> 00:01:01.700
So whenever royal messengers arrived in Gotham,
they found the locals doing something ridiculous.

22
00:01:01.700 --> 00:01:05.300
They tried to capture a cuckoo by building
a circular hedge around it,

23
00:01:05.309 --> 00:01:06.829
and when the bird flew away,

24
00:01:06.829 --> 00:01:09.140
decided they just hadn’t built the hedge
high enough.

25
00:01:09.140 --> 00:01:12.409
They tried to kill an eel by drowning it.

26
00:01:12.409 --> 00:01:15.259
Back then, "madness" was thought to be contagious.

27
00:01:15.259 --> 00:01:17.429
If the King was to visit this town,
then who knows:

28
00:01:17.429 --> 00:01:19.829
he might catch whatever they had.

29
00:01:19.829 --> 00:01:22.960
The king stayed away, and the locals won.

30
00:01:22.960 --> 00:01:28.270
So the full legend tells the tale of a wily
group of people who outwitted the King…

31
00:01:28.270 --> 00:01:31.229
but who also became known as a
village of fools in the process.

32
00:01:31.229 --> 00:01:35.499
They were both the Wise Men of Gotham and
the Mad Men of Gotham.

33
00:01:35.499 --> 00:01:39.960
Centuries later, in the early 1800s, there
was an American writer called Washington Irving.

34
00:01:39.960 --> 00:01:43.290
He’s best known now for writing
the Legend of Sleepy Hollow,

35
00:01:43.290 --> 00:01:45.509
but among many other things, he was a satirist,

36
00:01:45.509 --> 00:01:48.490
and in one of his early works he refers to
New York City as Gotham.

37
00:01:48.490 --> 00:01:52.079
Now, I tracked down that bit of writing, and
I can't understand it.

38
00:01:52.079 --> 00:01:53.619
I don’t know any of the context.

39
00:01:53.619 --> 00:01:58.130
I don't know if he’s calling the citizens
of New York dim, or clever, or both.

40
00:01:58.130 --> 00:02:02.049
But the nickname he gave New York stuck around
in the public consciousness –

41
00:02:02.049 --> 00:02:07.130
and it was written down, so at some point,
"Goat-um" became "Goth-am".

42
00:02:07.130 --> 00:02:10.670
More than a century after that, when
comic book writer Bill Finger

43
00:02:10.670 --> 00:02:13.189
was looking for a name for
Batman’s fictional town,

44
00:02:13.189 --> 00:02:15.230
he flipped through the
New York City phone book,

45
00:02:15.230 --> 00:02:18.840
spotted “Gotham Jewellers”, and thought:
that’s perfect.

46
00:02:18.840 --> 00:02:21.590
So now we have Gotham City.

47
00:02:21.590 --> 00:02:23.849
If one link in that chain had broken,

48
00:02:23.849 --> 00:02:27.650
through 13th-century legend,
to 16th-century insult book,

49
00:02:27.650 --> 00:02:31.629
to 19th-century writer,
to 20th-century phone book flip,

50
00:02:31.629 --> 00:02:34.739
if one of those small events hadn’t happened,

51
00:02:34.739 --> 00:02:36.590
Batman would live somewhere else.