Anyone who’s heard of Batman knows that he does his crime fighting in Gotham City.

The word gotham may possibly stem from an Old English root meaning “goat enclosure.”

There is no real major American city named Gotham, but it is generally seen as a stand in for New York City.  But there was a connection between Gotham and New York long before there was a Batman; and there was a Gotham City long before there was a New York City.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from 1807 for Gotham as applied to New York.  This is attributed to Washington Irving who used the term in something called Salmagundi.  These were a series of satirical pieces and I see from Google Book Search that Irving used the word quite a lot there.

The fact that he was writing satire is relevant here because going further back in history Gotham is a legendary town populated by fools.  So Washington Irving was poking fun at the sophistication of New York.

One example was a French Horn concert that was well played, but not quite so well played as an earlier concert given by

“a gentleman amateur in Gotham pla[ing] a solo on his proboscis.”

That is blowing his nose.

Gotham the legendary town of fools is first cited around 1460 so well before the founding of New Amsterdam—New York’s first European name—in 1626.  But the City of Gotham legend seems to go back further than that and refers, perhaps without basis, to the period of King John right around the year 1200.

It is a true fact that royalty like King John did tour around the countryside.  Some say it was to keep alliances alive.  Some say because their castles got so filthy and smelly they had to keep moving to the next one from time to time.  Another theory is that the royal retinue was so enormous that it gobbled up all the local resources and had to move on or risk starvation.

Starvation of the local people of course, not of the royal court.

Whatever the cause, this last overuse of resources seems to be at the root of the Gotham story.  King John is said to have planned to come to the City of Gotham in the course of his peregrinations and this started the people of the City of Gotham quaking in their boots.  They didn’t want to have to entertain the king in high style.  So they came up with a clever plan.  They decided to all begin acting like they were crazy so that when the advance guard checked out what the accommodations would be like this is what they found:

• A group of townsfolk earnestly trying to drown an eel; and
• another bunch surrounding a bush with arms locked so that the bird perched within couldn’t escape.

The king’s men reported that the place was full of wing-nuts and so King John stayed somewhere else.

I wonder what they’d have made of New York.