The True History of the Blackadder (65 page)

Sir (Lord) Edmund Blackadder

ROWAN ATKINSON

Sodoff Baldrick

TONY ROBINSON

First MP

SANJEEV BHASKAR

Second MP

HELEN LEDERER

Madame Chair

MIRANDA HART

Written & directed by

BEN ELTON

There is no such species as a ‘black adder’, and no black snakes have ever been native to the British Isles.

The Emperor Hadrian never poisoned his mother, nor married his horse, according to existing records.

There were no ‘Jumping Jews’ in England in the fifteenth century, Edward I having expelled the race, who were not legally readmitted until 1653. Remaining Judaists were compelled to keep their faith secret, and were not known for notable skill at jumping.

There was never a holy festival known as ‘Garethstide’, nor ‘Norristide’.

Prince Edmund’s temptation with ‘ten thousand sovereigns’ could not have worked, as sovereigns were not minted until Henry VII’s reign, in 1489.

The title of ‘Duke of Edinburgh’ was not instituted until the union with Scotland in 1707.

The greeting ‘hello’ was not in use until several centuries after the instances given in the Chronicles.

There was only one Pope at any one time during the fifteenth century, never three at once.

There was no Earl of Doncaster, homosexual or otherwise, until the seventeenth century.

Geoffrey Chaucer died almost a century before the events of ‘Witchsmeller Pursuivant’, so his appearance would have been a bad omen, whether mooing like a cow or not.

The execution of the Earl of Essex is referred to forty years too early.

Queen Elizabeth’s Nurse suggests that Sir Thomas More was present at the monarch’s birth, but official records show that he was imprisoned before September 1533. Also, he was beheaded, not burned at the stake.

Rhinoceroses do not rut.