In 1592, a traveller looked up at a stained-glass window in Hamelin's Market Church and copied down what it showed: a man in clothes of many colors, surrounded by small figures in white. The window was already three hundred years old. Long before the rats and the broken bargain, the town's own records held something stranger and simpler. A date, a number, a piper, and a hill outside the walls. Tonight we follow the oldest accounts of the Pied Piper back to the summer of 1284, through a stone at the town gate, a lane where music is still forbidden, and the historians who think the children were not stolen at all. They may have been recruited.
Season One: Strangers · Episode 1
Sources include the Lüneburg manuscript, Heinrich of Herford, and the work of Hans Dobbertin and Jürgen Udolph.
