Midnight Signals Guides

Guide to Episode: The Children of Hamelin

The window was gone by 1660. For about three and a half centuries it had stood in the Market Church at Hamelin, showing a man in clothes of many colours with a crowd of small figures around him. Nobody in the town needed it explained. When it disappeared, the only faithful record of what it looked like was a small watercolour made by a visitor sixty-eight years earlier.

Augustin von Mörsperg was a baron and a Knight of the Order of St John. He reached Hamelin in 1592 having heard that strange things had once happened there. He asked the clergy and the town’s councillors, looked into a city book, and had the window copied. His picture is now the oldest surviving image of the Piper. It is not a careful drawing. The figure is tall and patterned, the children are pale and crowded, and the town sits behind them. It was enough to keep the window from vanishing entirely.

By the time Mörsperg wrote the story down, it already included rats. The older records in Hamelin did not. They gave a date, a number, a piper and a place outside the walls, and they stopped there.

Hamelin grew up around a monastery at a crossing of the River Weser, founded by monks from the great abbey of Fulda. By the thirteenth century it was a walled market town with mills on the river and barges tied up below the walls. Grain came down the Weser and was ground there. The merchants who handled it built close together around the church.

The town did not have a quiet century. In 1259 the abbey sold its rights over Hamelin to the Bishop of Minden, and the townspeople refused to accept the sale. They fought the bishop’s forces near Sedemünder in 1260 and lost heavily. Within a generation the town had come under the dukes of Brunswick. Many families inside the walls had already buried sons by the summer the town later remembered.

That summer was 1284. The day was the feast of Saints John and Paul, the twenty-sixth of June. The early sources give no weather, no hour and no names. They describe only what was missing afterward.

Around 1370, the Dominican friar Heinrich of Herford finished a Latin chronicle called the Catena aurea, the Golden Chain. On its last page, in a different hand, someone added a short account of Hamelin. It describes one hundred and thirty children lost at a place of execution outside the town.

A German manuscript from Lüneburg, written around 1440 to 1450, puts it plainly. In the year 1284, on the day of John and Paul, one hundred and thirty children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper dressed in many colours, and lost at the calvary near the Koppen. The historian Heinrich Spanuth reported finding this version in the Lüneburg city archives in 1936.

A calvary in this sense was the hill of execution, where the gallows stood beside the road so that travellers would see it. Koppen probably meant the hills around the town, though some have tried to fix it to a particular place. The scribe seems to have assumed his readers knew which hills he meant. By that account, the children walked out through the gate, past the town’s gallows and into high ground, and the record loses them there.

Hamelin measured time from the loss. An entry in the town’s records dated 1384, often quoted, reads simply: “It is one hundred years since our children left.” In 1556, when the town built its New Gate, a Latin inscription recorded that the gate was founded two hundred and seventy-two years after a magician led one hundred and thirty children out of the city.

In 1602 and 1603, a new Renaissance stone façade went up on Osterstraße for Hermann Arendes, a mayor of Hamelin. On the side of the building, an inscription repeats the old account: the year 1284, the day of John and Paul, the piper in many colours and the one hundred and thirty children born in Hamelin, led away to the calvary near the Koppen and lost there.

The building is now called the Rattenfängerhaus, the Rat Catcher’s House, although it has nothing to do with rats or with any catcher. Its name came later, from the version of the story that took over. Beside it runs a narrow lane, the Bungelosenstraße, the street without drums. By tradition, it was the way the children went out. Music and dancing were not allowed there, and wedding processions crossing the old town fell silent as they passed through it.

These were ordinary places for a memory to be kept. A gate, a merchant’s wall and a side street are things people walk past every day. The town put the date and the number where they would be seen without anyone going to look for them.

In southern Germany, between 1559 and 1565, Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern compiled a long chronicle of his family and the world around it. In his version, a piper offers to clear a town of rats for a fee. He plays, the rats follow him into the river, and the town refuses to pay. He plays again, and the children follow him instead. Zimmern dated the event only to several hundred years before. His is the earliest surviving account with the rats in it.

The rats supplied what the older records lacked: a reason. Now the town had cheated someone and paid for it. The story became a lesson about keeping promises, and the loss acquired a cause that could be blamed on the adults of Hamelin.

In 1605 the antiquarian Richard Verstegan included the story in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, presenting it to English readers as a true account from Germany. In 1816 the Brothers Grimm placed it in their Deutsche Sagen, their collection of legends people believed had really happened, rather than among their fairy tales. Their sources included children said to have lagged behind and come back, unable to give a full account of what they had seen.

Robert Browning wrote his poem in 1842, reportedly to amuse William Macready’s young son while the boy was ill, and drew on Verstegan. His version gave the English-speaking world the name it still uses and the lame child left behind at the closing mountainside. By then the Market Church window had been gone for nearly two centuries.

Historians have tried many readings of the oldest account. Plague is the most familiar, with the bright-coated Piper standing in for death. The Black Death did not reach Germany for another sixty years, though, and the Hamelin records describe children leaving, not dying.

The Children’s Crusade of 1212 is too early by seventy years. Medieval Germany did have outbreaks of compulsive dancing, and in 1237 a crowd of children was said to have danced from Erfurt to Arnstadt, roughly twenty kilometres. The Hamelin sources do not say the children danced, however. They say they followed. Others have suggested a drowning or a collapse dressed up afterward as something stranger, but the earliest accounts send the children up into the hills and never mention the river.

The reading many historians now favour involves the settlement of lands to the east. Through the thirteenth century, lords in what are now Poland and the Czech Republic needed people to clear forest and build villages. Recruiters, often called locators, travelled through the western towns looking for families and young people willing to go. A younger son with no inheritance, or a daughter without a dowry, could be offered land of their own and years free of rent.

In that reading, the Piper was a recruiter and the children were the town’s young people. The word could cover sons and daughters long past infancy, and a town might speak of “our children” leaving long after they were grown. The linguist Jürgen Udolph traced surnames common around Hamelin to the Uckermark and Prignitz, in Brandenburg, and pointed to place names that seem to echo villages near the town. Hamelspringe, near Hamelin, has a counterpart in Hammelspring in the Uckermark.

The local historian Hans Dobbertin spent years on the case and produced a reconstruction of the lost window from Mörsperg’s copy and the surviving descriptions. In it, the children walk rather than dance.

The theory has limits. Settlers usually left charters behind, and no charter names Hamelin. Surnames can show that people from a region moved east, but not when they went, or whether they left together on a single summer day. It also leaves the tone of the town’s memory unexplained. A departure for land of one’s own is not usually recorded on a gate as a theft by a magician.

Dates for the earliest records are approximate, and the 1384 entry is known chiefly through later quotation.

The date the town remembered, the feast of Saints John and Paul.

No document from that year survives.

A window in the Market Church showed the Piper and the children.

Known from later descriptions and Mörsperg’s copy.

A note in another hand was added to Heinrich of Herford’s Catena aurea.

The earliest surviving written account.

A town entry recorded that it was one hundred years since the children left.

Widely quoted; the original is not reproduced here.

The Lüneburg manuscript gave the German account of the Piper and the calvary near the Koppen.

Reported found by Heinrich Spanuth in 1936.

The New Gate’s inscription counted two hundred and seventy-two years since the children were led away.

It names a magician, not a piper.

The Zimmern Chronicle introduced the rats and the unpaid fee.

The story gains a reason.

Augustin von Mörsperg had the window copied in watercolour.

The oldest surviving picture of the Piper.

The Osterstraße façade, later called the Rat Catcher’s House, was built with its inscription.

The lane beside it is the street without drums.

Richard Verstegan carried the story into English.

Browning’s later source.

The window disappeared from the Market Church.

Only Mörsperg’s copy preserves its image.

The Brothers Grimm published “The Children of Hamelin” among their German legends.

Filed as legend, not fairy tale.

Robert Browning published “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” in Dramatic Lyrics.

The version most English readers know.

The window and Mörsperg’s copy. Museum Hameln’s Pied Piper exhibition notes describe the lost Market Church window, Mörsperg’s 1592 visit and copy, the Osterstraße inscription and Hans Dobbertin’s reconstruction.

The written record. The Pied Piper of Hamelin overview gathers the early sources, including the Catena aurea note, the Lüneburg manuscript, the 1384 entry, the New Gate inscription and the Zimmern Chronicle, with references for further reading.

The house and its inscription. The Rat Catcher’s House, with the dates and builder of the Osterstraße façade.

The Grimms’ version. “Die Kinder zu Hameln” from Deutsche Sagen (1816), in the original German, with the sources the Grimms cited.

Browning’s poem. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” at Project Gutenberg. It follows Verstegan and keeps the lame child who could not keep up.

The eastward settlement. Ostsiedlung in Pomerania outlines how recruiters and new villages drew settlers east in the period the migration theory relies on.

1. The Piper and the children, 1592. Copy of the Market Church window made for Augustin von Mörsperg. Image record and public-domain basis.

2. Hamelin, 1839. Steel engraving by Johann Gabriel Friedrich Poppel after Georg Osterwald. Rijksmuseum, RP-P-2018-1369-1. Collection record, public domain.

3. The Rat Catcher’s House, around 1870 to 1890. Albumen print by B. Tieleman of Hamelin. Rijksmuseum, RP-F-00-1046. Collection record, public domain.

4. The Pied Piper, 1868. Wood engraving by Henry Marsh after John La Farge. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Collection record, public domain.

These images show the oldest copy of the lost window, the town and the house that kept the inscription, and one nineteenth-century illustration of the legend. None shows the events of 1284.