March 9, 2009 • 15 mins
Everyone knows the story of the Pied Piper -- but how much of this legend is factual? Learn more about the fact and fiction behind the story of the Pied Piper in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
Hey there, Hey Jane. I have a question for you.
(00:20):
What was your favorite fairy tale growing up? Growing up?
I think it had to be Cinderella. Nice choice. Yeah,
what about you, snow whites. It's a good choice. I
like that definitely. I like I like the Disney baby
with her little bobbed dark hair cut. I think she
was the only Disney princess that I can think of
who had short hair. That was interesting. I never thought
about that. I love us Cinderella, like I guess because
(00:41):
of the whole magical enchanted mice and everything, which I
thought was hilarious when they didn't uh and enchanted If
you saw that with the real mice coming in and
trying to clean the apartment, Oh yeah, well you know,
rodents are really no laughing matter, as we will soon see.
But first, a little background on fairy tales. As most
of you probably know, fairy tales weren't always as light
(01:05):
and fluffy and bedtime story ish as they are today.
They started out with the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm,
and they were pretty dark. And there's a very specific
reason for that, and that's that back when Jacob and
Wilhelm were around UM and the eighteen hundreds, they were
trying to do more of a historical and cultural thing
(01:27):
rather than a literary movement. When they recorded Germany's folklore.
This was not an initiative that they came up with
on their own. They had a friend who was compiling
a lot of um local Germanic tales, and they decided
that they would be sort of these cultural anthropologists and
go out and collect their own stories too. But their
friend was moving a little bit too slowly for their taste.
(01:49):
So by eighteen twelve they published a volume on their
own under the name Brothers Grim and it was called
Children's and Household Tales. This was really popular, right it was.
It was hugely popular, and at first the stories weren't
really geared toward children. It was again, like I said,
more of a matter of historical relevance and and writing
(02:09):
down German folklore. But they toned it down once they
saw how popular it was with children, and the reason
that they were trying to be so authentic in their
recording of these tales is that Napoleon was sweeping throughout
Europe at this time, and they really thought that Germany
would lose its identity if it wasn't recorded. And so
if you look at these tales that the Grimm brothers
wrote down, they have very pressing historical and cultural significance.
(02:35):
And we're going to study one in particular and just
a minute, but just to go ahead and finish out
the Grim brothers story. Um, As the Napoleonic invasions came
throughout Germany and throughout Europe, their professions changed a little
bit too. I think that they took out a stable
law school and decided that wasn't going to work out.
So Jacob actually became a diplomat for a while and
(02:56):
Wilhelm became a secretary to a librarian. And around this
time they put out the second volume. Next came small Edition,
which was a collection of the fairy tales that their
brother Ludwig illustrated. But if you think that the Grim
brothers were all fairy tales, you're mistaken, because they were
philologists too, And if you aren't up too sweet on philology, essentially,
(03:18):
it's uh, it's linguistics really and it puts a lot
of emphasis on a culture's history and identity and how
speech patterns really illuminate that. So they spend some time
in their retirement actually compiling a German dictionary, and Jacob
is credited for a pretty significant linguistic contribution called Grimm's Law.
And I'm no linguist or expert, but as far as
(03:40):
I can understand it, essentially what Grimm's Law boils down
to with the alteration of of sounds in particular words,
as the Germanic language became more and more disparate from
other European languages. And I don't have a really good
example for you guys, but you can all google Grimm's
law and you can see lots of illustrated examples of
(04:02):
how it works. And I think there's even one that
I found online that shares how it works within the
context of a grim Brother's fairy tale. And speaking of
fairy tales, that is what we are going to talk
about today, and the very very scary possibility that one
of the most frightening Grimm Brothers fairy tales might actually
be true. That's right, and we're talking about the Pied
(04:24):
piper of Hamelin, and this was a really popular story
as soon as it came out, like Candice was talking
about and one famous poet, Robert Brownie even even did
a really popular English version of the story. But to
go back to the original Grimm story, you ready for
story time, I am okay, I've got my cookies and
lactaste free milk. Well, don't lay down in bed because
(04:44):
this is going to freak you out so you can't
sleep afterwards. So this story is set in the German
town of Hamlin. This is a real place and it
exists to this day. It starts back in twelve eighty four.
So back then, the according to the story, the whole
town was suffering from this really bad rat and a station.
While it's dealing with this, uh, it doesn't know what
to do. The rats everywhere. So this motley clad fellow
(05:06):
strolls in promises the town people, I can get rid
of all your rats, and uh. The townspeople are so
happy about this that they're like, yes, please, and they
like promise as much money as the motley fellow um once.
So he takes out his pipe and he starts playing
it and magically all the rats come gathering around him.
(05:28):
They follow him wherever he goes, and eventually he leads
them into a river near the near the town. Uh
called the river weezer wiser I'm not sure, but no
visa and that's good. And the rats follow him in
to this to this river as he goes in and
just blindly follow and he and they all drown. So
(05:48):
the townspeople are ecstatic and they are so happy to
be rid of the rats. So the piper is like, okay,
I did my deed, where's my money? And this is
is probably where we get the term pay the piper,
as we'll see um. The town refuses to pay the
piper in this in this situation in the story, and
they say, when the rats are gone, what are you
gonna do. We're not gonna pay you anymore. We're gonna
(06:10):
bring them back to life or something. So he leaves
the town and he's really mad, and justifiably so, but
he swears vengeance, and his vengeance I don't know if
is if it's quite as warranted. So he returns to
the town a little later, and this time he's dressed
a little differently, and he's playing a new tune this time,
and this time, rats don't come, but children do. Every
(06:33):
single child starts uh following him, and not just the children,
right that the mayor's grown daughter. That's right. The Grim
Story mentions the mayor's grown daughter. Which maybe that's a
little flap in the face of the mayor right there,
who is probably responsible for him not getting paid. It's
really interesting. So the kids gather around, dance around him,
and follow him wherever he goes, just like the rats do.
(06:56):
And he doesn't take them into the river, but he
does do something just as bad, and he takes them
to a cave in a nearby nearby mountain, and they're
never heard from again. And what's curious is that some
say in the in the Grim Story, at least some
say that the kids went into the cave and they
came out on the other side, which happened to be
in Transylvania. Either way, nobody heard from the kids again
(07:18):
in the town of Hamelin. So in the context of
a fairy tale, that's disturbing enough, because no one wants
to see all of a town's children just vanish into
thin air under the under the direction of some strange
guy wearing multicolored clothes. It's pretty creepy, but the fact
that it could actually be a real story. Who the
(07:38):
heck was this piper? And I think some historians have
even gone so far as to suggest that he was
a pedophile and he learned the children to a secret
place and then he chopped up their bodies and scattered
them everywhere. Yeah, that's one theory that actually William Manchester writes,
and it's kind of a controversial book. We should say
it's called a world lit only by fire, and that's
what he says. Um A lot of people question that,
(08:00):
and there are other theories, and it's interesting because the
story isn't the only reason people think this might have happened.
There is a little bit more evidence that something terrible
happened in Hamlin, and one piece of evidence is the
idea of a stained glass window that the that the
townspeople put up around the year thirteen hundred. And they
put up this window, apparently in the church, and it
(08:23):
depicted a motley clad fellow with a group of children
just in white. And the window doesn't exist today. If
you go to Hamlin, you won't see it because it
was apparently destroyed. But there are accounts that exist that
say that there are accounts of the window, people who
had seen it and wrote about it, and I had
a pretty Italian inscription, right, that's right. It had an
inscription around it that said that a hundred and thirty
(08:45):
children were brought into danger and lost. So um, it
does beg the question if something did happen. And another
piece of evidence that popped up was about a century
after the window was put up, there is an account
of this monk writing that a man playing the flute
came into the town and led the kids out very curious,
(09:06):
And by sixteen o three the town puts up a
three hundred years after the story would have apparently happened.
Around that year, they the townspeople put up a facade
of a building with another similar inscription about a pied
piper bringing the kids into danger. And one of the
issues that we've actually discussed before on an earlier podcast
about Lady Gdiva another story that revolved around amongst writings
(09:31):
and a stained glass window, is that when we're talking
about oral storytelling, only so much can really be trusted.
And what's great about the Brothers Grim is that they
finally took these oral stories and recorded them but if
they were in fact based in history, real events that occurred,
who knows how many times the stories have been manipulated
(09:52):
by word of mouth and by people who didn't quite
understand what they were saying into the tale that it became.
And uh, you may recall an earlier podcast that Jane
and I did about the crusades, and Jane discussed the
children's crusade, and that's another possibility that these children followed
one child in particular who may have claimed to have
a vision from God that he was supposed to lead
(10:15):
his fellow children into battle and you know, to avenge
the Holy Land, and that could have been its Yeah,
that is one possible theory, and it's kind of it's
a little convincing. I think that could have happened because
it was around that time, maybe a little bit later.
But there is another really interesting theory that maybe the
children are all suffering from some horrible disease and it
(10:37):
caused them to die, and people historians they guess that
perhaps this is an early form of the plague. We
did an earlier podcast on the Black Death, and um,
if you heard that, you'll know a little bit about
about that disease and how horrible it was, and historians
postulate to that the motley clad fellow who was the
pied piper may not have been dressed in multicolored armands. Instead,
(11:01):
his skin could have been motley, It could have had
red splotches that were symptomatic of some sort of disease
that he had. They could have been some sort of
skin lesions, and the idea that he may have even
been afflicted with Huntington's disease, which is a disease that
manifests and people who are of middle age, and it
can be characterized by um I think mild bouts of dementia,
(11:24):
and people could act in rather exuberant ways. We know
that the piper came in dancing a little bit merrily,
supposedly playing on his pipe, leading the children out in
a very fanciful dance and song. So maybe he could
have been demented in some way. We we don't really know,
but I think that there is enough historical evidence to
suggest that there is a grain of historical truth to
(11:44):
the pie Piper of Hamlin. Those true, and it's really interesting,
And I do want to mention one less theory which
might be the most convincing for me at least. Remember
I mentioned at the end of the story that some
say that the kids came out at the other side
in Transylvania. And there is some evidence that a man
came to the town of Hamilin around the right time
of the story, and he was looking for people to
(12:04):
help him colonize parts of eastern Europe. So there's speculation
at least that the kids might have come with him
and taking taking them to a place around where Transylvania
was uh. And that's what actually happened to the children,
and that may shed some light on the fact that
the mayor's grown daughter maybe maybe she had some sort
of special permission from her father as the leader of
(12:26):
the town, to get with them and help them colonize
this new land. That's right, Kenemy really know. But what
is really interesting is that you may be thinking, well,
thank goodness, there are no more rats in the town
of Hamlin. Left another pied piper come along and take
all of their children. While I'm very sorry to inform
you that the Times actually reported on December seventeenth of
two thousand eight that Hamlin has a rat problem again,
(12:49):
and the particular reporter who was covering the story used
the phrase rat catchers are in vogue again, so, and
they're attributing the rat problem to these allot in gardens
around the periphery of the city. And they're sort of
like community gardens, you know, you can pay a fee
to have a small parcel of land to grow flowers
(13:10):
and vegetables and fruits, and if they're not tended to,
they just they beckon for rats to come and just
create a mess. So I think that they were estimating
that more than two hundred packs of rats had been
identified in the city as of December two thousand and eight.
And rats are they're pretty productive, and the boudoir as
it were, and I think that one couple can breed
(13:32):
up to two thousand descendants per year. So there's a
debate right now over how they're going to kill all
of these rats and do it in a humane way,
which probably was not a huge concern back when the
Grim Brothers would have been writing. I think that less
concerned about the humanity of of killing rats correctly, sure,
so I guess the stories is a lot more alive
today in Himland than they wanted to be. But also
(13:53):
they do get a lot of tourism to this day
you can visit Hammond. Um. I guess it's spilled differently now,
but it's the same town and every Sunday actually in
the summer they act out the story. So they do.
They do, carry in's a lot of tourism for it,
they do. I think they even make rat shaped bunds
in local bakery. They have a musical called Rats, you know,
not too dissimilar from our cats over here. Um, you
(14:14):
can even take a rat catch your tour. And from
what I understand, especially in you know, Hamlin, today, it's
a pretty thriving profession. You can make a pretty penny
off being a rat catcher. And back during the time
of the Black Death and the plague, it was a
very esteem profession because you're really putting yourself in a
lot of fire like a policeman would today. You know,
there's always that risk that you could die when you're
(14:34):
on the job. So anyway, Pie Piper one of the
oldest rat catchers and and uh Grim brother history. Remember
to pay the piper, exactly pay the piper, and for
even more about fairy tales that have a grain historical
truth and other interesting characters from history, be sure to
check out how stuff works dot com and if you
(14:55):
have any ideas about a historical topic you'd like to
hear us discuss, email us at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands
of other topics because at how stuff works dot com.
M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
Hey there, Hey Jane. I have a question for you.
(00:20):
What was your favorite fairy tale growing up? Growing up?
I think it had to be Cinderella. Nice choice. Yeah,
what about you, snow whites. It's a good choice. I
like that definitely. I like I like the Disney baby
with her little bobbed dark hair cut. I think she
was the only Disney princess that I can think of
who had short hair. That was interesting. I never thought
about that. I love us Cinderella, like I guess because
(00:41):
of the whole magical enchanted mice and everything, which I
thought was hilarious when they didn't uh and enchanted If
you saw that with the real mice coming in and
trying to clean the apartment, Oh yeah, well you know,
rodents are really no laughing matter, as we will soon see.
But first, a little background on fairy tales. As most
of you probably know, fairy tales weren't always as light
(01:05):
and fluffy and bedtime story ish as they are today.
They started out with the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm,
and they were pretty dark. And there's a very specific
reason for that, and that's that back when Jacob and
Wilhelm were around UM and the eighteen hundreds, they were
trying to do more of a historical and cultural thing
(01:27):
rather than a literary movement. When they recorded Germany's folklore.
This was not an initiative that they came up with
on their own. They had a friend who was compiling
a lot of um local Germanic tales, and they decided
that they would be sort of these cultural anthropologists and
go out and collect their own stories too. But their
friend was moving a little bit too slowly for their taste.
(01:49):
So by eighteen twelve they published a volume on their
own under the name Brothers Grim and it was called
Children's and Household Tales. This was really popular, right it was.
It was hugely popular, and at first the stories weren't
really geared toward children. It was again, like I said,
more of a matter of historical relevance and and writing
(02:09):
down German folklore. But they toned it down once they
saw how popular it was with children, and the reason
that they were trying to be so authentic in their
recording of these tales is that Napoleon was sweeping throughout
Europe at this time, and they really thought that Germany
would lose its identity if it wasn't recorded. And so
if you look at these tales that the Grimm brothers
wrote down, they have very pressing historical and cultural significance.
(02:35):
And we're going to study one in particular and just
a minute, but just to go ahead and finish out
the Grim brothers story. Um, As the Napoleonic invasions came
throughout Germany and throughout Europe, their professions changed a little
bit too. I think that they took out a stable
law school and decided that wasn't going to work out.
So Jacob actually became a diplomat for a while and
(02:56):
Wilhelm became a secretary to a librarian. And around this
time they put out the second volume. Next came small Edition,
which was a collection of the fairy tales that their
brother Ludwig illustrated. But if you think that the Grim
brothers were all fairy tales, you're mistaken, because they were
philologists too, And if you aren't up too sweet on philology, essentially,
(03:18):
it's uh, it's linguistics really and it puts a lot
of emphasis on a culture's history and identity and how
speech patterns really illuminate that. So they spend some time
in their retirement actually compiling a German dictionary, and Jacob
is credited for a pretty significant linguistic contribution called Grimm's Law.
And I'm no linguist or expert, but as far as
(03:40):
I can understand it, essentially what Grimm's Law boils down
to with the alteration of of sounds in particular words,
as the Germanic language became more and more disparate from
other European languages. And I don't have a really good
example for you guys, but you can all google Grimm's
law and you can see lots of illustrated examples of
(04:02):
how it works. And I think there's even one that
I found online that shares how it works within the
context of a grim Brother's fairy tale. And speaking of
fairy tales, that is what we are going to talk
about today, and the very very scary possibility that one
of the most frightening Grimm Brothers fairy tales might actually
be true. That's right, and we're talking about the Pied
(04:24):
piper of Hamelin, and this was a really popular story
as soon as it came out, like Candice was talking
about and one famous poet, Robert Brownie even even did
a really popular English version of the story. But to
go back to the original Grimm story, you ready for
story time, I am okay, I've got my cookies and
lactaste free milk. Well, don't lay down in bed because
(04:44):
this is going to freak you out so you can't
sleep afterwards. So this story is set in the German
town of Hamlin. This is a real place and it
exists to this day. It starts back in twelve eighty four.
So back then, the according to the story, the whole
town was suffering from this really bad rat and a station.
While it's dealing with this, uh, it doesn't know what
to do. The rats everywhere. So this motley clad fellow
(05:06):
strolls in promises the town people, I can get rid
of all your rats, and uh. The townspeople are so
happy about this that they're like, yes, please, and they
like promise as much money as the motley fellow um once.
So he takes out his pipe and he starts playing
it and magically all the rats come gathering around him.
(05:28):
They follow him wherever he goes, and eventually he leads
them into a river near the near the town. Uh
called the river weezer wiser I'm not sure, but no
visa and that's good. And the rats follow him in
to this to this river as he goes in and
just blindly follow and he and they all drown. So
(05:48):
the townspeople are ecstatic and they are so happy to
be rid of the rats. So the piper is like, okay,
I did my deed, where's my money? And this is
is probably where we get the term pay the piper,
as we'll see um. The town refuses to pay the
piper in this in this situation in the story, and
they say, when the rats are gone, what are you
gonna do. We're not gonna pay you anymore. We're gonna
(06:10):
bring them back to life or something. So he leaves
the town and he's really mad, and justifiably so, but
he swears vengeance, and his vengeance I don't know if
is if it's quite as warranted. So he returns to
the town a little later, and this time he's dressed
a little differently, and he's playing a new tune this time,
and this time, rats don't come, but children do. Every
(06:33):
single child starts uh following him, and not just the children,
right that the mayor's grown daughter. That's right. The Grim
Story mentions the mayor's grown daughter. Which maybe that's a
little flap in the face of the mayor right there,
who is probably responsible for him not getting paid. It's
really interesting. So the kids gather around, dance around him,
and follow him wherever he goes, just like the rats do.
(06:56):
And he doesn't take them into the river, but he
does do something just as bad, and he takes them
to a cave in a nearby nearby mountain, and they're
never heard from again. And what's curious is that some
say in the in the Grim Story, at least some
say that the kids went into the cave and they
came out on the other side, which happened to be
in Transylvania. Either way, nobody heard from the kids again
(07:18):
in the town of Hamelin. So in the context of
a fairy tale, that's disturbing enough, because no one wants
to see all of a town's children just vanish into
thin air under the under the direction of some strange
guy wearing multicolored clothes. It's pretty creepy, but the fact
that it could actually be a real story. Who the
(07:38):
heck was this piper? And I think some historians have
even gone so far as to suggest that he was
a pedophile and he learned the children to a secret
place and then he chopped up their bodies and scattered
them everywhere. Yeah, that's one theory that actually William Manchester writes,
and it's kind of a controversial book. We should say
it's called a world lit only by fire, and that's
what he says. Um A lot of people question that,
(08:00):
and there are other theories, and it's interesting because the
story isn't the only reason people think this might have happened.
There is a little bit more evidence that something terrible
happened in Hamlin, and one piece of evidence is the
idea of a stained glass window that the that the
townspeople put up around the year thirteen hundred. And they
put up this window, apparently in the church, and it
(08:23):
depicted a motley clad fellow with a group of children
just in white. And the window doesn't exist today. If
you go to Hamlin, you won't see it because it
was apparently destroyed. But there are accounts that exist that
say that there are accounts of the window, people who
had seen it and wrote about it, and I had
a pretty Italian inscription, right, that's right. It had an
inscription around it that said that a hundred and thirty
(08:45):
children were brought into danger and lost. So um, it
does beg the question if something did happen. And another
piece of evidence that popped up was about a century
after the window was put up, there is an account
of this monk writing that a man playing the flute
came into the town and led the kids out very curious,
(09:06):
And by sixteen o three the town puts up a
three hundred years after the story would have apparently happened.
Around that year, they the townspeople put up a facade
of a building with another similar inscription about a pied
piper bringing the kids into danger. And one of the
issues that we've actually discussed before on an earlier podcast
about Lady Gdiva another story that revolved around amongst writings
(09:31):
and a stained glass window, is that when we're talking
about oral storytelling, only so much can really be trusted.
And what's great about the Brothers Grim is that they
finally took these oral stories and recorded them but if
they were in fact based in history, real events that occurred,
who knows how many times the stories have been manipulated
(09:52):
by word of mouth and by people who didn't quite
understand what they were saying into the tale that it became.
And uh, you may recall an earlier podcast that Jane
and I did about the crusades, and Jane discussed the
children's crusade, and that's another possibility that these children followed
one child in particular who may have claimed to have
a vision from God that he was supposed to lead
(10:15):
his fellow children into battle and you know, to avenge
the Holy Land, and that could have been its Yeah,
that is one possible theory, and it's kind of it's
a little convincing. I think that could have happened because
it was around that time, maybe a little bit later.
But there is another really interesting theory that maybe the
children are all suffering from some horrible disease and it
(10:37):
caused them to die, and people historians they guess that
perhaps this is an early form of the plague. We
did an earlier podcast on the Black Death, and um,
if you heard that, you'll know a little bit about
about that disease and how horrible it was, and historians
postulate to that the motley clad fellow who was the
pied piper may not have been dressed in multicolored armands. Instead,
(11:01):
his skin could have been motley, It could have had
red splotches that were symptomatic of some sort of disease
that he had. They could have been some sort of
skin lesions, and the idea that he may have even
been afflicted with Huntington's disease, which is a disease that
manifests and people who are of middle age, and it
can be characterized by um I think mild bouts of dementia,
(11:24):
and people could act in rather exuberant ways. We know
that the piper came in dancing a little bit merrily,
supposedly playing on his pipe, leading the children out in
a very fanciful dance and song. So maybe he could
have been demented in some way. We we don't really know,
but I think that there is enough historical evidence to
suggest that there is a grain of historical truth to
(11:44):
the pie Piper of Hamlin. Those true, and it's really interesting,
And I do want to mention one less theory which
might be the most convincing for me at least. Remember
I mentioned at the end of the story that some
say that the kids came out at the other side
in Transylvania. And there is some evidence that a man
came to the town of Hamilin around the right time
of the story, and he was looking for people to
(12:04):
help him colonize parts of eastern Europe. So there's speculation
at least that the kids might have come with him
and taking taking them to a place around where Transylvania
was uh. And that's what actually happened to the children,
and that may shed some light on the fact that
the mayor's grown daughter maybe maybe she had some sort
of special permission from her father as the leader of
(12:26):
the town, to get with them and help them colonize
this new land. That's right, Kenemy really know. But what
is really interesting is that you may be thinking, well,
thank goodness, there are no more rats in the town
of Hamlin. Left another pied piper come along and take
all of their children. While I'm very sorry to inform
you that the Times actually reported on December seventeenth of
two thousand eight that Hamlin has a rat problem again,
(12:49):
and the particular reporter who was covering the story used
the phrase rat catchers are in vogue again, so, and
they're attributing the rat problem to these allot in gardens
around the periphery of the city. And they're sort of
like community gardens, you know, you can pay a fee
to have a small parcel of land to grow flowers
(13:10):
and vegetables and fruits, and if they're not tended to,
they just they beckon for rats to come and just
create a mess. So I think that they were estimating
that more than two hundred packs of rats had been
identified in the city as of December two thousand and eight.
And rats are they're pretty productive, and the boudoir as
it were, and I think that one couple can breed
(13:32):
up to two thousand descendants per year. So there's a
debate right now over how they're going to kill all
of these rats and do it in a humane way,
which probably was not a huge concern back when the
Grim Brothers would have been writing. I think that less
concerned about the humanity of of killing rats correctly, sure,
so I guess the stories is a lot more alive
today in Himland than they wanted to be. But also
(13:53):
they do get a lot of tourism to this day
you can visit Hammond. Um. I guess it's spilled differently now,
but it's the same town and every Sunday actually in
the summer they act out the story. So they do.
They do, carry in's a lot of tourism for it,
they do. I think they even make rat shaped bunds
in local bakery. They have a musical called Rats, you know,
not too dissimilar from our cats over here. Um, you
(14:14):
can even take a rat catch your tour. And from
what I understand, especially in you know, Hamlin, today, it's
a pretty thriving profession. You can make a pretty penny
off being a rat catcher. And back during the time
of the Black Death and the plague, it was a
very esteem profession because you're really putting yourself in a
lot of fire like a policeman would today. You know,
there's always that risk that you could die when you're
(14:34):
on the job. So anyway, Pie Piper one of the
oldest rat catchers and and uh Grim brother history. Remember
to pay the piper, exactly pay the piper, and for
even more about fairy tales that have a grain historical
truth and other interesting characters from history, be sure to
check out how stuff works dot com and if you
(14:55):
have any ideas about a historical topic you'd like to
hear us discuss, email us at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands
of other topics because at how stuff works dot com.
M
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