Speaker 1: Push Kim. Hey there against the rules listeners, it's Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis here. You might've heard that I've been working on
Speaker 1: a new book about the crypto Exchange FTX and its founder,
Speaker 1: Sam Bankman Freed, and I'm still working on it, talking
Speaker 1: to experts on background here in this feed. But I'm
Speaker 1: finally able to tell you just a bit more about
Speaker 1: the book itself, like the title, for instance, and when
Speaker 1: it will be published.
Speaker 2: So here we go.
Speaker 1: My next book is going to be called Going Infinite,
Speaker 1: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It's coming
Speaker 1: out October third. And rather than tell you what's in it,
Speaker 1: because I think a lot of the pleasure is going
Speaker 1: to come from you not knowing what's in it, how
Speaker 1: about I just read you a little jacket copy and
Speaker 1: I quote Michael Lewis, take you along on a quest
Speaker 1: to understand who Sam Bankman Freed really is, what motivated him,
Speaker 1: and what his spectacular rise and fall means for the
Speaker 1: rest of us. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo
Speaker 1: shorts and limp white socks whose eyes twitched across zoom
Speaker 1: meetings as he played video games on the side right
Speaker 1: on the roller coaster with me? Is I traced the
Speaker 1: ups and downs of a character who never liked the
Speaker 1: rules and was allowed to live by his own until
Speaker 1: it all came undone. I didn't write those words, but
Speaker 1: I think they sound okay. I'd read that book if
Speaker 1: I weren't still writing it. Going Infinite, The Rise and
Speaker 1: Fall of a New Tycoon will be available October twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. In fact, you could pre order it now
Speaker 1: from your favorite bookstore. Look forward to your response. Hey everyone,
Speaker 1: Michael lewis here today. We're back in your feed to
Speaker 1: bring you an episode from Revisionist History, another podcast from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. This season, on Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell is
Speaker 1: diving into one of the most infuriating corners in American life, guns.
Speaker 1: The six episode series looks at America's gun problem through
Speaker 1: topics like TV westerns, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and
Speaker 1: the insanity of the Supreme Court. In the first episode,
Speaker 1: Malcolm takes a close look at a name that popped
Speaker 1: up in a recent landmark Supreme Court ruling on the
Speaker 1: Second Amendment, a seventeenth century englishman named John Knight. He'll
Speaker 1: discover who this man is and why so much about
Speaker 1: twenty first century American gun control hinges on his story.
Speaker 1: All right, here's the episode. You can binge listen to
Speaker 1: all six episodes early in ad free by subscribing to
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts, or by visiting pushkin dot fm,
Speaker 1: slash plus, or Here are the episodes weekly in the
Speaker 1: Revisionist History podcast feed.
Speaker 3: Sixteen eighty six, in Bristol, a major port and manufacturing
Speaker 3: center on the southwest coast of England, a local merchant
Speaker 3: named John Knight, Sir John Knight is riding up a
Speaker 3: steep road outside the city to an Anglican church, Saint Michael's.
Speaker 3: On the hill greystone slate roof sturdy walls built during
Speaker 3: medieval times to withstand the full brunt of hostile force.
Speaker 3: The city of Bristol spread out below. Sir John Knight
Speaker 3: bursts in and then, oh my god, John Lone. My
Speaker 3: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 3: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, I
Speaker 3: invite you to descend with me into the deep and
Speaker 3: bottomless historical pit that is Sir John Knight, the irrepressible
Speaker 3: Englishman who has achieved more than three centuries after his
Speaker 3: death a sudden and extraordinary celebrity. How was it that
Speaker 3: the John Knight case came to such a promise? Who
Speaker 3: uncovered it? It doesn't sound like this wasn't a case
Speaker 3: that was in There wasn't a famous case name at
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 4: Now I don't I hate to say, it's like, you know,
Speaker 4: if you talk about history, like you know, you can
Speaker 4: go to Africa and find a rock with somebody's name
Speaker 4: on it. This is, you know, founded by white guy
Speaker 4: in nineteen eighteen. No, it was existing, right, it was there.
Speaker 4: It's always been there.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to explain how that happened and why
Speaker 3: he matters. And I know that this is something you've
Speaker 3: thought about, so I naturally wanted to call you. First
Speaker 3: question set for me. Who is the first modern legal
Speaker 3: scholar to reference Sir John Knight?
Speaker 5: Depends on what you mean by mom William Hawkins into
Speaker 5: seventy six in his seventeen sixteen treatise.
Speaker 3: I mean last fifty years his most recent celebrity.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean he was around in case law, you know,
Speaker 5: not as common as he's been in the twenty first century,
Speaker 5: but he was always around in case law. To some degree,
Speaker 5: you know, shows up in the major eighteen forty three
Speaker 5: case in North Carolina, and then another nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 5: North Carolina case, among others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, I you know, I was. I got
Speaker 3: really interested in the way the Second Amendment debate has
Speaker 3: been transformed and in this sort of focus on history,
Speaker 3: and I got The reason I got into is that
Speaker 3: I got really fascinated by the Sir John Knight case.
Speaker 6: Now, oh, yes, right, and.
Speaker 3: Everyone says, oh, the person you have to talk to
Speaker 3: is Joyce Malcolm. So here I am, and here you.
Speaker 6: Are, here I am.
Speaker 3: When you were doing your book, your original work on this,
Speaker 3: how did you come across the Sir John Knight case.
Speaker 6: Ah, well, it's a long time going out.
Speaker 3: John Knight's name is spoken first only in the smallest
Speaker 3: of historical circles. Then it gets repeated again and again
Speaker 3: with increasing frequency in bigger and bigger rooms.
Speaker 7: I was at a conference in d C where they
Speaker 7: were discussing Second Amendment issues, and they had people giving
Speaker 7: papers from all perspectives, and I was just there to
Speaker 7: offer some historic important I found myself having to clarify
Speaker 7: some of the basic details and mis assertions have been
Speaker 7: made about what had actually happened, So I said, I
Speaker 7: happened to know about this because I've read a lot
Speaker 7: of the sources.
Speaker 3: Do we know what Sir John looked like, his family life,
Speaker 3: his personal circumstances, Not really, but we do know something
Speaker 3: of his character, principled to a fault, contentious, possessed of
Speaker 3: a steadfastness of mind.
Speaker 8: Indeed, so he was a Bristol merchant, he was from
Speaker 8: quite an important Bristol mercantile family, and perhaps because his
Speaker 8: father had been a sugar maker, Sir John Knight appears
Speaker 8: to have gone out to the West Indies and spent
Speaker 8: a period of time there, apparently rather controversially, because when
Speaker 8: he then applied a couple of years before we're deinning
Speaker 8: with to be the governor of the Leeward Islands, he
Speaker 8: appears to have been vetoed by the people there saying
Speaker 8: that from their experience, he was the last person that
Speaker 8: they wanted to come out as the governor, and it
Speaker 8: may have been partly his resentment at that throwback, people
Speaker 8: have suggested may have been one reason why he turned
Speaker 8: against the government of James the Second, which up until
Speaker 8: that point he had been very strongly supporting. So he
Speaker 8: appears to have been a man of a short temper,
Speaker 8: much disliked by many other people, highly manipulative.
Speaker 3: But do we need to make friends of our heroes, No,
Speaker 3: we don't. What we demand of our heroes is that
Speaker 3: they serve some larger cause, that they stand for something
Speaker 3: that their name would be uttered with reverence on some
Speaker 3: 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 3: Do you know who that is? Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice,
Speaker 3: during arguments in November of twenty twenty one, posing a
Speaker 3: 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 3: 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 3: Oh, when the final accounting is done of the twenty
Speaker 3: first century, a handful of Supreme Court cases will stand
Speaker 3: out as landmarks. The Citizens United Case from twenty ten,
Speaker 3: for example, which freed corporations to spend enormous amounts of
Speaker 3: money on political candidates, the decision to overturn abortion rights,
Speaker 3: and very high on that list, a pivotal gun rights
Speaker 3: case that came before 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 3: New York Rifle and Pistol otherwise known as the Bruin Case.
Speaker 3: Broom was about the Second Amendment to the Constitution, A
Speaker 3: well regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of
Speaker 3: a free state comma the right of the people to
Speaker 3: keep and bear arms comma shall not be infringed. What
Speaker 3: does that sentence mean? For years and years scholars have
Speaker 3: argued about that. We even weighed in on it here
Speaker 3: at Revisionist History. If you remember in season three's Divide
Speaker 3: and Conquer episode with an investigation of the significance of
Speaker 3: the commas that surround the phrase being necessary to the
Speaker 3: security of a free state. But then along comes the
Speaker 3: Bruin case. For one hundred years a law has been
Speaker 3: on the books in New York State that says you
Speaker 3: can only get a handgun if you prove you need
Speaker 3: one for some specific purpose. And the gun lovers of
Speaker 3: New York are unhappy about this. They sue. The Supreme
Speaker 3: Court agrees to take the case, and in November of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, lawyers for both sides gather for what
Speaker 3: is the first stage in all Supreme Court cases, oral arguments.
Speaker 3: They're in the Court's Central Chamber on First Street, across
Speaker 3: from the Capital, an imposing room in the grand Neoclassical
Speaker 3: Revival style, forty four foot ceilings twenty four ionic columns
Speaker 3: in marble shipped from Liguria, Italy. The justices are sitting
Speaker 3: all in a row behind a long curved mahogany table,
Speaker 3: there to hear the lawyers on both sides of the
Speaker 3: Bruin case present their oral arguments. The room's packed, A
Speaker 3: 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 enshrines aright not just
Speaker 10: to keep arms, but to bear them, And the relevant
Speaker 10: history and tradition exhaustively surveyed by this Court in the
Speaker 10: Heller decision confirmed that the text protects an individual right
Speaker 10: to carry firearms outside the home for purposes of self defense.
Speaker 3: Paul Clement, lawyer for the gun rights group.
Speaker 11: I'm happy to continue by point I missed the Clement.
Speaker 11: I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Speaker 3: That's Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas would go on
Speaker 3: to write the Court's majority opinion in the case. This
Speaker 3: is the moment where he tips his hand shows us
Speaker 3: 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 rite regulation
Speaker 11: on in history that is a base that would form
Speaker 11: a basis for a legitimate regulation today. If we're going
Speaker 11: to do it by analogy, what would we analogize it to.
Speaker 11: What would that look like?
Speaker 3: If you were a law student armed with a yellow highlighter,
Speaker 3: you would underline the words history and tradition. Why Because
Speaker 3: Thomas is telling us something crucial here. He doesn't care
Speaker 3: about the commas in the Second Amendment. He doesn't care
Speaker 3: about the arcane theories of the legal scholars. He doesn't
Speaker 3: even care about what the citizens of New York State
Speaker 3: may or may not think about restricting handguns. He cares
Speaker 3: about what the Founders thought when they wrote the Second Amendment.
Speaker 3: And when he says you're going to have to do
Speaker 3: it by analogy, what he means is the only way
Speaker 3: to decide whether a restriction on guns is valid, is
Speaker 3: consistent with the Second Amendment, is did the Founders way
Speaker 3: back when ever, consider a restriction that looks like this
Speaker 3: 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 3: Yes, that's what this case is about. We're arguing history.
Speaker 12: Here, mister Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
Speaker 3: Then the attorney for the other side stands up, Barbara Underwood,
Speaker 3: 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 3: The Statute of Northampton. That's the third time we've heard
Speaker 3: it mentioned. In a case heard in the twenty first
Speaker 3: century about a law passed in the twentieth century. The
Speaker 3: court has asked for insight into how the founders felt
Speaker 3: in the eighteenth century, and the lawyers said, well, then
Speaker 3: we need to look to the fourteenth century. Thirteen twenty
Speaker 3: eight to be precise, Your Honor, during the reign of
Speaker 3: Edward the Second, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Northampton,
Speaker 3: which says that no man shall disturb the peace by
Speaker 3: riding armed night or day, without quote forfeiting their bodies
Speaker 3: to prison at the King's pleasure. The Statute of Northampton
Speaker 3: is part of English common law. English common law is
Speaker 3: what the first English settlers brought with them on the Mayflower.
Speaker 3: English common law is what the founding fathers learned in school.
Speaker 3: You want an analogy from history, you want to play
Speaker 3: early history. I give you a crucial law from thirteen
Speaker 3: twenty eight which absolutely found knew about that restricts guns
Speaker 3: way more than anything we're talking about in this court,
Speaker 3: Your Honor. If court cases are chess, this is check.
Speaker 3: The only way the gun rights crowd can win is
Speaker 3: if they can find their own bit of ancient history
Speaker 3: that trump's the Statute of Northampton, and incredibly they do.
Speaker 3: John Love, Yeah, yeah, going back to when you were
Speaker 3: doing your book, your original work on this, how did
Speaker 3: you come across the Sir John Knight case.
Speaker 6: Ah, well, it's a long time ago now, but I
Speaker 6: looked through all of the cases and there are these
Speaker 6: little handbooks on what the law was at different times
Speaker 6: that were published is to help justices of the peace
Speaker 6: and judges. I looked through the laws. I did a
Speaker 6: lot of manuscript reading and really investigating what Parliament was doing,
Speaker 6: what was happening at that time.
Speaker 3: Joyce Malcolm the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and
Speaker 3: the Second Amendment at the antonin Scalia Law School at
Speaker 3: George Mason University in Virginia. In a world where history
Speaker 3: matters more than law or public sentiment, historians become heroes.
Speaker 3: The magazine National Review once described Joyce Malcolm as the
Speaker 3: nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. She quote looks
Speaker 3: nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun control wars. Small,
Speaker 3: slender and bookish. She's a wisp of a woman who
Speaker 3: enjoys plunging into the archives and sitting through panel discussions
Speaker 3: at academic conferences, Malcolm felt the argument over gun rights
Speaker 3: had been set adrift from history. If we didn't know
Speaker 3: what the founders thought, how would we know what we
Speaker 3: should think. In her most famous book, To Keep and
Speaker 3: Bear Arms, The Origin of an American Right, she set
Speaker 3: out to answer that question, and while pouring through case
Speaker 3: books from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, she found it
Speaker 3: the key that unlocked the whole mystery. No more than
Speaker 3: a handful of paragraphs and a short summary, but the
Speaker 3: story it told was riveting. It's sixteen eighty six. England
Speaker 3: is overwhelmingly Protestant, legally and officially dominated by the Church
Speaker 3: of England, but for a brief period in the sixteen eighties,
Speaker 3: the king was James the Second, who was Catholic, and
Speaker 3: Church of England loyalists were outraged by the possibility that
Speaker 3: the king might try and empower his fellow Catholics, and
Speaker 3: one of those outraged Church of England loyalists was a
Speaker 3: merchant from the coastal town of Bristol, a man named
Speaker 3: Sir John Knight. One day, Knight rides up a steep
Speaker 3: road outside Bristol to the Anglican Church of Saint Michael
Speaker 3: on the hill. He bursts in the story, goes waving
Speaker 3: his guns, gives an impassioned speech. James the Second hears
Speaker 3: of it and has Knight arrested charges him under the
Speaker 3: Statute of Northampton.
Speaker 7: The information sets forth that the defendant did walk about
Speaker 7: the streets armed with guns, and that he went into
Speaker 7: the Church of Saint Michael in Bristol in the time
Speaker 7: of divine service with a gun to terrify the King's subjects.
Speaker 3: And what happens. The jury decides not guilty. Joyce Malcolm
Speaker 3: reads this and it takes her breath away. Everyone thinks
Speaker 3: that English common law, on which the American legal tradition
Speaker 3: is based was hostile to people walking around with guns.
Speaker 3: But that is not true. John Knight was acquitted. John
Speaker 3: Knight goes up against the Statute of Northampton, and John
Speaker 3: Knight wins. One side says the Statute of Northampton. Check.
Speaker 3: The other side counters John Knight, checkmate.
Speaker 6: So there's been this big debate about what the Statute
Speaker 6: of Northampton meant. But I can say that if it
Speaker 6: was archaic by the seventeenth century, it was certainly archaic
Speaker 6: by the eighteenth century, when we've got the Second Amendment,
Speaker 6: and for sure the twenty first century.
Speaker 3: The nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. And if
Speaker 3: you read through the briefs file before the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: in Bruin, what do you find John Knight. Everywhere we
Speaker 3: hear about the famous case of Sir John Knight, we
Speaker 3: get history lessons on John Knight. We learned that the
Speaker 3: legal entanglement he found himself in after he burst into
Speaker 3: the church at Saint Michael's on the Hill is the
Speaker 3: most quote significant precedent quote in understanding a crucial turn
Speaker 3: in Second Amendment law. During oral arguments, Neil Gore sutch
Speaker 3: lobs as softball Paul Clement about the Statute of Northampton.
Speaker 9: I know you've had a substantial debate, was your friends
Speaker 9: on the other side about the Statute of Northampton?
Speaker 3: And Paul Clement knocks the question out of the park
Speaker 3: John Knight? Baby Oh. Then six months later comes the
Speaker 3: final ruling in Bruin. Just as Clarence Thomas promised, It's
Speaker 3: all about history. Eight pages on the Perier between twelve
Speaker 3: eighty five and seventeen seventy six, five pages on Colonial America,
Speaker 3: nine pages on seventeen ninety one to the Civil War.
Speaker 3: Six pages on the Path to reconstruction, one of the
Speaker 3: most important cases of our generation, a landmark that once
Speaker 3: and for all clarifies the most controversial of all the
Speaker 3: amendments to the US Constitution. The debate is over. Now
Speaker 3: we know with the founders under the sway of the
Speaker 3: Statute of Northampton. No, they were not, the court rules.
Speaker 3: History teaches us. Otherwise the founders would have frowned on
Speaker 3: the way in New York State tried to regulate handguns.
Speaker 3: And we know this because of one man's heroic acquittal.
Speaker 3: If you read the brew and ruling, John Knight looms
Speaker 3: over it like a colossus. John Knight, John Knight, John Knight.
Speaker 3: He pops up again and again like a late seventeenth
Speaker 3: century whack a mole. I've been really drawn effect this morning.
Speaker 3: I was reading over again this stuff about the Rex v. Night,
Speaker 3: the John Knight case. I call up a second Amendment
Speaker 3: scholar named Patrick Charles. Before long talk swung to John Knight.
Speaker 3: Of course it did. There's no quitting John Knight once
Speaker 3: you catch John Knight fever. But you know that it's
Speaker 3: a totally fascinating history taken in itself, but in context
Speaker 3: the idea is it, You know, in the middle of
Speaker 3: a contemporary debate about how to handle the possession of
Speaker 3: dangerous weapons in America, that we're spending our time obsessing
Speaker 3: about a case from the seventeenth century in Bristol and
Speaker 3: England is hilarious.
Speaker 13: Yes, on the one level, you're you're absolutely critic.
Speaker 3: Patrick Charles and I agreed that it was hilarious to
Speaker 3: spend so much time on John Knight. And then what
Speaker 3: do we do? We continue talking about John Knight. John
Speaker 3: Knight is the groundhog who emerges from his musty English
Speaker 3: lair every spring to cast a shadow across twenty first
Speaker 3: century jurisprudence, the beaver who stealthily builds a legal edifice
Speaker 3: out of mud and sticks, The constitutional scholar and a
Speaker 3: founding member of the John Knight fan Club. David Copple
Speaker 3: once combed through the library of an eighteenth century law
Speaker 3: professor named George Wythe who taught law to a Supreme
Speaker 3: Court justice, a couple of presidents, some founding fathers, and
Speaker 3: he found that John Knight's name was all over law
Speaker 3: books back then. Surely this is all the founders were
Speaker 3: talking about over a good pipe and a bottle of
Speaker 3: claret in the drawing rooms of colonial Philadelphia. You were
Speaker 3: 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 3: David Copple, on vacation, says to his wife, we cannot
Speaker 3: quit this storied isle without paying homage to the man
Speaker 3: whose brave example saved America from the tyranny of restrictive
Speaker 3: 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. Well,
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 was quite a challenge.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, but you're in the area and you couldn't
Speaker 3: resist to stop by. And actually I kind of want
Speaker 3: to see Saint Michael's myself.
Speaker 5: Go ahead, tell me why you want to You want
Speaker 5: to see it.
Speaker 3: Too, of course I do. I mean, who wouldn't want
Speaker 3: to learn of this giant in the place of his
Speaker 3: birth and death. But then, just as I was packing
Speaker 3: my bags for Bristol, I thought, wait, let me check
Speaker 3: in with a more disinterested historian of that period. I
Speaker 3: called around, someone recommended a man named Jonathan Barry of
Speaker 3: the University of Eciter. When you, as a historian of
Speaker 3: this period, see the way that John Knight has suddenly
Speaker 3: popped up in American gun rights discourse, what's your reaction.
Speaker 8: Well, I find it bizarre because nobody that's ever heard
Speaker 8: of him or the case, and it has no implication,
Speaker 8: you know, as I know in the English, Jurish Britain's
Speaker 8: not the languagers.
Speaker 11: But you know.
Speaker 8: It's of no significance.
Speaker 3: Huh. So in England, John Knight is a nobody, But
Speaker 3: in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court three and
Speaker 3: a half thousand miles away, he's a superstar. It's a puzzle,
Speaker 3: and it is for puzzles like these that God invented
Speaker 3: revisionous history. One of the problems associated with the coronation
Speaker 3: of John Knight as the savior of the gun rights
Speaker 3: movement is that our understanding of the details of his
Speaker 3: arrest and acquittal was limited. We had the verdict, but
Speaker 3: not much else. After all, it happened in sixty eighty.
Speaker 3: It's not like there are digital records somewhere in the
Speaker 3: Bristol courthouse. What was known about the case came from
Speaker 3: legal catalogs from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the kind
Speaker 3: that a lawyer or a judge might subscribe to that
Speaker 3: offer brief summaries, news briefings of the goings on in
Speaker 3: various courthouses around England. That's what Joyce Malcolm found in
Speaker 3: her Eureka moment, a brief write up from a long
Speaker 3: ago legal newsletter on a matter of Rex v.
Speaker 2: Night.
Speaker 3: It was about a paragraph long. But let's be honest,
Speaker 3: one paragraph in a legal digest is not exactly the
Speaker 3: strongest of foundations for completely overturning our understanding of the
Speaker 3: Second Amendment. And perhaps more ominously, the newly inaugurated members
Speaker 3: of the Sir John Knight Fan Club tended to be lawyers,
Speaker 3: and lawyers deal in black and white, hard facts, the
Speaker 3: letter of the law, tangible evidence. But now they had
Speaker 3: crossed over into the lens of history, and history is
Speaker 3: not like the law at all. History is a living
Speaker 3: organic thing that gets rewritten all the time. I mean,
Speaker 3: why do you think we call this podcast revisionist history
Speaker 3: because historians love to say, wait a minute, I found
Speaker 3: something new that makes me think we didn't quite realize
Speaker 3: what we were talking about before. And in the case
Speaker 3: of Sir John Knight, that something new was the Newsletter
Speaker 3: of the Intrepid Roger.
Speaker 7: Morris ra Jamaris.
Speaker 3: Roger Morris was a journalist who wrote a private newsletter
Speaker 3: in the sixteen eighties for a variety of well connected clients.
Speaker 3: Roger Morris knew everyone and everything in late seventeenth century England.
Speaker 3: He passed on high end gossip. He told stories no
Speaker 3: one had ever heard before, about brothels and prostitutes and
Speaker 3: somebody bearing their breast to the Moroccan ambassador. He wrote
Speaker 3: about how the ice was so thick in the long
Speaker 3: cold winter of sixteen eighty four that people roasted an
Speaker 3: ox on the River Thames. He saw the king's baby
Speaker 3: and air up close and reported, and you have to
Speaker 3: love this little bit of late medieval trolling. The child
Speaker 3: was a large, full child in the head and the
Speaker 3: upper parts, but not suitably proportioned in the lower parts.
Speaker 3: Roger Morris was a gold mine. But there were a
Speaker 3: few problems. The first was that Roger Morris's reputation did
Speaker 3: not extend beyond the late seventeenth century. His newsletters ended
Speaker 3: up in an obscure library in central London where no
Speaker 3: one paid attention to them for several hundred years. Second problem,
Speaker 3: Roger Morris was incredibly prolific. That Roger morris archives extend
Speaker 3: into the millions of words, So if you wanted to
Speaker 3: find out what Roger Morris had to say about this
Speaker 3: or that, you had to make a commitment. Third, and
Speaker 3: maybe the biggest problem of all, Roger Morris's entire life
Speaker 3: work was written in code. I mean, if you're going
Speaker 3: to diss the private parts of the heir to the throne,
Speaker 3: you have to take some precautions.
Speaker 7: There was an attempt by historian called Douglas Lacy to
Speaker 7: try and to start to work on a volume.
Speaker 3: That's the historian Tim Harris.
Speaker 7: He did a book in the nineteen fifties. He couldn't
Speaker 7: break the shorthand couldn't break the code, and it's too
Speaker 7: much for one person's take on.
Speaker 3: A cryptographer from Oxford had to get involved. Teams of
Speaker 3: historians volunteered passing the job down from one generation to
Speaker 3: the next, until finally there it was a full shelf
Speaker 3: of encyclopedia sized volumes, offering hitherto unknown insights into one
Speaker 3: of the most complex eras in British history. It turns
Speaker 3: out had a lot to say about Sir John Knight.
Speaker 7: It's a seven volume edition and there was a team
Speaker 7: of us who did it, and now it's widely available.
Speaker 7: And because it's widely available, people are looking at it
Speaker 7: more and say, oh, there's not more we can find
Speaker 7: out about this is John knightcase. It's an incredible source.
Speaker 7: It has lots of very valuable information, and it's clearly
Speaker 7: well informed and if you could check his information against
Speaker 7: other sources, it's clearly accurate. But he also gives you
Speaker 7: additional information which you won't get elsewhere.
Speaker 3: So much additional information. Oh my god.
Speaker 8: So he was a Bristol merchant. He was from quite
Speaker 8: an important Bristol mercantile family.
Speaker 3: Jonathan Berry, historian at the University of Etceter. The Knights
Speaker 3: ran sugar refineries, they had plantations in the Caribbean. They
Speaker 3: were politically well connected and their sympathies did not lie
Speaker 3: with the Catholic King of England, James the second John
Speaker 3: Knight hated Catholics. One day he learns that a group
Speaker 3: of Irish Catholics are holding a secret mass in a
Speaker 3: house in Bristol. He arranges to have the priest arrested.
Speaker 7: So he gets the Lord Mayor and other magistrates to
Speaker 7: raid this Catholic chapel to a couple of weeks later,
Speaker 7: there's an anti Catholic ritual in Bristol which the government
Speaker 7: suspects the magistrates to Bristol and maybe Sir John Knight
Speaker 7: were involved in encouraging, where they parade through the city
Speaker 7: scoffing the mass. Say they hold a piece of bread
Speaker 7: up in the air, and they have someone dressed as
Speaker 7: a Virgin Mary, and someone dressed as a monk, and
Speaker 7: the monk is fonndeling the Virgin Mary.
Speaker 3: The monk is fondling the Virgin Mary.
Speaker 7: So the government is upset about this.
Speaker 3: The King of England is a Catholic, remember.
Speaker 7: And after that, Sir John Knight claims that he's threatened
Speaker 7: and is beaten up by a couple of irishmen. So
Speaker 7: Sir John Knight was advised to retire to a house
Speaker 7: in the country. But because he was in fear of
Speaker 7: beaten up. He was quite They beat him and kicked
Speaker 7: him when they attacked him when he came into Bristol. Subsequently,
Speaker 7: he came with a company of people carrying swords and
Speaker 7: muscus in front before him, but he left these at
Speaker 7: the walls of the city, because you're not allowed to
Speaker 7: carry arms into the city Bristol. Bristol had its own bylaws.
Speaker 3: Yes, you heard that correctly. He checks his guns at
Speaker 3: the gate. Now this is worth a slight digression.
Speaker 8: We tend to forget how violent and militaristic seventeenth century
Speaker 8: England in general, and a place like Bristol in particular were.
Speaker 3: Jonathan Barry Again.
Speaker 8: One reflection of the fact is that Bristol was a
Speaker 8: leading place for private teering, where basically you capture the
Speaker 8: ships of your rival traders, as it were, so you
Speaker 8: load yourself up. Bristol is just beginning at this period
Speaker 8: to get involved in the slave trade with Africa, which
Speaker 8: of course both involved the use of military force, but also,
Speaker 8: as you may know, that the chief one of the
Speaker 8: chief products that you actually took there to trade with
Speaker 8: was arms, and one of the things that Bristol and
Speaker 8: places around it were producing, in fact, were lots of arms.
Speaker 8: But also they needed weapons, cannons for their ships and
Speaker 8: so on. So we have to imagine the society in
Speaker 8: which there are a lot of people that are used
Speaker 8: to using weapons.
Speaker 3: So why would the nightcase represent some kind of turning
Speaker 3: point in British attitudes towards guns. Bristol was a washing guns,
Speaker 3: so much so that they were forced to put gun
Speaker 3: control measures in place that put anything in America today
Speaker 3: to shame.
Speaker 8: I mean, I think it's absurd to think that the
Speaker 8: crucial issue here was about whether a man was bearing
Speaker 8: arms or not because of lots of people wandering around
Speaker 8: bearing arms.
Speaker 3: Anyway, back to our story with Tim Herris.
Speaker 7: And then on one day he goes to church, and
Speaker 7: he does go with his attendant and goes with a
Speaker 7: gun and sword, but he leaves these, he says, he
Speaker 7: leaves these at the porch with his attendant.
Speaker 3: The church is Saint Michael's on the hill, his church,
Speaker 3: the one overlooking Bristol. He gets off his horse, checks
Speaker 3: his weapons at the door. It's not enormously significant here.
Speaker 3: So here we have a case that Second Amendment types
Speaker 3: are claiming, is this enormously important precedent for the right
Speaker 3: of an individual to bear arms. But the individual in
Speaker 3: question checks his arms at the door of the church.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like this is something to do. He's
Speaker 3: not even he's not waving his gun around or claiming
Speaker 3: he can wave his gun around. He he quite willingly
Speaker 3: adheres to local norms about where guns should and shouldn't
Speaker 3: be carried.
Speaker 7: Yes, that seems to be the case.
Speaker 3: Okay, So Knight enters the church and he shouts out,
Speaker 3: the Catholics are trying to kill me, and they're going
Speaker 3: to try and kill you too. Another quick digression. I
Speaker 3: asked Jonathan Barry about that moment. One question before we
Speaker 3: go on with the story. I want to go back
Speaker 3: how Catholic was Bristol in this era, So.
Speaker 8: If almost almost non existent?
Speaker 3: Oh wait wait, so wait, So John Knight is going
Speaker 3: into this parish church and saying we're all in danger
Speaker 3: of being God freed by the Catholics.
Speaker 8: Somebody, and the number of Catholics in Bristol to have
Speaker 8: conducted such a plot was minuscule.
Speaker 3: So he goes into this church and he says he
Speaker 3: tries to kind of whip the church up into a
Speaker 3: frenzy about the Irish threat and the government says, you've
Speaker 3: gone too far. He's implying that the Catholic king is
Speaker 3: somehow conspiring against his own people, and that's when he
Speaker 3: gets in trouble with the law. Yes, he doesn't sound
Speaker 3: very likable, Sir John Knight.
Speaker 8: Nobody appears to have liked Sir John Knight.
Speaker 3: No, the government goes after John Knight because he's a jackass.
Speaker 3: He's running around conjuring up ridiculous conspiracy theories about Catholics.
Speaker 7: So the charge. All the newsletter accounts I've read emphasize
Speaker 7: that it's the words that he spoke in the church,
Speaker 7: which and therefore this was proof of his disloyalty. That
Speaker 7: was a key issue for why they wanted to arrest him.
Speaker 7: That I decide to get him on the Statute of Northampton,
Speaker 7: which is a statute from thirteen twenty eight saying it's
Speaker 7: a breach of the peace, and he pleaded not guilty.
Speaker 7: He claims that he didn't take the gun or the
Speaker 7: sword into the church. He left it outside. And the
Speaker 7: church is actually just outside the walls of the city
Speaker 7: of Bristol as it was back then as Protestant church. Obviously,
Speaker 7: and he leaves the gun and the sword outside, and
Speaker 7: the jury said, he's got a proven track record of
Speaker 7: being loyal to the government, and so they found him
Speaker 7: not guilty.
Speaker 3: Because he didn't brandish a gun in church. The jury
Speaker 3: didn't find him disloyal because they knew he'd been loyal
Speaker 3: to the previous Protestant king. He wasn't armed, so they
Speaker 3: couldn't get him on that. He just didn't like Catholics.
Speaker 3: And so what this is Bristol in sixteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: No one in Bristol in sixteen eighty six likes Catholics.
Speaker 3: The case against him is dead on arrival. And by
Speaker 3: the way, no one knows this better than the government.
Speaker 7: So they actually don't want to prosecute Knights. They actually
Speaker 7: want Knight to apologize, and then they try and bury
Speaker 7: the case. That seems to be what's implied in the
Speaker 7: newsletter accounts I've read. That doesn't happen. They would have
Speaker 7: preferred if he's apoon, they could have said, okay, we'll
Speaker 7: let it go.
Speaker 3: So to recap John Knight's episode in the Church of
Speaker 3: Saint Michael has become a heroic moment to the American
Speaker 3: gun rights movement. Even though John Knight wasn't actually carrying
Speaker 3: a gun when he entered the Church of Saint Michael,
Speaker 3: even though the case against him had nothing to do
Speaker 3: with guns, even though Bristol in fact had gun control
Speaker 3: ordinances that puts every gun control ordinance in America today
Speaker 3: to shame, And even though the whole Brew ha was
Speaker 3: just about him being a bigot who was terrified of
Speaker 3: a Catholic conspiracy taking over Bristol, even though there were
Speaker 3: hardly any Catholics in Bristol, and even though the whole
Speaker 3: case was dead on arrival, and Knight could have apologized
Speaker 3: and made it all go away, and just didn't feel
Speaker 3: like it. But the only way you would know all
Speaker 3: this is if you were willing to wade to the
Speaker 3: seven volumes of Roger Morris's coded newsletters. And who has
Speaker 3: time for that? I was reading the did you read
Speaker 3: There's the historian Tim Harris wrote an essay on I
Speaker 3: was amused to see there was That? In his he
Speaker 3: talks about the John Night case, about how when he
Speaker 3: goes to the church, the Protestant Church, to speak to
Speaker 3: what he thought of was the threat being posed by
Speaker 3: the Catholics and Bristol. He insists that he checks his
Speaker 3: weapons at the front of the church. And he also
Speaker 3: says that when he goes into Bristol, he abided by
Speaker 3: the bylaws of Bristol and didn't carry his weapons into
Speaker 3: the past the city's limits. I wondered how Joyce Malcolm
Speaker 3: made sense of all these new facts. The Roger Morris
Speaker 3: newsletters were finally decoded more than ten years after she
Speaker 3: wrote her opus to keep him bare arms. So I'm
Speaker 3: just curious that how do those sort of two facts
Speaker 3: fit into this story. So even if we have if
Speaker 3: the Sir John Knight case represents some kind of affirmation
Speaker 3: of the individual right to peace will carry So John
Speaker 3: Knight himself is complying with some pretty strict gun control laws,
Speaker 3: isn't he.
Speaker 6: I think, to be honest that I think that Professor
Speaker 6: Harris is wrong. First of all, because there was such
Speaker 6: a there was all of these duties and requirements to
Speaker 6: protect yourself. And in the in the judge's opinion in
Speaker 6: the in the Sir John Knight case, he says that
Speaker 6: the law allows gentlemen to go about with arms as
Speaker 6: long as they're not you know, unusual and the dangerous weapons.
Speaker 6: So the judge seems at odds with Professor Harris.
Speaker 3: But what do you make of Sir John Knight's claim
Speaker 3: that he checked his weapons at the front of the
Speaker 3: church and didn't carry his weapons into the city of Bristol.
Speaker 6: I find that very odd because if that were the case,
Speaker 6: if there was a law that he couldn't carry his
Speaker 6: weapons into the city of Bristol at all, that the
Speaker 6: whole city was what we would now call a sensitive
Speaker 6: place that no one could wear. It goes against your
Speaker 6: right to protect yourself. That goes against your right to
Speaker 6: protect yourself in your house. It goes against the judges ruling.
Speaker 6: And to be honest, Professor Harris is British. They don't
Speaker 6: think much of the right to be armed.
Speaker 3: The homicide rate in the United States, if you're wondering,
Speaker 3: is four and a half times higher than the United Kingdom.
Speaker 6: When I explored that right and told my British friends
Speaker 6: about it, most of them didn't even realize they ever
Speaker 6: had had a right to be armed. There's this whole
Speaker 6: history and that they haven't looked. And I think it
Speaker 6: was because I said earlier, I asked an American question
Speaker 6: we were interested in that they weren't particularly interested in
Speaker 6: a right to be armed, and so it wasn't something
Speaker 6: that they had studied or been even very curious about
Speaker 6: until I started to write about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, But if the British are interested in a
Speaker 3: right to bear arms, then why are we drawing on
Speaker 3: British Why is the British tradition relevant to the discussion
Speaker 3: of American individual gun rights?
Speaker 6: I think this was a history that was lost to them.
Speaker 6: I think modern British people have a different view of it.
Speaker 6: They're much more dependent on the state taking care of them,
Speaker 6: particularly since World War Two. This is earlier British history.
Speaker 6: Is there a history that they really were not that
Speaker 6: familiar with? You know, they were looking at other things?
Speaker 6: And I think that one of the I guess the
Speaker 6: contribution I made was that I was an American that
Speaker 6: looked at British history in English history with American questions,
Speaker 6: with the things we were interested in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what is the Supreme Court? How did the
Speaker 3: highest legal body in the land, in the landmark ruling
Speaker 3: of New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruin
Speaker 3: handle the fact that their hero has feet of clay.
Speaker 13: I know I had a summarized summer.
Speaker 9: Let me see I think that's it.
Speaker 3: Yes, I asked Patrick Charles to read me the relevant section.
Speaker 13: To the extent that there are multiple plausible interpretations of
Speaker 13: Sir John Knight's case, we will favor the one that
Speaker 13: is more consistent with the Second Amendments command.
Speaker 3: Which, in other words, there's a whole long list of
Speaker 3: ways we can make sense of this. We're going to
Speaker 3: pick the one we like the most. Okay, that's exactly.
Speaker 3: That's the one that makes our life easiest in arguing
Speaker 3: the case we've already decided we want to argue. It's
Speaker 3: like history is cherry picking.
Speaker 13: Oh, it's so cherry picked.
Speaker 3: The Supreme Court decides to clear up the ambiguity over
Speaker 3: the Second Amendment. Let us leave the verdict to history,
Speaker 3: they declare. But then their hero turns out to have
Speaker 3: feet of clay. So they shrug and go on with
Speaker 3: the things that they had already made up their mind
Speaker 3: to do before they tried to convince us that they
Speaker 3: wanted to play historian and go to England and make
Speaker 3: their pilgrimage to Saint Michael on the Hill and pretend
Speaker 3: that the man who they have chosen to symbolize the
Speaker 3: grand tradition of American gun rights is something other than
Speaker 3: a jackass. And after far too many hours reconstructing the
Speaker 3: history of this jackass, I realized that I had fallen
Speaker 3: into the same trap that we've all fallen into in
Speaker 3: his country when it comes to gun violence. We're talking
Speaker 3: about the wrong things, telling irrelevant stories. And over the
Speaker 3: course of the next five episodes of Revisionist History, I
Speaker 3: want to try and change that conversation. I'm going to
Speaker 3: take you to North Carolina to shoot guns, Visit an
Speaker 3: old man in Alabama with a crazy story to tell,
Speaker 3: Revisit the assassination of Robert Kennedy, on and on, but
Speaker 3: no more John Knight. I promise we've all had it
Speaker 3: with John Knight.
Speaker 7: What kind of person was he? Not sort of person
Speaker 7: I want to have a drink with. It was a
Speaker 7: nasty piece of work, really, he was vindictive and spiteful.
Speaker 7: He's a biggot, he's a trouble maker. He's obviously deliberately
Speaker 7: going out to try and provoke trouble in April sixteen
Speaker 7: eighty six when he gets his priests arrested because he's
Speaker 7: staring things up. So yeah, not a nice piece of work.
Speaker 7: That's my basic view of him, he's involved in the
Speaker 7: slave traders sugar refiner. I would hardly see that he
Speaker 7: was the sort of hero figure the champions of American
Speaker 7: liberty would want to celebrate, although maybe that's not the point.
Speaker 2: Oh Our revisionist history Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Bend,
Speaker 2: daph Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin, and Leeming Gistuo.
Speaker 3: We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton, fact
Speaker 3: checking by Arthur Gomperts and Kashelle Williams. Original scoring by
Speaker 3: Luis Kira, with vocals in this episode by the Magnificent
Speaker 3: Ethan Herschenfeld. Mastering by Flon Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence.
Speaker 3: I'm Malcolm Bad