Gotham's folklore is unusual among the entries in this record set for being comic rather than eerie, but it is one of the best documented and longest surviving folk traditions attached to any Nottinghamshire village, and it deserves its place here on that strength alone.
The core story holds that the villagers of Gotham, faced with word that King John intended to travel through their village, deliberately acted like fools and madmen. At the time, any road a reigning king travelled on by law became a public highway, a costly and unwelcome burden for a small village to take on. When the king's messengers arrived to scout ahead, they found the villagers engaged in a series of absurd tasks: trying to drown an eel by throwing it into a pond, and joining hands in a circle around a thornbush in an attempt to trap a cuckoo inside it so that it would sing all year. Convinced the village was populated entirely by lunatics unworthy of a royal visit, the king is said to have redirected his route elsewhere, and the villagers, so the story concludes, had the last laugh.
The tale is genuinely old. It is referenced in the 15th-century Wakefield mystery plays, and around 1540 a printed collection called Certaine Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham gathered twenty such stories, a book popular enough to be reprinted with little change almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Its longest-lasting legacy, though, came centuries later and an ocean away: the American writer Washington Irving borrowed the name Gotham as a satirical nickname for New York City, and that nickname eventually attached itself to the fictional Gotham City of the Batman comics, an unlikely but well documented line running directly back to this one small Nottinghamshire village.
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