Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

(snakes hissing)

The tales have been told

since man first gathered around the fires of pre-history.

Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden

in the vast unknown shadows of the world.

Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic,

of gods and kings, of myths and monsters.

From dark forests to the lands of ice,

from desert wastes to the storm thrashed seas,

every corner of the earth has its legends to tell.

Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter,

of the wilderness and the dangers within.

Stories of battles, of love, of order,

and of chaos.

But what are the roots of these fantastic tales

and why have they endured so long?

In this series,

we'll explore the history behind these legends

and reveal the hidden influences that shaped them.

War and disease,

religious and social upheaval,

the untameable ferocity of the natural world,

(thunder rumbling)

and above all, the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(dramatic music) (fire crackling)

(eerie music)

(insects chirping)

For most of our existence on earth,

humans were hunter gatherers.

We foraged for survival,

living on what we could scavenge,

always on the move.

(dramatic music)

All this changed around 10,000 years ago

when mankind formed its first permanent settlements.

When we started growing crops and domesticating animals,

the agricultural revolution had begun.

(dramatic music)

The settlements grew, towns formed,

then cities, nations, and empires.

(dramatic music)

But it took more than living side by side

to form a community.

Shared traditions and beliefs were needed

and shared stories.

It's through stories that the boundaries

of a community were set,

that their rules were tested,

(crowd cheering)

that they coped with change.

All societies going through periods of rapid change

desperately need myths to hang on to.

Sometimes myths seem to exist to question social norms

and to ask us to question them.

That's a much better way of enforcing social norms

than the kind of story which just says

this is the social norm, this is what you're gonna do.

(dramatic music)

I think if one sees it

as a kind of vehicle in narrative form,

for things which are important in society.

That's probably the best way of thinking of it.

Though a lot of myths involve characters, heroes,

heroines, debating what they should do,

and in that way a norm gets defined.

Myths, of course, can only become myths if we share them.

We're a community of readers of the Bible.

We share faith in those stories.

So myths create community. They bond us together.

(dramatic music)

Societies exist in a state of tension.

The needs and wants of all can never be satisfied

at the same time.

A balance must be found.

It's in the stories we tell each other

that we debate what that balance is.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

"The laws of the kingdom were clear,

(somber music)

"and Prince Roswall had broken them.

"He'd disobeyed his father, the king.

(dramatic music)

"The three noblemen had been in the dungeon for years,

"they were blamed by the king

"for a crime they did not commit.

"Roswall was not his father, however.

"The injustice done to the three men shamed him.

"He had to do something.

"Roswall led the nobles out of the dungeon, past the guards,

"and through the secret silent passages

"of the castle to freedom.

(gentle dramatic music)

"But Roswall's father soon discovered

"who was responsible for the prisoners' escape.

"Roswall would pay a price for his kindness.

"The king banished his son, sending him forever into exile.

"The law, after all, was the law."

(somber music)

It is a comforting thought

that we have control over our destiny.

The random cruelty of the world

can seem at times too much to bear.

Stories offer a haven.

Good is rewarded, evil punished,

and everyone gets their just desserts.

In a story even catastrophe has a reason.

(tense music)

The rivers of central Germany carve through field and hill

on their journey to the distant sea.

For centuries these waterways have borne goods and people

up and down the country.

Riverside towns grew rich on the back of this trade.

One of those settlements was the town of Hamelin.

Hamelin was an important center for the shipping of grain.

It was on the Weser River,

It got lots of grain coming in.

It milled it and it shipped it out.

So it was one of the relatively new towns

which were becoming very, very important.

Much like all German towns of that age,

it would have had a social structure.

It would have had a class of burgher,

what we would call bourgeoisie,

that is to say qualified citizens of the town.

It would have been dominated by guilds

rather than aristocrats,

so one would begin to see the sort of structure

that would eventually evolve into the modern city.

(tense music)

Hamelin is most famous however

for the story of the Pied Piper.

It's one of the best known tales of the Brothers Grimm.

In their telling, Hamelin was wealthy and thriving.

Its citizens lived happily in their fine gray stone houses,

until an infestation of rats inflicted misery upon the town.

This black swarm of vermin attacked barns and storehouses.

They gnawed on wood and chewed through cloth.

Try as they might,

the people could not rid themselves of the plague.

Salvation seemed to come

in the figure of a mysterious piper.

He lured the rats into the river with a magical song,

but when the town refused to pay him what was promised,

the piper swore revenge.

Returning to the town, he played his song once more,

but this time it was the town's children he entranced.

He marched them out of Hamelin

and into a mountain cave.

Neither piper nor children were ever seen again.

(gentle flute music)

(children chatting excitingly)

There's more to it, however, than mere legend.

In 1384, the Hamelin Chronicle recorded

that a century had passed

since the children had left the town.

Something did happen in Hamelin, but what?

(somber music)

Because there's a specific date, there's a suggestion

that well maybe this started as a real story,

and then you get the kind of speculation

of what is going on.

I think we can say deductively,

well in all probability it will have had its origin

in some kind of social and cultural crisis.

That's what the stories are there for.

They're there to resolve that crisis.

What kind of crisis might that have been?

Well we don't know.

We can speculate.

(somber music)

Some suggest that a disease

or famine must have struck Hamelin.

The piper was symbolic of the death,

which carried the town's children away.

(suspenseful music) (people clapping)

Others have linked the story

to the dancing plagues of Medieval Europe.

This bizarre trend saw thousands of people dance together

in a state of frenzy until collapsing from exhaustion.

A more convincing theory is that the legend

of the Pied Piper is a story of migration.

The town's children were in fact citizens,

who left Hamelin en masse in the late 13th century.

This was a time when recruiters traveled

across central Europe seeking settlers

for land further east.

They offered rewards for those willing to move.

Thousands took up the offer.

(dramatic music)

(townspeople chattering)

In eastern Europe you had these huge empty tracts of land,

and land owners would actually hire agents

to go find people to come and farm the land.

So this may actually be a story of emigration.

There are some names

which contain the etymology of Hamelin,

and it is possible that perhaps 100 or 150

of the youth of Hamelin wandered away,

and that the tale therefore has its origins

in that great division of the population.

The Grimms recorded their version

of the story in the 1800s.

But the tale had been told

and retold in Europe since the Middle Ages,

and it evolved along the way.

(gentle music)

Once you get people living in cities and they're crowded,

you begin to see a change in the kind of stories

they tell themselves or they tell each other.

There are no rats in the original story.

The idea of the bargain comes in, even slightly later.

Then by the time the 19th century comes along,

you begin to get a much more sentimental thing,

a little lame boy or the little blind boy,

depending on the version,

who can't keep up with his fellows,

and therefore the mountain closes before he can get there.

So it's a wonderful example

of how myths will change as society changes.

(gentle music)

The story of "The Pied Piper" is one

of social norms broken.

Hamelin loses its children

not to the random cruelty of sickness or war,

but because of its own peoples' actions.

They broke their agreement with the piper.

Their greed and dishonesty are responsible

for the disappearance of the children.

In times scarred by war, starvation, and disease,

the sense of control the story implies

must have been comforting.

Avoid Hamelin's mistake.

Obey the rules of society,

and catastrophe can be prevented.

(dramatic music) (fire crackling)

(gentle music)

"Prince Roswall did not go into his exile alone.

"He was accompanied by a steward

"who had served the family loyally for many years.

"After a long ride through punishing terrain,

"Roswall suggested they rest a while at a cooling stream.

(water trickling)

(ominous music)

"A sharp blow sent Roswall crashing unconscious

"to the ground.

"The steward sneered over him,

"long had this man nursed resentment for his masters,

"long had he cloaked his ambitions.

"Roswall's parents had given him gold enough

"to live in princely fashion.

"The wicked steward took it all.

"Donning Roswall's fine garments,

"the steward rode away with the prince's fortune

"and a prince's name.

"Poor Roswall was left for dead."

Not all law breakers are as unpleasant

as Roswall's treacherous steward.

The good thief is an archetype found

in cultures around the world.

This rogue may break the laws of the land

but only to follow a higher code.

In rebelling against the existing social order

with all its flaws and inequalities,

the good thief holds out the promise of something better.

(dramatic music)

(birds chirping)

(dramatic music)

"Amid the trees and woodland streams of the English forest,

"there once lurked a fugitive from the law.

(dramatic music)

"He was known by kings in their castles.

"He was beloved by peasants in the fields.

"He was a man of many identities.

"He was a trickster, a soldier, a rebel, a lord.

"His name was Robin Hood."

(gentle music) (birds chirping)

Since emerging in the 14th century,

Robin has become one of the world's most famous

and enduring legends.

Today, his story seems familiar to us all.

Robin lives in the woods with his Merry Men.

He challenges the wrongful authority

of the sheriff of Nottingham,

and he robs from the rich to give to the poor.

Yet this familiarity disguises the evolution of this legend.

For as society is changed down the centuries,

so has Robin Hood.

For what defines wrongful authority?

What principles justify rebellion against it?

Our answers are always shifting.

In the earliest ballads and plays about him,

Robin is no knight fallen on hard times

nor a nobleman denied his birthright.

Instead he is a man of the people,

a yeoman, a little more than a peasant.

(dramatic music)

The Robin Hood story is very much a story

of ordinary people against authority,

and Robin Hood is the nexus

that allows authority to be challenged.

He's saying something about the ordinary person,

the ordinary yeoman bowman having capabilities

that aren't well understood by toffs.

Robin Hood is smarter and better at shooting

and better at defending himself than the people

who think they're very smart

because they've got account books

and because they're good with abacuses,

and that in a way is the point of him.

That's what he's for.

(dramatic music) (people chattering)

Stories about Robin were spread

by word of mouth among ordinary people,

and it was a time when they could do with a hero.

The Black Death and other plagues

had ravaged 14th century England.

Civil war followed,

millions were killed or displaced.

The stories of the defiant and clever Robin Hood

offered rare victories for the common man,

but he would not be theirs alone for long.

In 1510, King Henry VIII himself

played the outlaw at a court pageant.

Even the high and mighty could not resist Robin's appeal.

In the 16th century, England became a Protestant nation.

As the country changed, so did the stories of Robin Hood.

Soon it was not only the sheriff of Nottingham he fought

but corrupt Catholic priests as well.

(suspenseful music)

Under Elizabeth I, however, authorities grew concerned.

This legendary man of the people was becoming too popular.

Robin Hood they decided was a threat to their power.

Efforts were made to suppress the stories.

If Robin Hood was to survive,

he would have to change yet again.

His savior was Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday.

He transformed the outlaw from a yeoman

into the Earl of Huntingdon,

a fallen member of the aristocracy.

(dramatic music)

This changed the target of Robin Hood's rebellion.

In Munday's telling the outlaw's conflict

was only with corrupt authority.

Now a member of the aristocracy himself

and a loyal servant of the true king,

Robin became a representative of legitimate authority,

and every time he defied the rulers of his fictional world,

he reinforced the social structures of the Elizabethan.

(dramatic music) (birds chirping)

The next great shift came in the 19th century.

The 19th century gets really keen

on the medieval past.

It's called medievalism,

and this takes lots of different forms.

Like William Morris goes around,

trying to replicate medieval interiors

and the look of medieval books for example.

You've got Tennyson writing poems about King Arthur,

"Idylls of the King" and "Le Morte d'Arthur."

And Robin Hood's sort of part of that.

People like Walter Scott re-write the legend

to bring it into line with the 19th century's idea

of what the Middle Ages were.

Robin becomes a literary figure,

a popular figure, and once that happens

you get this romantic Robin Hood

who is very much loved by all.

He's loved by women.

He's very, very charming.

He's loved by good men.

He's a true monarchist,

which is very important in the expanding English empire.

It was a time of urbanization,

industry, and empire building.

Its Robin Hood stories mingled nostalgia

for a simpler, medieval age

with a muscular, Victorian nationalism.

(people chattering)

The 19th century saw the popularity

of the Robin Hood legend spread far beyond England,

and in the 20th century he would reach Hollywood.

(dramatic music)

Since his early appearances in silent film,

there have been dozens of screen adventures for Robin Hood.

These depictions vary decade by decade,

but they always question pressing issues of the day.

In the 1920s it was American isolationism.

In the '30s the Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal.

In the 1950s Britain's Post-War Reconstruction

was the unspoken backdrop.

In the 1970s, its tired decline.

The '90s saw a new, more international Robin Hood

with allies of different races and creeds.

(dramatic theatrical music)

And we continue year after year to revisit the story

and re-craft it for our own age,

for the appeal of Robin Hood seems undimmed by time.

Are you with me! (townspeople cheering)

There's something immensely attractive

about being an outlaw in connection with trees.

I think it's just the idea of living

in a world where you don't have to work

but where you have all kinds of important skills,

and you're living in this kind of almost Edenic nature.

We like bad boys, and I think this is what

the Robin Hood legend sort of attracts us to,

in that he's a bad boy with a heart of gold.

So there's something very, very attractive about him.

(men grunting) (swords clanking)

(dramatic music)

His identity, his enemies,

and the questions he asks of us

continue to evolve with every new screen adventure.

Robin Hood is both a figure

of comforting permanent tradition

and a relentlessly contemporary rule breaker.

This dual identity is at the heart of his endurance.

It is through constant evolution

that Robin Hood maintains his foothold in our imagination.

(dramatic theatrical music) (fire crackling)

(gentle music)

"After weeks of wandering,

"the exhausted Roswall came to a city.

"Behind walls high and true, stood great houses of stone,

"and beyond them in the heart of the city,

"the towers of a mighty fortress dazzled in the sun.

"Roswall marveled at its wide streets and busy markets,

"but the greatest wonder was still to come.

"It was in the palace yard he saw her.

"He was transfixed.

"She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.

"Roswall summoned up his courage to speak with her,

"but before they'd exchanged more than a few words,

"a harsh cry came from the palace.

"'Princess Lillian come at once,

"'your father wishes to speak with you.'

"Reluctantly the princess obeyed.

"Roswall stared longingly after her.

"'She's not meant for the likes of us lad,'

"a passerby mocked.

"'She's to marry some fine prince, I hear.'

(lively music)

"Sure enough, just days later,

"the prince promised to Lillian arrived at the castle.

"Roswall joined the crowds at the gate,

"but when he saw the prince he was stunned.

"It was none other than the treacherous steward

"who had stolen his fortune and his princely name.

"He was the man dear Lillian was to wed."

Sudden reversals in fortune like those of poor Roswall

are difficult for individuals to bear.

Whole societies can fare little better.

Balancing people's competing demands

is difficult at the best of times,

a sudden shock can make it impossible.

(dramatic music)

One such shock came in the 16th century.

In 1517, German monk Martin Luther defied the teachings

of the Catholic Church.

He ignited a religious revolution.

The Reformation had begun.

(tense music)

Soon Europe was divided as never before.

Families, communities, and nations were split,

Catholic and Protestant.

(people yelling)

Wars of religion scarred the continent,

and the bloodiest of all was The Thirty Years' War.

With almost 8 million casualties,

the conflict was one of the longest

and most destructive in European history.

It began in the Holy Roman Empire,

a fragmented land of tiny kingdoms and principalities.

All of these little kingdoms were caught up

in a stupendous war about whether Catholics or Protestants

should succeed to one of these little kingdoms.

But all of them ended up getting involved,

and it started in 1618 and it just banged on and on and on.

This was the epoch of the war,

which proverbially laid waste to Germany.

Germany was the theater of war for all of Europe.

The pretty normal experience was

for the other side to ride into your village

and just kill everybody, and I really mean everybody.

That kind of nightmare experience became quite commonplace,

and must have altered people's sense of the world.

(bells tolling) (dramatic music)

Caught up in this conflict

was the north Bavarian town of Bamberg.

It was a town built at the meeting of two rivers

40 miles downstream from Nuremberg.

It had grown in the shadow of a mountain fortress,

but at its heart was the church,

a four-towered cathedral loomed over the rooftops,

and Catholicism dominated everyday life.

Bamberg in the early 17th century

was a typically south German, typically Bavarian place.

It would have had

a strongly established Roman Catholic culture.

Bamberg was a Prince Archbishopric,

presided over by successive archbishops,

who strongly wanted to oppose the spread of Protestantism.

It defined itself

over against the newly established

and threatening Protestant culture

just a few leagues up the road.

(dramatic music)

In 1623, Johann Georg von Dornheim

became the city's Prince Bishop.

Von Dornheim was a Jesuit.

He was utterly committed to the Catholic Church

and obsessed with pushing back Protestantism.

The bishop was a rather extreme character,

even by the standards of his day.

He appears to have exploited his office

as Prince Bishop of Bamberg

to apply the most rigoristic form

of witch hunting.

Witch hunts were not new in Bamberg.

They had taken place under several

of von Dornheim's predecessors,

but von Dornheim took the practice to extremes,

not for nothing was he dubbed the Hexenbrenner,

the witch burner.

(tense music) (townspeople shouting)

(fire crackling)

Hundreds were accused, put on trial, and executed.

In 1627, von Dornheim ordered the construction

of the witch house.

This special prison had 28 cells and torture chambers.

It was here he secured his confessions.

(people singing in foreign language)

There was quite lavish torture

used to force a confession from witches,

and we know this because one of the suspects

actually smuggled a letter out to his daughter.

It's incredibly sad, explaining what had been done to him,

explaining why he'd had to name names, and betray people,

even though he knew what he was saying wasn't true,

and it was the standard array of medieval tortures.

Thumb screws, the boots, and the strappado,

which mostly rely not only on pain

but on creating disfigurement and disability.

Neither age nor rank proved a defense against accusation.

Among those executed were the mayor and his wife.

Georg Haan a prominent doctor

in the town opposed the trials,

but that only made him a target for the bishop.

(suspenseful music) (fire crackling)

(woman screaming) (people shouting)

Haan, his wife, his son,

and two daughters were all burned at the stake.

(dramatic music)

Witches have featured in European mythology

and folklore for thousands of years,

but they were never confined to the safe world of the story.

Many believed in sorcery,

and blamed it for misfortune in their everyday life.

(dramatic music)

There has never been a society that didn't have

at least a residual belief in witchcraft.

It's not a recent thing.

It doesn't suddenly bound into existence

in the 17th century.

What happens though, and this is important,

in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries people started trying

to prosecute everyone

who they thought was guilty of witchcraft,

and by the time of the Bamberg trials,

it was a serious matter for the secular courts

with capital punishment to follow.

The theological

and legal foundation for witch trials

was found in a book published in the late 15th century.

"The Malleus Maleficarum" or "Hammer of the Witches"

defined witchcraft as a pact with the devil,

and laid down ways to combat this alleged evil.

(people chattering)

The prosecution of witches

was not restricted to Germany, however.

Similar trials took place throughout Europe.

Both Protestant and Catholic communities took part.

In a tiny village in Sweden

more than 70 people were beheaded in a single day.

Hundreds were killed in Scotland,

and the Spanish Inquisition accused thousands.

A moral panic was gripping Europe.

(dramatic music)

But what could drive whole societies to such inhuman acts?

(mysterious music)

For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages,

Europe benefited from long summers and mild winters.

Crops were plentiful and the seas free of ice.

But this medieval warm period did not last forever.

By the 16th century, Europe had become colder,

rivers froze, snows lingered long into spring,

and crops failed again and again.

(ominous music)

(bird squawking)

There was widespread famine.

Months of rain, ruined crops,

and there were no charitable agencies

of course, to prevent people starving in their villages.

What people thought they knew about the weather

was constantly violated, and that upset them terribly

and made them feel that something was causing all this.

People are very reluctant to believe

that nature is as changeable as it actually is.

If your harvest fails for one year

but then another year, and then another year,

these things appear to be against the course of nature.

Because they appear to be unnatural,

of course it's natural for the collective mind

to seek a supernatural reason for it.

It's that kind of collective thinking

which surely would have played a significant role

in the collective fury of the witch hunts.

(fire crackling) (tense music)

The Bamberg trials finally ended

after the Swedish intervention in The Thirty Years' War.

King Gustavus Adolphus invaded Germany

in defense of Protestantism.

In February of 1632, his forces neared Bamberg.

(horse neighing)

The Bishop von Dornheim fled.

The remaining prisoners in the witch house were released.

They were told never to speak

of the torture inflicted upon them.

(gentle music)

The trials in Bamberg are a frightening example

of what can happen when society turns on itself,

when it seeks out the saboteurs and the enemies within,

when it embarks on a witch hunt.

(dramatic music) (fire crackling)

(dramatic music) (fluid bubbling)

(steam hissing)

(chain rattling)

(gear clicking)

In the 19th century, Britain was transformed.

A steam-powered revolution was underway.

Railways cut through the countryside.

Chimneys pierced the sky.

The roar of metal-toothed machinery filled the air,

and black smoke veiled the heavens.

The Industrial Revolution made Britain a global superpower.

It reshaped the landscape of the country,

and it altered the lives of its people forever.

(dramatic music)

Although creating great wealth

and beginning to improve the living standards

of even the poorest,

this new age of industry

was also disrupting established ways of life.

Old jobs were disappearing,

and towns were swallowing up people in their thousands.

(dramatic music)

The cities were transformed by factories and mills.

They became dark and dirty.

People started doing what we would now think

of as a really long work day actually.

They typically were roused by the factory siren,

sort of 7:00 in the morning,

and didn't stagger home again until 6:00 at night.

When you get new communities,

you really have to create myths and legends

that allow people to deal with that environment

and allow people to identify themself with that environment.

Once you've got people living in the rookeries,

they're going to start trying to make up stories

about where they are,

and they're going to start trying to incorporate

this nightmare landscape of thick smoke

and fog and blackened buildings and hungry children

into their mythology as a way of coping with it.

There aren't the certainties of the old small communities

where everybody knew everybody,

so the Industrial Revolution was a great sort of upset

to old communities, but it also created new communities.

And it's the transition between the old and new communities

where you get a lot of new legends

and myths starting to emerge.

(eerie music)

The first rumors began circulating in the autumn of 1837.

In the villages south of London,

a monstrous fiend was on the loose.

Described as a great white bull or bear,

something had attacked several people

and women were its favorite target.

(dramatic music)

As the rumors spread closer to the heart of the city,

the strange creature's form shifted.

It became more human and all the more frightening.

It was an unearthly visitant,

clad in armor and long clawed gloves,

who struck at night

before escaping with great leaps over the city rooftops.

(mysterious music)

By early 1838,

authorities could no longer ignore the phenomenon.

On the 8th of January, Sir John Cowan,

Lord Mayor of the City of London,

publicized a letter he had received

from a resident of South London.

The letter warned of the strange apparition

and the terror growing among the people.

The Lord Mayor however was dismissive.

These attacks were either made up

or the work of malicious pranksters.

"The Times" printed the mayor's announcement the next day.

The monster made another leap,

this time into the imaginations

of people around the country.

He soon had a name as well, Spring-heeled Jack.

(townspeople shouting) (dramatic music)

This is where you really see the media beginning

to take the legend and feed back into the legend.

"Terrible event in somewhere,"

"Great outrage in," I mean you know the usual things,

but you also had a lot of chat books,

which are sort of little, almost like little paperbacks,

little sort of paper books,

which were sold by peddlers all over the country.

He comes from the kind of literature

that usually gets characterized as the Penny Dreadful,

which is a literature deliberately produced

for and to some extent also by the ordinary kids,

who are just about literature, who love a good story,

who love to be scared.

And the idea of something suddenly jumping at you,

it's like a popcorn moment in a horror film basically,

and this is part of the thing that appealed to people.

They liked to be scared.

(dramatic music)

(fire crackling)

Spring-heeled Jack was a blend of the old and new.

He was a figure reminiscent of ancient superstition

yet was strikingly modern in his appearance.

Whether the attacks were real or fabricated

in many ways doesn't matter.

The fact that the story spread so quickly

and were believed by so many reveals

an anxiety at work in Victorian society.

But with his metal claws and furnace mouth,

Spring-heeled Jack was the dark personification

of this new industrial urban world,

a new demon hidden among the anonymous masses of the city.

(dramatic music)

It must have seemed to people

that they were living in hell.

At night you could see the fires from the potteries

for miles and miles and the smoke belching out.

Why would you not think that this was part

of a kind of modern demonology?

This notion of a character

who can jump quickly looks like the devil.

Sometimes he's skeletal.

Sometimes he's got fiery eyes.

But he also begins to take on characters of a gothic hero.

In that, he can be dressed as a gentlemen

and he has a long cloak.

So you can see this figure being created

about all of the fascinations and anxieties

of the Victorian world.

I suspect Spring-heeled Jack struck people

as a kind of emanation

of the Industrial Revolution itself, the darkness,

the terrible smog and fog that overtook the country.

The fact that even the trees turned black.

(tense music)

He's the perfect urban legend

for the Victorian era.

He's a criminal. He's supernatural.

You never know when he's going to appear.

He attacks the vulnerable,

but of course if you read about him a chat book

or a newspaper or see him on stage, somehow you're safe.

(dramatic music) (fire crackling)

(gentle music)

"Three days of jousting were announced

"to celebrate the nuptials of Princess Lillian.

"The crowd roared as the joust began.

"But sitting in the royal box beside her husband to be,

"Lillian could not muster even a smile.

"Across the tourney field the miserable Roswall

"paid little heed to the spectacle either.

"When the jousting came to an end,

"the victors paraded down the ground.

"The custom was for them to stop

"and bow at the royal box, but not this day.

"Instead the three knights ignored the imposter prince

"and rode on towards the other side of the ground.

"There among the common people they found Roswall.

"It was to him they bowed.

"Roswall was stunned

"until the knights removed their helmets.

"They were the noblemen he had freed

"from his father's dungeon.

"They denounced the imposter in the royal box

"and proclaimed Roswall the true prince.

"'Arrest them,' the steward cried.

"But nobody moved.

"'Arrest them!'

"The more he shouted the less princely he looked.

(tense music)

"Instead of the royal bride he hoped for,

"the steward received a traitor's death.

"His head was left to rot above the city gates.

"Reclaiming his royal title, Roswall married Lillian.

"The happy kingdom they inherited lived in peace and justice

"all the rest of their days."

(gentle music)

With roots in earlier folklore,

the story of Roswall was a popular one

in 16th century England and Scotland.

It was a tale of social order uprooted and then restored.

An attractive proposition for many in what was a time

of religious upheaval and national uncertainty.

For change is often frightening,

too much can tear society apart,

but too little and society withers.

In times of change, stories can be a comfort to cling to,

or a tool to probe with.

They can be a reminder of shared history

or a vision of a possible future.

The best of them have lingered in our memory for centuries.

The tensions in society reflected by those tales

have not disappeared completely, however.

We remain a jumble of contradictions just about muddling by.

But as was ever the case,

it is in the stories we cherish,

in the legends we believe and in the myths we retell,

that those contradictions are debated

and our values are tested.

(gentle music)