Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

- The tales have been told

since man first gathered around the fires of prehistory,

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.

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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 upheavals,

the un-tameable ferocity of the natural world,

and above all, the monsters lurking within ourselves.

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(tense music)

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.

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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.

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The settlements grew.

Towns formed, then cities,

nations, and empires.

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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,

that they coped with change.

- All society is going through periods of rapid change,

desperately needing myths to hang on to.

Sometimes myths seem to exist to question social laws

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 going to do."

- 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.

- So a lot of myths involved 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.

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- 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.

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(pages rustling)

The laws of the kingdom were clear

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and Prince Roswall had broken them.

He'd disobeyed his father, the King.

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The three nobleman 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.

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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.

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.

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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 are 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 Burger,

what we would call bourgeoisie,

that is the qualified citizens of the town.

- [Dr. Wood] 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.

- [Narrator] 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 on 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.

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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?

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- 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, within 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.

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- Some suggest that a disease or famine

must've struck Hamelin.

The Piper was symbolic of the death

which carried the town's children away.

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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.

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- In Eastern Europe, you had these huge empty tracks of land

and landowners would actually hire agents

to go find people to come and farm the land.

So, this may actually be a story of immigration.

- There are some names which contain

the etymology of Hamelin and it is possible

that perhaps a hundred or 150 of the youth of Hamelin

wandered away and that the tale, therefore,

has its origins in that great division of the population.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] 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.

- 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.

The little lame boy or the little blind boy,

depending on the version,

who can't keep up with his fellows and therefore, you know,

the mountain closes before he can get there.

So it's a wonderful example of how myths will change

as society changes.

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- 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 people's 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've been comforting.

Avoid Hamelin's mistake.

Obey the rules of society and catastrophe can be prevented.

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- Prince Roswall did not go into his exile alone.

He was accompanied by a steward

who'd served the family loyally for many years.

After a long ride through punishing terrain,

Roswall suggested they rest awhile at a cooling stream.

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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 a prince's fortune and a prince's name.

Poor Roswall was left for dead.

Not all lawbreakers 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 rebellion against the existing social order,

with all its flaws and inequalities,

the good thief holds out the promise of something better.

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Amid the trees and woodland streams of the English forest,

there once lurked a fugitive from the law.

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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.

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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 has 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,

little more than a peasant.

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- 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.

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- 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.

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- [Narrator] 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.

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.

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His savior was Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday.

He transformed the outlaw from a yeoman

into the Earl of Huntington,

a fallen member of the aristocracy.

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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.

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The next great shift came in the 19th Century.

- [Professor Purkiss] 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 the "Maud Arthur."

And Robin Hood's sort of part of that.

People like Walter Scott rewrote the legend

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

of what the Middle Ages were.

- [Dr. Wood] 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

Yet, Robin Hood stories mingled nostalgia

for a simpler medieval age

with a muscular Victorian nationalism.

The 19th Century saw the popularity of the Robin Hood legend

spread far beyond England.

And in the 20th century, he would reach Hollywood.

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Since his early appearances in silent film,

there've been dozens of screen adventures for Robin Hood.

These depictions varied 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.

It the 1970s, its tired decline.

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

with allies of different races and creeds.

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.

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- 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.

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- 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.

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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 had 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."

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 a little better.

Balancing people's competing demands

is difficult at the best of times.

A sudden shock can make it impossible.

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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.

Wars of religion scarred the continent

and the bloodiest of all was the 30 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.

- [Professor Purkiss] 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.

(bell tolling)

- [Narrator] 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.

- [Professor Purkiss] Bamberg was a Prince-Bishopric,

presided over by successive archbishops

who strongly wanted to oppose the spread of Protestantism.

- [Professor Saul] It defined itself over

against the newly established and threatening

Protestant culture just a few leagues up the road.

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- [Narrator] 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'd 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.

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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.

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- [Professor Purkiss] 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:

thumbscrews, 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.

(dramatic music)

Haan, his wife, his son, and two daughters

were all burned at the stake.

Witches have featured in European mythology and folklore

for thousands of years,

but there were never confined

to the safe world of the story.

Many believed in sorcery

and blamed it for misfortune in their everyday life.

(tense music)

- There's 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.

- [Narrator] 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.

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.

(tense music)

But what could drive whole societies to such inhuman acts?

(dramatic 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.

- [Professor Saul] 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.

(tense music)

- The Bamberg trials finally ended

after the Swedish intervention in the 30 Years' War.

King Gustavus Adolphus invaded Germany

in defense of Protestantism.

In February of 1632, his forces neared Bamberg.

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.

(dramatic 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)

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.

Although creating great wealth

and beginning to improve 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.

- 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 workday, actually.

They're typically were roused by the factory siren.

So, at seven in the morning,

and didn't stagger home again till six 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.

- [Professor Purkiss] Once you've got people living

in new areas,

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.

- [Dr. Wood] 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.

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.

(tense 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'd 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.

- 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 chapbooks,

which are sort of little, almost like little paperbacks,

little sort of paper books,

which were sold by peddlers all over the country.

- It 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 were just about literate, who loved a good story,

who loved to be scared.

- And the idea of something or somebody 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.

(eerie music)

- 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 stories spread so quickly

and were believed by so many

reveals an anxiety at work in Victorian society.

For, 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.

(tense music)

- [Professor Purkiss] It must've 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 gentleman

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.

- [Professor Purkiss] 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)

- [Dr. Wood] He is 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 in a chapbook

or a newspaper or see him on stage,

somehow you are safe.

(tense music)

(page rustles)

- 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 toward 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 nobleman 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.

Instead of the royal bride he'd 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.

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.

(dramatic music)