Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is co-founder of Pushkin Industries and host of the hit podcast Revisionist History. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping…
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In the battles over gun rights, a shadowy English nobleman from the 17th century has unexpectedly taken center stage. Who was he? What did he do that has — 300 years later — endeared him to a generation of legal scholars? Revisionist History explores the cult of personality around the mysterious Sir John Knight.
Malcolm Gladwell
It is 1686 in Bristol, a major port and manufacturing center on the southwest coast of England. A local merchant named John Knight, Sir John Knight, is riding up a steep road outside the city to an Anglican church, St. Michael's on the hill. Gray stone, slate roof, sturdy walls, built during medieval times to withstand the full brunt of hostile force, the city of Bristol spread out below. Sir John Knight bursts in and then... Oh, my God.
Ethan Herschenfeld
John Knight.
Malcolm Gladwell
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, I invite you to descend with me into the deep and bottomless historical pit that is Sir John Knight, the irrepressible Englishman who has achieved, more than three centuries after his death, a sudden and extraordinary celebrity.
How was it that the John Knight case came to such prominence? Who uncovered it? It doesn't sound like... This wasn't a case that was in... This wasn't a famous case in England at the time, was it?
Patrick Charles
No, I hate to say it's like... If you talk about history, like you can go to Africa and find a rock with somebody's name on it that says, "Founded by a white guy in 1918." No, it was existent, right? It was there. It's always been there.
Malcolm Gladwell
So I wanted to explain how that happened and why he matters, and I know that this is something you've thought about, so I naturally wanted to call you. First question, settle for me, who is the first modern legal scholar to reference Sir John Knight?
David Kopel
Depends on what you mean by modern. William Hawkins in his 1716 treatise.
Malcolm Gladwell
I mean last 50 years, his most recent celebrity.
David Kopel
Well, I mean he was around in case law, not as common as he's been in the 21st century, but he was always around in case law to some degree, you know. Shows up in a major 1843 case in North Carolina, and then another 1968 North Carolina case among others.
Malcolm Gladwell
So yeah, I got really interested in the way the Second Amendment debate has been transformed, and in this sort of focus on history. And the reason I got into it is I got really fascinated by the Sir John Knight case.
Joyce Malcolm
Oh, yes. Right.
Malcolm Gladwell
And everyone says, "Oh, the person you have to talk to is Joyce Malcolm." So here I am, and here you are.
Joyce Malcolm
And here I am. Right.
Malcolm Gladwell
When you were doing your book, your original work on this, how did you come across the Sir John Knight case?
Joyce Malcolm
Well, it's a long time ago now.
Malcolm Gladwell
John Knight's name is spoken first only in the smallest of historical circles. Then it gets repeated again and again with increasing frequency in bigger and bigger rooms.
Tim Harris
I was at a conference in DC where they were discussing Second Amendment issues and they had people giving papers from all perspectives. And I was just there to offer some historical input, and I found myself having to clarify some of the basic details, and misassertions had been made about what had actually happened. So I said, "I happen to know about this because I've read a lot of the sources."
Malcolm Gladwell
Do we know what Sir John looked like? His family life, his personal circumstances? Not really, but we do know something of his character, principled to a fault, contentious, possessed of a steadfastness of mind and deed.
Jonathan Barry
So he was a Bristol merchant. He was from quite an important Bristol Mercantile family. And perhaps because his father had been a sugar maker, Sir John Knight appears to have gone out to the West Indies and spent a period of time there, apparently rather controversially, because when he then applied a couple of years before the period we're dealing with to be the governor of the Leeward Islands, he appears to have been vetoed by the people there saying that from their experience of him, he was the last person that they wanted to come out as the governor. And it may have been partly his resentment at that throwback, people have suggested, may have been one reason why he turned against the government of James II, which up until that point, he had been very strongly supporting. So he appears to have been a man of a short temper, much disliked by many other people and highly manipulative.
Malcolm Gladwell
But do we need to make friends of our heroes? No, we don't. What we demand of our heroes is that they serve some larger cause, that they stand for something, that their name would be uttered with reverence on some grand stage.
Neil Gorsuch
I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends on the other side about the statute of Northampton.
Malcolm Gladwell
Do you know who that is? Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice, during oral arguments in November of 2021, posing a question to the legendary appellate lawyer, Paul Clement.
Neil Gorsuch
We haven't heard about that today and I just wanted to give you a chance.
Paul D. Clement
Thank you, Justice Gorsuch. I'd say just a couple of quick things about the statute of Northampton.
Malcolm Gladwell
Wait for it. Wait for it.
Paul D. Clement
First of all, I think that it was very clear from the Knight's case and the treatises that this court relied on in Heller, that by the time of the framing of the...
Malcolm Gladwell
The Knight's case.
Ethan Herschenfeld
John Knight.
Malcolm Gladwell
When the final accounting is done at the 21st century, a handful of Supreme Court cases will stand out as landmarks. The Citizens United case from 2010, for example, which freed corporations to spend enormous amounts of money on political candidates. The decision to overturn abortion rights. And very high on that list, a pivotal gun rights case that came before the court in late 2021.
John G. Roberts, Jr.
We will hear argument this morning in Case 2843, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruen.
Malcolm Gladwell
New York Rifle and Pistol, otherwise known as the Bruen case. Bruen was about the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
A well-regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of a free state comma the right of the people to keep and bear arms comma shall not be infringed.
What does that sentence mean? For years and years, scholars have argued about that. We even weighed in on it here at Revisionist History, if you remember, in season three's Divide and Conquer episode with an investigation of the significance of the commas that surround the phrase, "Being necessary to the security of a free state." But then along comes the Bruen case.
For a hundred years, a law has been on the books in New York state that says you can only get a handgun if you prove you need one for some specific purpose. And the gun lovers of New York are unhappy about this. They sue. The Supreme Court agrees to take the case, and in November of 2021, lawyers for both sides gather for what is the first stage in all Supreme Court cases, oral arguments. They're in the court's central chamber on First Street across from the Capitol, an imposing room in the Grand Neoclassical revival style, 44-foot ceilings, 24 ionic columns and marble shipped from Liguria, Italy. The justices are sitting all in a row behind a long curved mahogany table there to hear the lawyers on both sides of the Bruen case present their oral arguments. The room is packed. A sense of anticipation is in the air.
Paul D. Clement
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, the text of the Second Amendment enshrines a right not just to keep arms, but to bear them. And the relevant history and tradition exhaustively surveyed by this court in the Heller decision confirmed that the text protects an individual right to carry firearms outside the home for purposes of self-defense.
Malcolm Gladwell
Paul Clement, lawyer for the Gun rights group.
Paul D. Clement
I'm happy to continue by-
Clarence Thomas
Mr. Clement, sorry to interrupt you.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. Thomas would go on to write the court's majority opinion in the case. This is the moment where he tips his hand, shows us where he's leaning.
Clarence Thomas
If we analyze this and use history, tradition, the text of the Second Amendment, we're going to have to do it by analogy. So can you give me a regulation in history that would form a basis for legitimate regulation today? If we're going to do it by analogy, what would we analogize it to? What would that look like?
Malcolm Gladwell
If you were a law student armed with a yellow highlighter, you would underline the words history and tradition. Why? Because Thomas is telling us something crucial here. He doesn't care about the commas in the Second Amendment. He doesn't care about the arcane theories of the legal scholars. He doesn't even care about what the citizens of New York State may or may not think about restricting handguns. He cares about what the founders thought when they wrote the Second Amendment. And when he says, "You're going to have to do it by analogy," what he means is the only way to decide whether a restriction on guns is valid is consistent with the Second Amendment is did the founders way back when ever consider a restriction that looks like this New York law? Would they have been okay with it? And Clement agrees.
Clarence Thomas
So can you give me a regulation in history that would form a basis for legitimate regulation today?
Malcolm Gladwell
Yes, that's what this case is about. We're arguing history here.
Barbara D. Underwood
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court...
Malcolm Gladwell
Then the attorney for the other side stands up, Barbara Underwood, Solicitor General of the state of New York.
Barbara D. Underwood
For centuries, English and American law have imposed limits on carrying firearms in public in the interest of public safety. The history runs from the 14th century statute of Northampton, which prohibited carrying arms in fairs and markets and other public gathering places, to similar laws adopted by half of the American colonies and states in the founding period.
Malcolm Gladwell
The Statute of Northampton. That's the third time we've heard it mentioned. In a case heard in the 21st century about a law passed in the 20th century, the court has asked for insight into how the founders felt in the 18th century, and the lawyers said, "Well then, we need to look to the 14th century. 1328 to be precise. Your Honor, during the reign of Edward II, the English parliament passed the Statute of Northampton, which says that no man shall disturb the peace by riding armed night or day without, quote, forfeiting their bodies to prison at the king's pleasure.
The statute of Northampton is part of English common law. English common law is what the first English settlers brought with them on the Mayflower. English common law is what the founding fathers learned in school. You want an analogy from history? You want to play early history? I give you a crucial law from 1328, which absolutely the founders knew about that restricts guns WAY MORE than anything we're talking about in this court, your honor. If court cases are chess, this is check. The only way the gun rights crowd can win is if they can find their own bit of ancient history that trumps the Statute of Northampton, and incredibly, they do.
Ethan Herschenfeld
John Knight.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. Yeah. Going back to when you were doing your book, your original work on this, how did you come across the Sir John Knight case?
Joyce Malcolm
Well, it was a long time ago now, but I looked through all of the cases, and there are these little handbooks on what the law was at different times that were published to help justices of the peace and judges. I looked through the laws, I did a lot of manuscript reading and really investigating what Parliament was doing, what was happening at that time.
Malcolm Gladwell
Joyce Malcolm, the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, in Virginia. In a world where history matters more than law or public sentiment, historians become heroes. The magazine National Review once described Joyce Malcolm as “the nice girl who saved the second Amendment.”
[She] quote “looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun-control wars. Small, slender, and bookish, she’s a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into the archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences.”
Malcolm felt the argument over gun rights had been set adrift from history. If we didn't know what the founders thought, how would we know what we should think? In her most famous book, To Keep And Bear Arms: The Origin Of An American Right, she set out to answer that question. And while poring through case books from the 18th and 19th century, she found it, the key that unlocked the whole mystery. No more than a handful of paragraphs and a short summary, but the story it told was riveting.
It's 1686. England is overwhelmingly Protestant, legally and officially dominated by the Church of England. But for a brief period in the 1680s, the king was James the II, who was Catholic.
And Church of England loyalists were outraged by the possibility that the king might try and empower his fellow Catholics. And one of those outraged Church of England loyalists was a merchant from the coastal town of Bristol, a man named Sir John Knight.
One day, Knight rides up a steep road outside Bristol to the Anglican Church of St. Michael on the Hill. He bursts in, the story goes, waving his guns, gives an impassioned speech. James the II hears of it and has Knight arrested, charges him under the Statute of Northampton.
Tim Harris
The information sets forth that "the defendant did walk about the streets armed with guns, and that he went into the Church of St. Michael in Bristol in the time of divine service with a gun to terrify the king's subjects."
Malcolm Gladwell
And what happens? The jury decides, not guilty. Joyce Malcolm reads this and it takes her breath away. Everyone thinks that English common law, on which the American legal tradition is based, was hostile to people walking around with guns, but that is not true. John Knight was acquitted. John Knight goes up against the Statute of Northampton and John Knight wins. One side says, "The Statute of Northampton, check." The other side counters, "John Knight, checkmate."
Joyce Malcolm
So there's been this big debate about what the Statute of Northampton meant, but I can say that if it was archaic by the 17th century, it was certainly archaic by the 18th century when we got the Second Amendment, and for sure, the 21st century.
Malcolm Gladwell
The nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. And if you read through the briefs filed before the Supreme Court in Bruen, what do you find? John Knight. Everywhere. We hear about the famous case of Sir John Knight. We get history lessons on John Knight. We learn that the legal entanglement he found himself in after he burst into the church at St. Michael's on the Hill is the most, quote, significant precedent, quote, in understanding a crucial turn in Second Amendment law. During oral arguments, Neil Gorsuch lobs a softball at Paul Clement about the Statute of Northampton.
Neil Gorsuch
I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends on the other side about the Statute of Northampton.
Malcolm Gladwell
And Paul Clement knocks the question out of the park.
John Knight, baby!
Ethan Herschenfeld
John Knight.
Malcolm Gladwell
Then six months later comes the final ruling in Bruen. Just as Clarence Thomas promised, it's all about history. Eight pages on the period between 1285 and 1776. Five pages on colonial America. Nine pages on 1791 to the Civil War. Six pages on the path to reconstruction. One of the most important cases of our generation, a landmark, that once and for all clarifies the most controversial of all the amendments to the US Constitution. The debate is over. Now we know. Were the founders under the sway of the Statute of Northampton? No, they were not, the court rules. History teaches us otherwise. The founders would've frowned on the way New York state tried to regulate handguns. And we know this because of one man's heroic acquittal. If you read the Bruen ruling, John Knight looms over it like a colossus. John Knight, John Knight, John Knight. He pops up again and again like a late 17th century whack-a-mole.
I've been really drawn... In fact, this morning I was reading over again the stuff about the Rex v. Knight, the John Knight case. I called up a Second Amendment scholar named Patrick Charles. Before long, talk swung to John Knight. Of course it did. There's no quitting John Knight once you catch John Knight fever. But it's a totally fascinating history taken in itself, but in context, the idea that in the middle of a contemporary debate about how to handle the possession of dangerous weapons in America, that we're spending our time obsessing about a case from the 17th century in Bristol in England is hilarious.
Patrick Charles
Yes, on the one level, you're absolutely correct.
Malcolm Gladwell
Patrick Charles and I agreed that it was hilarious to spend so much time on John Knight. And then what did we do? We continued talking about John Knight.
John Knight is the groundhog who emerges from his musty English lair every spring to cast a shadow across 21st century jurisprudence. The beaver who stealthily builds a legal edifice out of mud and sticks.
The constitutional scholar and a founding member of the John Knight fan club, David Kopel, once combed through the library of an 18th century law professor named George Wythe, who taught law to a supreme court justice, a couple of presidents, some founding fathers, and he found that John Knight's name was all over law books back then. Surely this is all the founders were talking about over a good pipe and a bottle of claret in the drawing rooms of colonial Philadelphia.
You were in Bristol not long ago?
David Kopel
I was. My wife and I were on vacation, and as we were on our way from Cornwall to Wales, we did stop at St. Michael Church in Bristol where all this stuff happened because I wanted to see it, maybe see if Sir John Knight was buried in that graveyard.
Malcolm Gladwell
David Kopel, on vacation, says to his wife, "We cannot quit this storied aisle without paying homage to the man whose brave example saved America from the tyranny of restrictive gun laws."
David Kopel
And it was interesting. It's not a huge cathedral type church. It's a medium-sized church, but it's up on the hill as I learned the hard way because I was driving a stick shift, and getting up that very steep hill was quite a challenge.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, yeah. But you're in the area and you couldn't resist to stop by. And actually, I kind of want to see St. Michael's, myself.
David Kopel
Well, go ahead. Tell me why. You want to see it too?
Malcolm Gladwell
Of course I do. I mean, who wouldn't want to learn of this giant in the place of his birth and death? But then just as I was packing my bags for Bristol, I thought, "Wait, let me check in with a more disinterested historian of that period."
I called around. Someone recommended a man named Jonathan Barry of the University of Exeter.
When you, as a historian of this period, see the way that John Knight has suddenly popped up in American gun rights discourse, what's your reaction?
Jonathan Barry
Well, I find it bizarre because nobody in England's ever heard of him or the case. And it has no implication as far as I know in the English jurisprudence, not that I'm a jurisprudence, but it's of no significance.
Malcolm Gladwell
Huh. So in England, John Knight is a nobody. But in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court three and a half thousand miles away, he's a superstar. It's a puzzle and it is for puzzles like these that God invented Revisionist History.
One of the problems associated with the coronation of John Knight as the savior of the gun rights movement is that our understanding of the details of his arrest and acquittal was limited. We had the verdict, but not much else. After all, it happened in 1686. It's not like there are digital records somewhere in the Bristol courthouse. What was known about the case came from legal catalogs from the 18th and 19th century, the kind that a lawyer or a judge might subscribe to, that offer brief summaries, news briefings of the goings-on in various courthouses around England. That's what Joyce Malcolm found in her eureka moment, a brief writeup from a long ago legal newsletter on a matter of Rex v. Knight. It was about a paragraph long. But let's be honest, one paragraph in a legal digest is not exactly the strongest of foundations for completely overturning our understanding of the Second Amendment.
And perhaps more ominously, the newly inaugurated members of the Sir John Knight Fan Club tended to be lawyers. And lawyers deal in black and white, hard facts, the letter of the law, tangible evidence, but now they had crossed over into the land of history. And history is not like the law at all. History is a living organic thing that gets rewritten all the time. I mean, why do you think we call this podcast Revisionist History? Because historians love to say, "Wait a minute, I found something new that makes me think we didn't quite realize what we were talking about before." And in the case of Sir John Knight, that something new was the newsletter of the intrepid Roger Morris.
Ethan Herschenfeld
Roger Morris.
Malcolm Gladwell
Roger Morris was a journalist who wrote a private newsletter in the 1680's for a variety of well-connected clients. Roger Morris knew everyone and everything in late 17th century England. He passed on high-end gossip. He told stories no one had ever heard before about brothels and prostitutes and somebody bearing their breasts to the Moroccan ambassador. He wrote about how the ice was so thick in the long cold winter of 1684 that people roasted an ox on the River Thames. He saw the king's baby and heir up close and reported, and you have to love this little bit of late medieval trolling, "The child was a large full child in the head and the upper parts, but not suitably proportioned in the lower parts." Roger Morris was a goldmine, but there were a few problems.
The first was that Roger Morris's reputation did not extend beyond the late 17th century. His newsletters ended up in an obscure library in central London where no one paid attention to them for several hundred years. Second problem, Roger Morris was incredibly prolific. The Roger Morris archives extend into the millions of words. So if you wanted to find out what Roger Morris had to say about this or that, you had to make a commitment. Third, and maybe the biggest problem of all, Roger Morris's entire life work was written in code. I mean, if you're going to diss the private parts of the heir to the throne, you have to take some precautions.
Tim Harris
There was an attempt by a historian called Douglas Lacey to try and start work on a volume.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's the historian, Tim Harris.
Tim Harris
He did a book in the 1950s. He couldn't break the shorthand, couldn't break the code, and it's too much for one person to take on.
Malcolm Gladwell
A cryptographer from Oxford had to get involved. Teams of historians volunteered, passing the job down from one generation to the next until finally, there it was, a full shelf of encyclopedia-sized volumes offering hither to unknown insights into one of the most complex eras in British history. And Roger Morris, it turns out, had a lot to say about Sir John Knight.
Tim Harris
It's a seven-volume edition. And there was a team of us who did it, and now it's widely available. And because it's widely available, people are looking at it more and say, "Oh, there's not more we can find out about this Sir John Knight case." It's an incredible source. It has lots of very valuable information and it's clearly well-informed. And if you can check his information against other sources, it's clearly accurate, but he also gives you additional information which you won't get elsewhere.
Malcolm Gladwell
So much additional information. Oh, my God.
Jonathan Barry
So he was a Bristol merchant. He was from quite an important Bristol mercantile family.
Malcolm Gladwell
Jonathan Barry, historian at the University of Exeter. The Knights ran sugar refineries. They had plantations in the Caribbean. They were politically well-connected, and their sympathies did not lie with the Catholic King of England, James the II. John Knight hated Catholics. One day he learns that a group of Irish Catholics are holding a secret mass in a house in Bristol. He arranges to have the priest arrested.
Tim Harris
So he gets the Lord Mayor and other magistrates to raid this Catholic chapel. So a couple of weeks later, there's an anti-Catholic ritual in Bristol, which the government suspects the magistrates of Bristol and maybe Sir John Knight were involved in encouraging where they parade through the city, scoffing the mass. They hold a piece of bread up in the air, and they have someone dressed as a Virgin Mary and someone dressed as a monk, and the monk is fondling the Virgin Mary.
Malcolm Gladwell
The monk is fondling the Virgin Mary.
Tim Harris
So the government is upset about this.
Malcolm Gladwell
The King of England is a Catholic, remember.
Tim Harris
And after that, Sir John Knight claims that he's threatened and is beaten up by a couple of Irishmen. So Sir John Knight was advised to retire to a house in the country, but because he was in fear of beaten up, he was quite... They beat him and kicked him when they attacked him. When he came into Bristol, subsequently, he came with a company of people carrying swords and muskets in front, before him. But he left these at the walls of the city because you're not allowed to carry arms into the city. Bristol had its own bylaws.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yes, you heard that correctly. He checks his guns at the gate. Now this is worth a slight digression.
Jonathan Barry
We tend to forget how violent and militaristic 17th century England, in general, and a place like Bristol, in particular, were.
Malcolm Gladwell
Jonathan Barry, again.
Jonathan Barry
One reflection of the fact is that Bristol was a leading place for privateering, where basically you capture the ships of your rival traders as it were, so you load yourself up. Bristol is just beginning at this period to get involved in the slave trade with Africa, which of course both involved the use of military force, but also, as you may know, one of the chief products that you actually took there to trade with was arms. And one of the things that Bristol and places around it were producing, in fact, were lots of arms, but also they needed weapons, cannons for their ships and so on. So we have to imagine a society in which there are a lot of people that are used to using weapons.
Malcolm Gladwell
So why would the Knight case represent some kind of turning point in British attitudes towards guns? Bristol was awash in guns, so much so that they were forced to put gun control measures in place that put anything in America today to shame.
Jonathan Barry
I mean, I think it's absurd to think that the crucial issue here was about whether a man was bearing arms or not because there were lots of people wandering around bearing arms.
Malcolm Gladwell
Anyway, back to our story with Tim Harris.
Tim Harris
And then on one day he goes to church, and he does go with his attendant and goes with a gun and sword, but he leaves these. He says he leaves these at the porch with his attendant.
Malcolm Gladwell
The church is St. Michael's on the Hill. His church, the one overlooking Bristol. He gets off his horse, checks his weapons at the door.
Isn't that enormously significant here? So here we have a case that Second Amendment types are claiming is this enormously important precedent for the right of an individual to bear arms, but the individual in question checks his arms at the door of the church.
I mean, it's like nothing to do... He's not waving his gun around or claiming he can wave his gun around. He quite willingly adheres to local norms about where guns should and shouldn't be carried.
Tim Harris
Yes, that seems to be the case.
Malcolm Gladwell
Okay, so Knight enters the church and he shouts out, "The Catholics are trying to kill me and they're going to try and kill you too."
Another quick digression. I asked Jonathan Barry about that moment. One question before we go on with the story. I wanted to go back. How Catholic was Bristol in this era?
Jonathan Barry
Almost non-existent.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh wait, so wait, so John Knight is going into this parish church and saying, "We're all in danger of being godfried by the Catholics."
Jonathan Barry
And the number of Catholics in Bristol to have conducted such a plot was minuscule.
Malcolm Gladwell
So he goes into this church and he says... He tries to kind of whip the church up into a frenzy about the Irish threat, and the government says, "You've gone too far." He's implying that the Catholic king is somehow conspiring against his own people, and that's when he gets in trouble with the law.
Jonathan Barry
Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
He doesn't sound very likable, Sir John Knight.
Jonathan Barry
Nobody appears to have liked Sir John Knight. No.
Malcolm Gladwell
The government goes after John Knight because he's a jackass. He's running around conjuring up ridiculous conspiracy theories about Catholics.
Tim Harris
So the charge, all the newsletter accounts I've read emphasize that it's the words that he spoke in the church, which... And therefore, this was proof of his disloyalty. That was a key issue for why they wanted to arrest him. They decide to get him on the Statute of Northampton, which is a statute from 1328 saying it's a breach of the peace. He pleaded not guilty. He claims that he didn't take the gun or the sword into the church, he left it outside. And the church is actually just outside the walls of the city of Bristol as it was back then. It's a Protestant church, obviously. And he leaves the gun and the sword outside, and the jury said he's got a proven track record of being loyal to the government. And so they found him not guilty.
Malcolm Gladwell
Because he didn't brandish a gun in church. The jury didn't find him disloyal because they knew he'd been loyal to the previous Protestant king. He wasn't armed, so they couldn't get him on that. He just didn't like Catholics. And so what? This is Bristol in 1686. No one in Bristol in 1686 likes Catholics. The case against him is dead on arrival. And by the way, no one knows this better than the government.
Tim Harris
So they actually don't want to prosecute Knight. They actually want Knight to apologize, and then they try and bury the case. That seems to be what's implied in the newsletter accounts I've read. That doesn't happen. They would've preferred if he'd apologized and they could have said, "Okay, we'll let it go."
Malcolm Gladwell
So to recap, John Knight's episode in the Church of St. Michael has become a heroic moment to the American gun rights movement, even though John Knight wasn't actually carrying a gun when he entered the Church of St. Michael, even though the case against him had nothing to do with guns, even though Bristol in fact had gun control ordinances that puts every gun control ordinance in America today to shame, and even though the whole bruhaha was just about him being a bigot who was terrified of a Catholic conspiracy taking over Bristol, even though there were hardly any Catholics in Bristol, and even though the whole case was dead on arrival, and Knight could have apologized and made it all go away and just didn't feel like it.
But the only way you would know all this is if you were willing to wade through the seven volumes of Roger Morris's coded newsletters.
And who has time for that?
I was reading the... Did you read... The historian, Tim Harris, wrote an essay on... I was amused to see there was a... And he talks about the Sir John Knight case about how when he goes to the church, the Protestant church, to speak to what he thought of was the threat being posed by the Catholics in Bristol, he insists that he checks his weapons at the front of the church. And he also says that when he goes into Bristol, he abided by the bylaws of Bristol and didn't carry his weapons into the... past the city's limits.
I wondered how Joyce Malcolm made sense of all these new facts. The Roger Morris newsletters were finally decoded more than 10 years after she wrote her opus to keep and bear arms.
So I'm just curious, how do those sort of two facts fit into this story? So even if we have... If the Sir John Knight case represents some kind of affirmation of the individual right to peaceable carry. So John Knight himself is complying with some pretty strict gun control laws, isn't he?
Joyce Malcolm
I think, to be honest, that I think that Professor Harris is wrong. First of all, because there was all of these duties and requirements to protect yourself. And in the judge's opinion in the Sir John Knight case, he says that the law allows gentlemen to go about with arms as long as they're not unusual and the dangerous weapons. So the judge seems at odds with Professor Harris.
Malcolm Gladwell
But what do you make of Sir John Knight's claim that he checked his weapons at the front of the church and didn't carry his weapons into the city of Bristol?
Joyce Malcolm
I find that very odd because if that were the case, if there was a law that he couldn't carry his weapons into the city of Bristol at all, that the whole city was what we would now call a sensitive place, that no one could work. It goes against your right to protect yourself. It goes against your right to protect yourself and your house. It goes against the judge's ruling. And to be honest, Professor Harris is British, they don't think much of the right to be armed.
Malcolm Gladwell
The homicide rate in the United States, if you're wondering, is four and a half times higher than the United Kingdom.
Joyce Malcolm
When I explored that right and told my British friends about it, most of them didn't even realize they ever had had a right to be armed. There's this whole history that they haven't looked at. And I think it was because, I said earlier, I asked an American question. We were interested in that. They weren't particularly interested in a right to be armed. And so it wasn't something that they had studied or been even very curious about until I started to write about it.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, yeah. But if the British aren't interested in a right to bear arms, then why are we drawing on British... Why is British tradition relevant to the discussion of American individual gun rights?
Joyce Malcolm
I think this was a history that was lost to them. I think modern British people have a different view of it. They're much more dependent on the state taking care of them, particularly since World War II. This is earlier British history, history that they really were not that familiar with. They were looking at other things. And I think that one of the, I guess, the contribution I made was that I was an American that looked at British history and English history with American questions, with the things we were interested in.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
And what of the Supreme Court? How did the highest legal body in the land in the landmark ruling of New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen handle the fact that their hero has feet of clay?
Patrick Charles
I know I have it summarized somewhere, but let me see. I think this is it. Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
I asked Patrick Charles to read me the relevant section.
Patrick Charles
To the extent that there are multiple plausible interpretations of Sir John Knight's case, we will favor the one that is more consistent with the Second Amendment's command.
Malcolm Gladwell
(Laughing) Which, in other words, there's a whole long list of ways we can make sense of this. We're going to pick the one we like the most.
Patrick Charles
Okay. Which one's that?
Malcolm Gladwell
That's the one that makes our life easiest in arguing the case we've already decided we want to argue. It's like history is cherry-picking.
Patrick Charles
Oh, it's so cherry-picked.
Malcolm Gladwell
The Supreme Court decides to clear up the ambiguity over the Second Amendment. "Let us leave the verdict to history," they declare, but then their hero turns out to have feet of clay. So they shrug and go on with the things that they had already made up their mind to do before they tried to convince us that they wanted to play historian and go to England and make their pilgrimage to St. Michael on the Hill and pretend that the man who they have chosen to symbolize the grand tradition of American gun rights is something other than a jackass.
And after far too many hours reconstructing the history of this jackass, I realized that I had fallen into the same trap that we've all fallen into in this country when it comes to gun violence. We're talking about the wrong things, telling irrelevant stories. And over the course of the next five episodes of Revisionist History, I want to try and change that conversation. I'm going to take you to North Carolina to shoot guns, visit an old man in Alabama with a crazy story to tell, revisit the assassination of Robert Kennedy, on and on, but no more John Knight, I promise. We've all had it with John Knight.
Tim Harris
What kind of person was he? Not sort of person I want to have a drink with. He was a nasty piece of work, really. He was vindictive and spiteful. He's a bigot. He's a troublemaker. He's obviously deliberately going out to try and provoke trouble in April 1686 when he gets this priest arrested because he's staring things up.
So yeah, not a nice piece of work. That's my basic view of him. He's involved in the slave trade, a sugar refiner. I would hardly see that he was the sort of hero figure that champions of American liberty would want to celebrate, although maybe that's not the point.
Ethan Herschenfeld
John Knight!
Malcolm Gladwell
Our Revisionist History Gun Series was produced by Jacob Smith, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Kiara Powell, Tali Emlen, and Lee Mengistu. We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Arthur Gomperts and Keishel Williams. Original scoring by Luis Guerra with vocals in this episode by the magnificent Ethan Herschenfeld. Mastering by Flawn Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
The Host
