Speaker 1: Bushkin. Over the next stretch of revisionist history, we have
Speaker 1: a special treat for you, six episodes, all devoted to
Speaker 1: one theme, an examination of the many, weird and strange
Speaker 1: corners of the American obsession with guns. It's about what
Speaker 1: we don't know, what we get wrong, how we screwed up,
Speaker 1: and how utterly bizarre things get in a country where
Speaker 1: guns stand at the center of our culture. Our journey
Speaker 1: begins in seventeenth century England with a mysterious merchant named
Speaker 1: John Knight, who inexplicably has become a twenty first century
Speaker 1: legal celebrity. Then on to the New York City subways,
Speaker 1: the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, a little town
Speaker 1: in rural Alabama, the south side of Chicago, and the
Speaker 1: wild wob West Dodge City. To be exact, I'll show
Speaker 1: you what it means to get out of Dodge. We'll
Speaker 1: consider a what if involving the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 1: I'll shoot assault rifles in a range in the woods
Speaker 1: of North Carolina and sit in the basement of the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago Hospital as an er doc pours out
Speaker 1: his heart to me. Now, as you may already know
Speaker 1: you can hear this entire series starting right now by
Speaker 1: becoming a pushkin Plus subscriber. You can subscribe on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or on our website Pushkin fm, slash Plus, or
Speaker 1: hear the episodes weekly right here in the Revisionist History Feed.
Speaker 1: We'd also love to hear from you as you listen.
Speaker 1: You can write into our contact form at revisionististory dot com.
Speaker 1: All right, here we go. It's sixteen eighty six in Bristol,
Speaker 1: a major port and manufacturing center on the southwest coast
Speaker 1: of England. A local merchant named John Knight, Sir John
Speaker 1: Knight is riding up a steep road outside the city
Speaker 1: to an Anglican church, Saint Michael's on the hill greystone
Speaker 1: slate roof sturdy walls built during medieval times to withstand
Speaker 1: the full brunt of hostile force. The city of Bristol
Speaker 1: spread out below. Sir John Knight bursts in and then,
Speaker 1: oh my god, John Lone. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. In this episode, I invite you to descend
Speaker 1: with me into the deep and bottomless historical pit. That
Speaker 1: is Sir John Knight, the irrepressible Englishman who has achieved
Speaker 1: more than three centuries after his death, a sudden and
Speaker 1: extraordinary celebrity. How was it that the John Knight case
Speaker 1: came to such a promise? Who uncovered it? It doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like this wasn't a case that was in There
Speaker 1: wasn't a famous case name at the time.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 3: I hate to say.
Speaker 4: It's like, you know, if you talk about history, like
Speaker 4: you know, you can go to Africa and find a
Speaker 4: rock with somebody's name on it. This is, you know,
Speaker 4: founded by white guy in nineteen eighteen. No, it was existent, right,
Speaker 4: it was there, It's always been there.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to explain how that happened and why
Speaker 1: he matters. And I know that this is something you've
Speaker 1: thought about, so I naturally wanted to call you. First
Speaker 1: question sulled for me. Who is the first modern legal
Speaker 1: scholar to reference Sir John Knight?
Speaker 5: Depends on what you mean by William Hawkins into seventy
Speaker 5: six in his seventeen sixteen treatise.
Speaker 1: I mean last fifty years his most recent celebrity.
Speaker 5: Who well, I mean he was around in case law,
Speaker 5: you know, not as common as he's been in the
Speaker 5: twenty first century. But he was. He was always around
Speaker 5: in case law to some degree. You know, shows up
Speaker 5: in a major eighteen forty three case in North Carolina
Speaker 5: and then another nineteen sixty eight North Carolina case, among others.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think, I you know, I was. I
Speaker 1: got really interested in the way the Second Amendment debate
Speaker 1: has been transformed, and instead of focus on history and
Speaker 1: got the reason I got into is that I got
Speaker 1: really fascinated by the Sir John Knight case.
Speaker 6: Now oh, yes, right.
Speaker 1: And everyone says, oh, the person you have to talk
Speaker 1: to is Joyce Malcolm. So here I am, and here
Speaker 1: you are.
Speaker 5: Here I am.
Speaker 1: When you were doing your book, your original work on this,
Speaker 1: how did you come across the Sir John Knight case.
Speaker 7: Ah, well, it's a long time gone out.
Speaker 1: John Knight's name is spoken first only in the smallest
Speaker 1: of historical circles. Then it gets repeated again and again
Speaker 1: with increasing frequency in bigger and bigger rooms.
Speaker 8: I was at a conference in d C where they
Speaker 8: were discussing Second Amendment issues, and they had people giving
Speaker 8: papers from all perspectives, and I was just there to
Speaker 8: offer some historical input and I found myself having to
Speaker 8: clarify some of the basic details and mis assertions have
Speaker 8: been made about what had actually happened. So I said,
Speaker 8: I happened to know about this because I've read a
Speaker 8: lot of the sources.
Speaker 1: Do we know what Sir John looked like, his family life,
Speaker 1: his personal circumstances, Not really, but we do know something
Speaker 1: of his character, principled to a fault, contentious, possess of
Speaker 1: a steadfastness of mind.
Speaker 6: Indeed, so he was a Bristol merchant, he was from
Speaker 6: quite an important Bristol mercantile family, and perhaps because his
Speaker 6: father had been a sugar maker, Sir John Knight appears
Speaker 6: to have gone out to the West Indies and spent
Speaker 6: a period of time there, apparently rather controversially, because when
Speaker 6: he then applied a couple of years before we're deinning
Speaker 6: with to be the governor of the Leeward Islands, he
Speaker 6: appears to have been vetoed by the people there saying
Speaker 6: that from their experience of him, he was the last
Speaker 6: person that they wanted to come out as the governor,
Speaker 6: and it may have been partly his resentment at that throwback,
Speaker 6: people have suggested may have been one reason why he
Speaker 6: turned against the government of James the Second, which up
Speaker 6: until that point he had been very strongly supporting. So
Speaker 6: he appears to have been a man of a short
Speaker 6: tempera much disliked by many other people, highly manipulative.
Speaker 1: But do we need to make friends of our heroes, No,
Speaker 1: we don't. What we demand of our heroes is that
Speaker 1: they serve some larger cause, that they stand for something
Speaker 1: that their name would be uttered with reverence on some
Speaker 1: grand stage.
Speaker 9: I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends
Speaker 9: on the other side about the Statute of Northampton.
Speaker 1: Do you know who that is? Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice,
Speaker 1: during oral arguments in November of twenty twenty one, posing
Speaker 1: a question to the legendary appellate lawyer Paul Clement.
Speaker 9: We haven't heard about that today, and I just wanted
Speaker 9: to give you a chance.
Speaker 10: Thank you, Justice Gorsich. I'd say just a couple of
Speaker 10: quick things about the Statute of Northampton.
Speaker 1: Wait for it. Wait for it.
Speaker 10: First of all, I think that it was very clear
Speaker 10: from the Knight's case and the treatises that this Court
Speaker 10: relied on in Heller that by the time of the
Speaker 10: framing of the Knight's Case.
Speaker 1: When the final accounting is done of the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: a handful of Supreme Court cases will stand out as landmarks.
Speaker 1: The Citizens United Case from twenty ten, for example, which
Speaker 1: freed corporations to spend enormous amounts of money on political candidates,
Speaker 1: the decision to overturn abortion rights, and very high on
Speaker 1: that list, a pivotal gun rights case that came before
Speaker 1: the Court in late twenty twenty one.
Speaker 10: We will hear argument this morning in case twenty eight
Speaker 10: forty three New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin.
Speaker 1: New York Rifle and Pistol otherwise known as the Bruin Case.
Speaker 1: Broome was about the Second Amendment to the Constitution, a
Speaker 1: well regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of
Speaker 1: a free state Comma the right of the people to
Speaker 1: keep and bear arms comma shall not be infringed. What
Speaker 1: does that sentence mean? For years and years scholars have
Speaker 1: argued about that. We even weighed in on it here
Speaker 1: at Revisionist History. If you remember in season three's Divide
Speaker 1: and Conquer episode with an investigation of the significance of
Speaker 1: the commas that surround the phrase being necessary to the
Speaker 1: security of a free state. But then along comes the
Speaker 1: Bruin Case. For one hundred years, a law has been
Speaker 1: on the books in New York State that says you
Speaker 1: can only get a handgun if you prove you need
Speaker 1: one for some specific purpose. And the gun lovers of
Speaker 1: New York are unhappy about this. They sue. The Supreme
Speaker 1: Court agrees to take the case, and in November of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, lawyers for both sides gather for what
Speaker 1: is the first stage in all Supreme Court cases, oral arguments.
Speaker 1: They're in the Court's Central Chamber on First Street, across
Speaker 1: from the Capital, an imposing room in the grand Neoclassical
Speaker 1: Revival style, forty four foot ceilings twenty four ionic columns
Speaker 1: in marble shipped from Liguria, Italy. The justices are sitting
Speaker 1: all in a row behind a long curved Mahogany table,
Speaker 1: there to hear the lawyers on both sides of the
Speaker 1: Bruin case present their oral arguments. The room's packed, A
Speaker 1: sense of anticipation is in the.
Speaker 10: Air, mister Chief Justice, and may it please the Court
Speaker 10: the text of the second Amendment in Shrine's aright, not
Speaker 10: just to keep arms, but to bear them, and the
Speaker 10: relevant history and tradition exhaustively surveyed by this Court in
Speaker 10: the Heller decision confirm that the text protects an individual
Speaker 10: right to carry firearms outside the home for purposes of
Speaker 10: self defense.
Speaker 1: Paul Clement, lawyer for the gun rights group.
Speaker 11: I'm happy to continue by point I missed a Clement,
Speaker 11: I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Speaker 1: That's Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas would go on
Speaker 1: to write the Court's majority opinion in the case. This
Speaker 1: is the moment where he tips his hand shows us
Speaker 1: where he's leaning.
Speaker 11: If we analyze this and use history, tradition texts of
Speaker 11: the Second Amendment, we're going to have to do it
Speaker 11: by analogy. So can you give me a regulation in
Speaker 11: history that is a base that would form a basis
Speaker 11: for legitimate regulation today. If we're going to do it
Speaker 11: by analogy, what would we analogize it to? What would
Speaker 11: that look like?
Speaker 1: If you were a law student armed with a yellow highlighter,
Speaker 1: you would underline the words history and tradition. Why Because
Speaker 1: Thomas is telling us something crucial here. He doesn't care
Speaker 1: about the commas in the Second Amendment. He doesn't care
Speaker 1: about the arcane theories of the legal scholars. He doesn't
Speaker 1: even care about what the citizens of New York State
Speaker 1: may or may not think about restricting handguns. He cares
Speaker 1: about what the Founders thought when they wrote the Second Amendment.
Speaker 1: And when he says you're going to have to do
Speaker 1: it by analogy, what he means is the only way
Speaker 1: to decide whether a restriction on guns is valid, is
Speaker 1: consistent with the Second Amendment? Is did the Founders way
Speaker 1: back when ever, consider a restriction that looks like this
Speaker 1: New York law, would they have been okay with it?
Speaker 11: And Clement agrees, So can you give me a regulation
Speaker 11: in history that is a base that would form a
Speaker 11: basis for a legitimate regulation today.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's what this case is about. We're arguing history here.
Speaker 12: Mister Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
Speaker 1: Then the attorney for the other side stands up, Barbara Underwood,
Speaker 1: Solicitor General of the State of New York.
Speaker 12: For centuries, English and American law have imposed limits on
Speaker 12: carrying firearms in public and the interests of public safety.
Speaker 12: The history runs from the fourteenth century Statute of Northampton,
Speaker 12: which prohibited carrying arms in fairs and markets, and other
Speaker 12: public gathering places to similar laws adopted by half of
Speaker 12: the American colonies and states in the Founding period.
Speaker 1: The Statute of Northampton. That's the third time we've heard
Speaker 1: it mentioned in a case heard in the twenty first
Speaker 1: century about a law passed in the twentieth century. The
Speaker 1: court has asked for insight into how the Founders felt
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century, and the lawyers said, well, then
Speaker 1: we need to look to the fourteenth century. Thirteen twenty
Speaker 1: eight to be precise, your honor, during the reign of
Speaker 1: Edward the Second, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Northampton,
Speaker 1: which says that no man shall disturb the peace by
Speaker 1: riding armed night or day, without quote forfeiting their bodies
Speaker 1: to prison at the King's pleasure. The Statute of Northampton
Speaker 1: is part of English common law. English common law is
Speaker 1: what the first English settlers brought with them on the Mayflower.
Speaker 1: English common law is what the Founding fathers learned in school.
Speaker 1: You want an analogy from history, you want to play
Speaker 1: early history, I give you a crucial law from thirteen
Speaker 1: twenty eight, which absolutely the Founders knew about, that restricts
Speaker 1: guns way more than anything. We're talking about in this court,
Speaker 1: your honor cases are chess. This is check. The only
Speaker 1: way the gun rights crowd can win is if they
Speaker 1: can find their own bit of ancient history that trump's
Speaker 1: the Statute of Northampton, and incredibly they do. John Lowe, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: going back to when you were doing your book, your
Speaker 1: original work on this, how did you come across the
Speaker 1: Sir John Knight case.
Speaker 7: Ah, well, it's a long time ago now, but I
Speaker 7: looked through all of the cases and there are these
Speaker 7: little handbooks on what the law was at different times
Speaker 7: that were published is to help justices of the peace
Speaker 7: and judges. I looked through the laws. I did a
Speaker 7: lot of manuscript reading and really investigating what Parliament was doing,
Speaker 7: what was happening at that time.
Speaker 1: Joyce Malcolm the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and
Speaker 1: the Second Amendment at the ntonin Scalia Law School at
Speaker 1: George Mason University in Virginia. In a world where history
Speaker 1: matters more than law or public sentiment, historians become heroes.
Speaker 1: The magazine National Review once described Joyce Malcolm as the
Speaker 1: nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. She quote looks
Speaker 1: nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun control wars. Small,
Speaker 1: slender and bookish. She's a wisp of a woman who
Speaker 1: enjoys plunging into the archives and sitting through panel discussions
Speaker 1: at academic conferences. Malcolm felt the argument over gun rights
Speaker 1: had been set adrift from history. If we didn't know
Speaker 1: what the founders thought, how would we know what we
Speaker 1: should think. In her most famous book, To Keep and
Speaker 1: Bear Arms, The Origin of an American Right, she set
Speaker 1: out to answer that question, and while pouring through case
Speaker 1: books from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, she found it
Speaker 1: the key that unlocked the whole mystery. No more than
Speaker 1: a handful of paragraphs and a short summary, but the
Speaker 1: story it told was riveting. It's sixteen eighty six. England
Speaker 1: is overwhelmingly Protestant, legally and officially dominated by the Church
Speaker 1: of England, but for a brief period in the sixteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the king was James the Second, who was Catholic, and
Speaker 1: Church of England loyalists were outraged by the possibility that
Speaker 1: the king might try and empower his fellow Catholics, and
Speaker 1: one of those outraged Church of England loyalists was a
Speaker 1: merchant from the coastal town of Bristol, a man named
Speaker 1: Sir John Knight. One day, Knight rides up a steep
Speaker 1: road outside Bristol to the Anglican Church of Saint Michael
Speaker 1: on the Hill Sin the story goes waving his guns,
Speaker 1: gives an impassioned speech. James the Second hears of it
Speaker 1: and has Knight arrested charges him under the Statute of Northampton.
Speaker 8: The information sets forth that the defendant did walk about
Speaker 8: the straits armed with guns, and that he went into
Speaker 8: the Church of Saint Michael in Bristol in the time
Speaker 8: of divine service with a gun to terrify the King's subjects.
Speaker 1: And what happens. The jury decides not guilty. Joyce Malcolm
Speaker 1: reads this and it takes her breath away. Everyone thinks
Speaker 1: that English common law, on which the American legal tradition
Speaker 1: is based was hostile to people walking around with guns.
Speaker 1: But that is not true. John Knight was acquitted. John
Speaker 1: Knight goes up against the Statute of Northampton and John
Speaker 1: Knight wins. One side says the Statute of Northampton. Check
Speaker 1: The other side counters Night checkmate.
Speaker 7: So there's been this big debate about what the Statute
Speaker 7: of Northampton meant. But I can say that if it
Speaker 7: was archaic by the seventeenth century, it was certainly archaic
Speaker 7: by the eighteenth century, when we've got the Second Amendment,
Speaker 7: and for sure the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: The nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. And if
Speaker 1: you read through the briefs file before the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: in Bruin, what do you find John Knight. Everywhere we
Speaker 1: hear about the famous case of Sir John Knight, we
Speaker 1: get history lessons on John Knight. We learned that the
Speaker 1: legal entanglement he found himself in after he burst into
Speaker 1: the church at Saint Michael's on the Hill is the
Speaker 1: most quote significant precedent quote in understanding a crucial turn
Speaker 1: in Second Amendment law. During oral arguments, Neil Gore sutch
Speaker 1: lobes as softball Paul Clement about the Statute of Northampton.
Speaker 9: I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends
Speaker 9: on the other side about the Statute of Northampton, and.
Speaker 1: Paul Clement knocks the question out of the park John
Speaker 1: Knight Baby. Then six months later comes the final ruling
Speaker 1: in Bruin. Just as Clarence Thomas promised, It's all about history.
Speaker 1: Eight pages on the perier between twelve eighty five and
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six, five pages on colonial America, nine pages
Speaker 1: on seventeen ninety one to the Civil War, six pages
Speaker 1: on the Path to reconstruction. One of the most important
Speaker 1: cases of our generation, a landmark that once and for
Speaker 1: all clarifies the most controversial of all the amendments to
Speaker 1: the US Constitution. The debate is over now we know
Speaker 1: with the founders under the sway of the Statute of Northampton. No,
Speaker 1: they were not, the court rules history teaches us. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: the founders would have frowned on the way in New
Speaker 1: York State tried to regulate handguns. And we know this
Speaker 1: because of one man's heroic acquittal. If you read the
Speaker 1: brew and ruling, John Knight looms over it like a colossus.
Speaker 1: John Knight, John Knight, John Knight. He pops up again
Speaker 1: and again like a late seventeenth century whack them all.
Speaker 1: I've been really drawn effect this morning. I was reading
Speaker 1: over again this stuff about the Rex v. Knight, the
Speaker 1: John Knight case. I call up a second amendment scholar
Speaker 1: named Patrick Charles. Before long talk swung to John Knight.
Speaker 1: Of course it did. There's no quitting John Knight. Once
Speaker 1: you catch John Knight Fever, But you know that it's
Speaker 1: a totally fascinating history taken in itself, but in context.
Speaker 1: The idea that you know, in the middle of a
Speaker 1: contemporary debate about how to handle the possess of dangerous
Speaker 1: weapons in America, that we're spending our time obsessing about
Speaker 1: a case from the seventeenth century in Bristol and England
Speaker 1: is hilarious.
Speaker 3: Yes, on the one level, you're you're absolutely critic.
Speaker 1: Patrick Charles and I agreed that it was hilarious to
Speaker 1: spend so much time on John Knight. And then what
Speaker 1: do we do? We continue talking about John Knight. John
Speaker 1: Knight is the groundhog who emerges from his musty English
Speaker 1: lair every spring to cast a shadow across twenty first
Speaker 1: century jurisprudence, the beaver who stealthily builds a legal edifice
Speaker 1: out of mud and sticks. The constitutional scholar and a
Speaker 1: founding member of the John Knight fan Club. David Copple
Speaker 1: once combed through the library of an eighteenth century law
Speaker 1: professor named George Wythe who taught law to a Supreme
Speaker 1: Court justice, a couple of presidents, some founding fathers, and
Speaker 1: he found that John Knight's name was all over law
Speaker 1: books back then. Surely this is all all the founders
Speaker 1: were talking about over a good pipe and a bottle
Speaker 1: of claret in the drawing rooms of colonial Philadelphia. You
Speaker 1: were in Bristol not long ago.
Speaker 5: I was my wife and I were on vacation, and
Speaker 5: as we were on our way from Cornwall to Wales,
Speaker 5: I we did stop at Saint Michael Church in Bristol
Speaker 5: where all this stuff happened, because I wanted to see it,
Speaker 5: maybe see if Sir John Knight was buried in that graveyard.
Speaker 1: David Copple, on vacation, says to his wife, we cannot
Speaker 1: quit this storied isle without paying homage to the man
Speaker 1: whose brave example saved America from the tyranny of restrictive
Speaker 1: gun laws.
Speaker 5: And it was interesting. It's not a huge cathedral type church.
Speaker 5: It's a medium sized church, but it's up on the hill.
Speaker 5: As I learned the hard way, because I was driving
Speaker 5: a stick shift and getting up that very steep hill
Speaker 5: was quite a challenge.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you're in the area and you couldn't resist
Speaker 1: to stop by. And actually I kind of want to
Speaker 1: see Saint Michael's myself.
Speaker 5: Go ahead, tell me why you want to You want
Speaker 5: to see it too.
Speaker 1: Of course I do. I mean, who wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: learn of this giant in the place of his birth
Speaker 1: and death. But then, just as I was packing my
Speaker 1: bags for Bristol, I thought, wait, let me check in
Speaker 1: with a more disinterested historian of that period. I called around.
Speaker 1: Someone recommended a man named Jonathan Barry of the University
Speaker 1: of Exeter. When you, as a historian of this period,
Speaker 1: see the way that John Knight has suddenly popped up
Speaker 1: in American gun rights discourse, what's your reaction?
Speaker 6: Well, I find it bizarre because nobody that's ever heard
Speaker 6: of him or the case, and it has no implication,
Speaker 6: you know, as far as I know. In the English
Speaker 6: jurist Britain's not the land of Drews. But you know
Speaker 6: it's it's of no significance.
Speaker 1: Huh, England, John Knight is a nobody, But in the
Speaker 1: hallowed halls of the Supreme Court three and a half
Speaker 1: thousand miles away, he's a superstar. It's a puzzle, and
Speaker 1: it is for puzzles like these that God invented revisionous history.
Speaker 1: One of the problems associated with the coronation of John
Speaker 1: Knight as the savior of the gun rights movement is
Speaker 1: that our understanding of the details of his arrest and
Speaker 1: acquittal was limited. We had the verdict, but not much else.
Speaker 1: After all, it happened in sixteen eighty six. It's not
Speaker 1: like there are digital records somewhere in the Bristol courthouse.
Speaker 1: What was known about the case came from legal catalogs
Speaker 1: from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the kind that a
Speaker 1: lawyer or a judge might subscribe to that offer brief summaries,
Speaker 1: news briefings of the goings on in various court houses
Speaker 1: around England. That's what Joyce Malcolm found in her Eureka moment,
Speaker 1: a brief write up from a long ago legal newsletter
Speaker 1: on a matter of Rex v.
Speaker 12: Night.
Speaker 1: It was about a paragraph long. But let's be honest,
Speaker 1: one paragraph in a legal digest is not exactly the
Speaker 1: strongest of foundations for completely overturning our understanding of the
Speaker 1: Second Amendment. And, perhaps more ominously, the newly inaugurated members
Speaker 1: of the Sir John Knight Fan Club tended to be lawyers,
Speaker 1: and lawyers deal in black and white hard facts, the
Speaker 1: letter of the law, tangible evidence. But now they had
Speaker 1: crossed over into the land of history, and history is
Speaker 1: not like the law at all. History is a living,
Speaker 1: organic thing that gets rewritten all the time. I mean,
Speaker 1: why do you think we call this podcast revisionist history
Speaker 1: because historians love to say, wait a minute, I found
Speaker 1: something new that makes me think we didn't quite realize
Speaker 1: what we were talking about before. And in the case
Speaker 1: of Sir John Knight, that something new was the Newsletter
Speaker 1: of the Intrepid Roger Morris Rojamoris Roger Morris was a
Speaker 1: journalist who wrote a private newsletter in the sixteen eighties
Speaker 1: for a variety of well connected clients. Roger Morris knew
Speaker 1: everyone and everything in late seventeenth century England. He passed
Speaker 1: on high end gossip. He told stories no one had
Speaker 1: ever heard before, about brothels and prostitutes and somebody bearing
Speaker 1: their breast to the Moroccan ambassador. He wrote about how
Speaker 1: the ice was so thick in the long cold winter
Speaker 1: of sixteen eighty four that people roasted an ox on
Speaker 1: the River Thames. He saw the King's baby and air
Speaker 1: a close and reported and you have to love this
Speaker 1: little bit of late medieval trolling. The child was a large,
Speaker 1: full child in the head and the upper parts, but
Speaker 1: not suitably proportioned in the lower parts. Roger Morris was
Speaker 1: a gold mine, but there were a few problems. The
Speaker 1: first was that Roger Morris's reputation did not extend beyond
Speaker 1: the late seventeenth century. His newsletters ended up in an
Speaker 1: obscure library in central London where no one paid attention
Speaker 1: to them for several hundred years. Second problem, Roger Morris
Speaker 1: was incredibly prolific. The Roger Morris archives extend into the
Speaker 1: millions of words, so if you wanted to find out
Speaker 1: what Roger Morris had to say about this or that,
Speaker 1: you had to make a commitment. Third, and maybe the
Speaker 1: biggest problem of all, Roger Morris's entire life work was
Speaker 1: written in code. I mean, if you're could have dissed
Speaker 1: the private parts of the heir to the throne, you
Speaker 1: have to take some precautions.
Speaker 8: There was an attempt by historian called Douglas Lacy to
Speaker 8: try and to start to work on a volume.
Speaker 1: That's the historian Tim Harris.
Speaker 8: He did a book in the nineteen fifties. He couldn't
Speaker 8: break the shorthand couldn't break the code. And it's too
Speaker 8: much for one person's take.
Speaker 1: On a cryptographer from Oxford had to get involved. Teams
Speaker 1: of historians volunteered, passing the job down from one generation
Speaker 1: to the next, until finally there it was a full
Speaker 1: shelf of encyclopedia sized volumes offering hitherto unknown insights into
Speaker 1: one of the most complex eras in British history. And
Speaker 1: Roger Morris, it turns out, had a lot to say
Speaker 1: about Sir John Knight.
Speaker 8: It's a seven volume edition and there was a team
Speaker 8: of us who did it, and now it's widely available.
Speaker 8: And because it's widely available, people are looking at it
Speaker 8: more and say, oh, there's not more we can find
Speaker 8: out about this is John Knight case. It's an incredible source.
Speaker 8: It has lots of very valuable information, and it's clearly
Speaker 8: well informed and if you could check his information against
Speaker 8: other sources, it's clearly accurate. But he also gives you
Speaker 8: additional information which you won't get elsewhere.
Speaker 1: So much additional information. Oh my god.
Speaker 6: So he was a Bristol merchant. He was from quite
Speaker 6: an important Bristol mercantile family.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Berry, historian at the University of Exeter. The Knights
Speaker 1: ran sugar refineries, They had plantations in the Caribbean. They
Speaker 1: were politically well connected and their sympathies did not lie
Speaker 1: with the Catholic King of England, James the second, John
Speaker 1: Knight hated Catholics. One day he learns that a group
Speaker 1: of Irish Catholics are holding a secret mass in a
Speaker 1: house in he arranges to have the priest arrested.
Speaker 8: So he gets the Lord Mayor and other magistrates to
Speaker 8: raid this Catholic chapel. A couple of weeks later, there's
Speaker 8: an anti Catholic ritual in Bristol which the government suspects
Speaker 8: the magistrates to Bristol and maybe Sir John Knight were
Speaker 8: involved in encouraging. Where they parade through the city scoffing
Speaker 8: the mass. They hold a piece of bread up in
Speaker 8: the air, and they have someone dressed as a Virgin
Speaker 8: Mary and someone dressed as a monk, and the monk
Speaker 8: is fundeling the Virgin Mary.
Speaker 1: The monk is fondling the Virgin Mary.
Speaker 8: So the government is upset about this.
Speaker 1: The King of England is a Catholic, remember.
Speaker 8: And after that, Sir John Knight claims that he's threatened
Speaker 8: and he is beaten up by a couple of irishmen.
Speaker 8: So Sir John Knight was advised to retire to a
Speaker 8: house in the country, but because he was in fear
Speaker 8: of beaten up, he was quite They beat him and
Speaker 8: kicked him when they attacked him. When he came into
Speaker 8: Bristol subsequently, he came with a company of people carrying
Speaker 8: swords and muscus in front before him, but he left
Speaker 8: these at the walls of the city, because you're not
Speaker 8: allowed to carry arms into the city Bristol. Bristol had
Speaker 8: its own bylaws.
Speaker 1: Yes, you heard that correctly. He checks his guns at
Speaker 1: the gate. Now this is worth a slight digression.
Speaker 6: We tend to forget how violent and militaristic seventeenth century
Speaker 6: England in general, and a place like Bristol in particular were.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Barry Again.
Speaker 6: One reflection of the fact is that Bristol was a
Speaker 6: leading place for private tiering, where basically you capture the
Speaker 6: ships of your rival traders, as it were, so you
Speaker 6: load yourself up. Bristol is just beginning at this period
Speaker 6: to get involved in the slave trade with Africa, which
Speaker 6: of course both involved the use of military force, but also,
Speaker 6: as you may know, the chief one of the chief
Speaker 6: products that you actually took there to trade with was arms.
Speaker 6: And one of the things that Bristol and places around
Speaker 6: it were producing, in fact, were lots of arms. But
Speaker 6: also they needed weapons, cannons for their ships and so on.
Speaker 6: So we have to imagine the society in which there
Speaker 6: are a lot of people that are used to using weapons.
Speaker 1: So why would the nightcase represent some kind of turning
Speaker 1: point in British attitudes towards guns. Bristol was a washing guns,
Speaker 1: so much so that they were forced to put gun
Speaker 1: control measures in place that put anything in America today
Speaker 1: to shame.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think it's absurd to think that the
Speaker 6: crucial issue here was about whether a man was bearing
Speaker 6: arms or not because of lots of people wandering around
Speaker 6: bearing arms.
Speaker 1: Anyway, back to our story with Tim Herris.
Speaker 8: And then on one day he goes to church, and
Speaker 8: he does go with his attendant and goes with a
Speaker 8: gun and sort, but he leaves these. He says, he
Speaker 8: leaves these the porch with his attendant.
Speaker 1: The church is Saint Michael's on the hill, his church,
Speaker 1: the one overlooking Bristol. He gets off his horse, checks
Speaker 1: his weapons at the door. It's not enormously significant here.
Speaker 1: So here we have a case that Second Amendment types
Speaker 1: are claiming, is this enormously important precedent for the right
Speaker 1: of an individual to bear arms? But the individual in
Speaker 1: question checks his arms at the door of the church.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like this is nothing to do. He's
Speaker 1: not even he's not waving his gun around or claiming
Speaker 1: he can wave his gun around. He he quite willingly
Speaker 1: adheres to local norms about where guns should and shouldn't
Speaker 1: be carried.
Speaker 8: Yes, that seems to be the case.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Night enters the church and he shouts out,
Speaker 1: the Catholics are trying to kill me, and they're going
Speaker 1: to try and kill you too. Another quick digression. I
Speaker 1: asked Jonathan Barry about that moment. One question before we
Speaker 1: go on with the story, I want to go back
Speaker 1: how Catholic was Bristol in this era?
Speaker 6: So if almost almost non existent?
Speaker 1: Oh wait wait, so wait, So John Knight is going
Speaker 1: into this parish church and saying we're all in danger
Speaker 1: of being God freed by the Catholics.
Speaker 6: Somebody, and the number of Catholics in Bristol to have
Speaker 6: conducted such a plot was minuscule.
Speaker 1: So he goes into this church and he says he
Speaker 1: tries to kind of whip the church up into a
Speaker 1: frenzy about the Irish threat, and the government says, you've
Speaker 1: gone too far. He's implying that the Catholic king is
Speaker 1: somehow conspiring against his own people, and that's when he
Speaker 1: gets in trouble with the law. Yes, he doesn't sound
Speaker 1: very likable, Sir John Knight.
Speaker 6: Nobody appears to have liked Sir John Knight.
Speaker 1: No, the government goes out after John Knight because he's
Speaker 1: a jackass. He's running around conjuring up ridiculous conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: about Catholics.
Speaker 8: So the charge. All the newsletter accounts I've read emphasize
Speaker 8: that it's the words that he spoke in the church,
Speaker 8: which and therefore this was proof of his disloyalty. That
Speaker 8: was a key issue for why they wanted to arrest him.
Speaker 8: That I decide to get him on the Statute of Northampton,
Speaker 8: which is a statute from thirteen twenty eight, saying it's
Speaker 8: a breach of the peace, and he pleaded not guilty.
Speaker 8: He claims that he didn't take the gun or the
Speaker 8: sword into the church, he left it outside. And the
Speaker 8: church is actually just outside the wars of the city
Speaker 8: of Bristol, as it was back then. It's Protestant church obviously,
Speaker 8: and he leaves the gun and the sword outside, and
Speaker 8: the jury said, he's got a proven track record of
Speaker 8: being loyal to the government, and so they found him
Speaker 8: not guilty.
Speaker 1: Because he didn't brandish a gun in church. The jury
Speaker 1: didn't find him disloyal because they knew he'd been loyal
Speaker 1: to the previous Protestant king. He wasn't armed, so they
Speaker 1: couldn't get him on that. He just didn't like Catholics.
Speaker 1: And so what this is Bristol in sixteen eighty six.
Speaker 1: No one in Bristol in sixteen eighty six likes Catholics.
Speaker 1: The case against him is dead on arrival. And by
Speaker 1: the way, no one knows this better than the government.
Speaker 8: So they actually don't want to prosecute Knights. They actually
Speaker 8: want Knight to apologize, and then they try and bury
Speaker 8: the case. That seems to be what's implied in the
Speaker 8: newsletter accounts I've read. That doesn't happen. They would have
Speaker 8: preferred if he'd apologized, and they could have said, okay,
Speaker 8: we'll let it go.
Speaker 1: So to recap John Knight's episode in the Church of
Speaker 1: Saint Michael has become a heroic moment to the American
Speaker 1: gun rights movement, even though John Knight wasn't actually carrying
Speaker 1: a gun when he entered the Church of Saint Michael,
Speaker 1: even though the case against him had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with guns, even though Bristol in fact had gun control
Speaker 1: ordinances that puts every gun control ordinance in America today
Speaker 1: to shame, And even though the whole brew was just
Speaker 1: about him being a bigot who was terrified of a
Speaker 1: Catholic conspiracy taking over Bristol, even though there were hardly
Speaker 1: any Catholics in Bristol, and even though the whole case
Speaker 1: was dead on arrival, and Knight could have apologized and
Speaker 1: made it all go away, and just didn't feel like it.
Speaker 1: But the only way you would know all this is
Speaker 1: if you were willing to wade to the seven volumes
Speaker 1: of Roger Morris's coded newsletters. And who has time for that?
Speaker 1: I was reading the did you read there's a the
Speaker 1: historian Tim Harris essay on I was amused to see
Speaker 1: there was that. In his he talks about the Sir
Speaker 1: John Knight case, about how when he goes to the church,
Speaker 1: the Protestant church, to speak to what he thought of
Speaker 1: was the threat being posed by the Catholics and Bristol.
Speaker 1: He insists that he checks his weapons at the front
Speaker 1: of the church, and he also says that when he
Speaker 1: goes into Bristol, he abided by the bylaws of Bristol
Speaker 1: and didn't carry his weapons into the past the city's limits.
Speaker 1: I wondered how Joyce Malcolm made sense of all these
Speaker 1: new facts. The Roger Morris newsletters were finally decoded more
Speaker 1: than ten years after she wrote her opus to keep
Speaker 1: him bare arms. So I'm just curious, think, how do
Speaker 1: those sort of two facts fit into this story. So
Speaker 1: even if we have if the Sir John Knight case
Speaker 1: represents kind of affirmation of the individual right to peace,
Speaker 1: will carry So John Knight himself is complying with some
Speaker 1: pretty strict gun control laws, isn't he.
Speaker 7: I think, to be honest that I think that Professor
Speaker 7: Harris is wrong. First of all, because there was such
Speaker 7: a There was all of these duties and requirements to
Speaker 7: protect yourself. And in the in the judge's opinion in
Speaker 7: the in there Sir John Knight case, he says that
Speaker 7: the law allows gentlemen to go about with arms as
Speaker 7: long as they're not you know, unusual and the dangerous weapons.
Speaker 7: So the judge seems at odds with Professor Harris.
Speaker 1: But what do you what do you make of Sir
Speaker 1: John Knight's claim that he checked his weapons at the
Speaker 1: front of the church and didn't carry his weapons into
Speaker 1: the city of Bristol.
Speaker 7: I find that pery odd because if that were the case,
Speaker 7: if there was a law that he couldn't carry his
Speaker 7: weapons into the city of Bristol at all, that the
Speaker 7: whole city was what we would now call a sensitive
Speaker 7: place that no one could wear. It goes against your
Speaker 7: right to protect yourself. That I was against your right
Speaker 7: to protect yourself in your house. It goes against the
Speaker 7: judges ruling. And to be honest, Professor Harris is British.
Speaker 7: They don't think much of the right to be armed.
Speaker 1: The homicide rate in the United States, if you're wondering,
Speaker 1: is four and a half times higher than the United Kingdom.
Speaker 7: When I explored that right and told my British friends
Speaker 7: about it, most of them didn't even realize they ever
Speaker 7: had had a right to be armed. There's this whole
Speaker 7: history and that they haven't looked at. And I think
Speaker 7: it was because I said earlier, I asked an American
Speaker 7: question we were interested in that. They weren't particularly interest
Speaker 7: in a right to be armed, and so it wasn't
Speaker 7: something that they had studied or been even very curious
Speaker 7: about until I started to write about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But if the British are interested in a right
Speaker 1: to bear arms, then why are we drawing on British
Speaker 1: Why is the British tradition relevant to the discussion of
Speaker 1: American individual gun rights.
Speaker 7: I think this was a history that was lost to them.
Speaker 7: I think modern British people have a different view of it.
Speaker 7: They're much more dependent on the state taking care of them,
Speaker 7: particularly since World War Two. This is earlier British history
Speaker 7: is the history that they really were not that familiar with,
Speaker 7: you know, they were looking at other things, and I
Speaker 7: think that one of I guess the contribution I made
Speaker 7: was that I was an American that looked at British
Speaker 7: history in English history with American questions, with the things
Speaker 7: we were interested in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what is the Supreme Court? How did the
Speaker 1: highest legal body in the land, in the landmark ruling
Speaker 1: of New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruin
Speaker 1: handle the fact that their hero has feet of clay.
Speaker 3: I know, I had a summarized summer.
Speaker 8: See, I think that is it.
Speaker 1: Yes, I asked Patrick Charles to read me the relevant section.
Speaker 3: To the extent that there are multiple plausible interpretations of
Speaker 3: Sir John Knight's case, we will favor the one that
Speaker 3: is more consistent with the Second Amendments command.
Speaker 1: Which, in other words, there's a whole long list of
Speaker 1: ways we can make sense of this. We're going to
Speaker 1: pick the one we like the most. Okay, that's exactly.
Speaker 1: That's the one that makes our life easiest. And arguing
Speaker 1: the case we've already decided we want to argue. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's like history is cherry.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's so chery picked.
Speaker 1: The Supreme Court decides to clear up the ambiguity over
Speaker 1: the Second Amendment. Let us leave the verdict to history,
Speaker 1: they declare. But then their hero turns out to have
Speaker 1: feet of clay. So they shrug and go on with
Speaker 1: the things that they had already made up their mind
Speaker 1: to do before they tried to convince us that they
Speaker 1: wanted to play historian and go to England and make
Speaker 1: their pilgrimage to Saint Michael on the Hill and pretend
Speaker 1: that the man whom they have chosen to symbolize the
Speaker 1: grand tradition of American gun rights is something other than
Speaker 1: a jackass. And after a far too many hours reconstructing
Speaker 1: the history of this jackass, I realized that I had
Speaker 1: fallen into the same trap that we've all fallen into
Speaker 1: in his country when it comes to gun violence. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the wrong things, telling irrelevant stories. And over
Speaker 1: the course of the next five episodes of Revision's History,
Speaker 1: I want to try and change that conversation. I'm going
Speaker 1: to take you to North Carolina to shoot guns, Visit
Speaker 1: an old man in Alabama with a crazy story to tell,
Speaker 1: Revisit the assassination of Robert Kennedy on a one but
Speaker 1: no more John Knight. I promise we've all had it
Speaker 1: with John Knight.
Speaker 8: What kind of person was he? Not sort of person
Speaker 8: I want to have a drink with. It was a
Speaker 8: nasty piece of work. Really, he was vindictive and spiteful.
Speaker 8: He's a biggot, He's a trouble maker. He's obviously deliberately
Speaker 8: going out to try and provoke trouble. In April sixteen
Speaker 8: eighty six, when he gets his priests arrested because he's
Speaker 8: staring things up. So yeah, not a nice piece of work.
Speaker 8: That's my basic view of him. He's involved in the
Speaker 8: slave traders, sugar refiner. I would hardly say that he
Speaker 8: was the sort of hero figure the champions of American
Speaker 8: liberty who wants to celebrate, although maybe that's not the point.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Our revisionist history Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: bend A DApp Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin, and Liam Gistoo.
Speaker 1: We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by Arthur Gomperts and Kashelle Williams. Original scoring by
Speaker 1: Luis Garra, with vocals in this episode by the Magnificent
Speaker 1: Ethan Herschenfeld. Mastering by Flon Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladwins.