716. How The King's Search for Gun Powder Strengthened Property Rights

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today, I am very excited to geek out with you guys on history, especially property rights history, so double geeking out. Today, I want to talk about property rights and gunpowder, and those might not seem related, but it all goes back to a case in England in 1606. So a long time ago and long before America was even a country. But so I want you to think about this. How was a case that happened? Again, long before we were a country. How was that still impacting

our cases today and property rights today? So that's what we're kind of going to dig into. But first, let's start at the beginning. So in 1606 in England, England has just signed a peace treaty ending a war that they were in with the Spanish people. And that was that started in 1585. So that was a pretty long war. The people are exhausted at this point. And the king, what what is one thing we know about wars? They're very expensive, very expensive. So the king is like out of money, which he has no money, he gets

it from the people who he's taxing. But the king is out of money, his supplies are depleted. And they're a little bit scared, even though the war has ended, they now know how easy it is for them to suddenly get attacked, right? And find themselves in another war. So the king is a little nervous. And he's thinking like, okay, we need to make sure that we have supplies in case this happens again. And there's another thing going on in England, too. So that was a foreign threat. But England's also going through some domestic,

some local threats as well. At the time, there were there was like a religious battle between Catholics and non Catholics, this is a battle going on, not necessarily an active battle, but there was a lot of turmoil between the two groups. And there was a radical Catholic uprising, where you actually may have heard of Guy Fox Day or like V for Vendetta, it's like a dystopian graphic novel that kind of hearkens back to Guy Fox, the guy that wore this, they have like, he didn't wear the mask. But in V for Netta, he wears like a Guy Fox

mask. Guy Fox was a real person. He tried to blow up Parliament. So he was a little bit of a radical. But he tried to blow up Parliament because he wanted to kill the king. He wanted to kill, you know, both houses of Parliament. So he was trying to send a message to the government. He didn't act alone. There were other people. But that plot was thwarted. It didn't happen. But you have to realize if you're the king and you realize what you just prevented, you're going to be a little on age edge, you're going to be a little nervous. So he wants to

be able to defend himself should something happen. And even though this isn't like explicitly stated, I have to imagine that he also probably wanted to make sure that England did have a history of being able to defend yourself and the people being able to have weapons. I mean, the reason we have our Second Amendment here is because it is like most things rooted in English law, right? So it happened long before America, which is kind of what we're going to talk about today with property rates. But so even though they did have that history, you

have to think if you're the king, like, I don't want a lot of people having gunpowder weren't me because we can see what they can do, you know, we just barely managed to foil this plot. So there's a lot of things going on that's making the king think, okay, we need to make sure we have our supply stocked. But but the gunpowder think that's not new. The the Kings, because this is King James, but the other Kings also, obviously, for centuries that wanted gunpowder because gunpowder is very important to winning a war. But gunpowder

takes or requires three essential ingredients. Okay. So that is charcoal sulfur. But then you have to make it explode, right? You have to get like that explosion. And so there's something called salt Peter, salt Peter, salt Peter is what today we'd call potassium nitrate. And that's what's going to make it like spark, right? If you don't have potassium nitrate, it's like gonna just go like, she's gonna fizzle, like my implementation, that was a ridiculous noise. But it's not going to explode. Okay, so you're learning a few things today. I just

taught you a science lesson, which is crazy coming for me because science was never my best subject. But there's your science lesson of the day. So they needed salt Peter. And salt Peter is naturally occurring, at least it was back then again, I'm not a science I don't they might be able to make it in a lab today. I just know about 1606, I'm very outdated. So in 1606, it is a naturally occurring thing, right? And where it's found is actually pretty gross. So it's found in in areas that are so like, Hey, in a barn that you've had like animal

urine on forever. And like the animal urine just like sits in like, Hey, or it sits in soil with manure. And it like starts to smell terribly. Or masonry. So a lot of, you know, homes were made out of organic materials that most things were so like bricks, masonry. When that would start crumbling and decaying, you'd also get these the salt, the salt Peter. So it was founded like cold, damp, dark places, places like soil that had been sitting there for a long time. That's how you get salt Peter. And that wasn't in its final form. Salt Peter's

like these crystals, but first you had to get the actual like raw material, then you had to like, think it was called like leaching and diluting and, you know, it's a whole process, but you couldn't do any of that until you found where it was. And usually you found it because like, you could smell it like it smelled so awful. And you were like, Oh, salt Peter, it must be here. So where is the king going to find all the salt Peter he needs? He's going to go into the houses of his people, but he's not going to do it himself. He's going to send

what are called salt Peter men, pretty self explanatory title. And the salt Peter men that was not new, that was not a King James thing. Salt Peter men had been around for a while, and it was for this cause it was for the cause of I like to call them salt Peter scavengers like that was their job. But I want you to imagine you're somebody living at this time, you have a nice, you know, a modest home and you have a barn and you're raising animals. And without warning, you never know when it's happening. The salt Peter men come to your door

and they start looking for the salt Peter, but they do that by lifting up your floorboards and moving stones and maybe opening up your walls, you know, cracking open walls and they have to scrape the inside of the walls to look for the salt Peter or going into again your barn and like digging up soil and moving the animals. It's it's causing a lot of unnecessary just, you know, it's I don't want to say it's breaking things though. I mean, if your floorboards are getting lifted up and then your floor isn't even it's causing a lot of damage. It's causing

a lot of chaos. And so every time the salt Peter men kind of came to the houses and they left the people were just like sitting there with their houses all upturned. And so this is becoming a really big problem. And again, this was not a new problem. This has been happening for I guess almost two centuries at the time. But the people were getting pretty fed up, right? They were like, this can't keep happening. And like, we have no recourse. Now another thing, and I always try to drive this point home whenever I do any, any sort of episode about the revolution

later on or English, English history, like I'm talking about today. As I think when we think of the revolution, we think, Oh, we were rebelling against this tyrant king and because England didn't have any of the rights we have here in America today. And that's not true, right? The reason that the revolutionaries were so determined to fight this war is because England people were supposed to have the same rights that we have today. A lot of those rights are based off rights that England had already established. And so we're like, Hey, just because we live in the colonies

doesn't mean that we should not be held to the same rules as English subjects living in England. And so they were allowed to bring lawsuits. I say this to say like they still had rights. So at this point, Magna Carta has been signed. We're still a couple of decades away from the English Bill of Rights. But there was the established rule that kings could not rule unlimited, right? They did have some limitations. And so that meant for this time, people were allowed to bring lawsuits against the salt peter men who were the king's men essentially, right? So all these people are

bringing lawsuits like, Hey, these people messed up my house and we're still they don't even know for sure if they have salt Peter, they can follow their nose and get some gross stuff. But they don't actually know it got salt Peter until they go and try to break it down and see if those crystals form. So it's a whole thing, right? It is a whole thing. So the courts are sick. They're sick of people filing these trespassing suits. They're sick of they're just sick of the whole thing. And finally, the court is like, okay, we have to address this. Now, when I say case, a lot of times when

we think of case like a lawsuit, we think, okay, who was the plaintiff? Who was the defendant? Who were the parties involved? Now the salt Peter case, as it has been remembered, that's what it's called now, there was no like defendant or plaintiff in that case, it was more the court had this opportunity because they were getting some trespassing cases, they were they needed to address an issue that was becoming a very big deal. And it was time for them to address it. So there is this amazing judge who plays a more significant role on the court. His name is Sir Edward Cook, but it

is spelled coke like how we spell Coca Cola. Well, not Coca Cola, but coke as C O K E. But I believe it is cook. So don't get confused by that. If you're trying to look it up, it's not spelled how it sounds. And he is amazing. We're actually going to do a whole other episode on what he did for castle law. We'll get into that later. He's big property rights guy. But so he and the other judges are, you know, discussing this and they're debating it and they're thinking, where should the limit be? Because we've already established through our history that the sovereign,

the king, King James, in this particular instance, but any king, the king has to be limited, right? That's that rule of law. That is that, you know, there is no divine right of kings that a king has to be subject to a law. And in our case here in America, it's a constitution, but in England, they didn't have one set written constitution. It was English common law. And it was, you know, Magna Carta that was 1215. And then later the English Bill of Rights, it was like a culmination of things. So what's interesting about that also is so well, common law, common law is the traditions

of the land. And a lot of that was set by courts, like what the court was deciding here with the gun powder case or salt, Peter. So Lord or not Lord, circa, sorry, he's a judge. And he is trying to figure out with his other judges, like, where is the line? And here's what he decides. He says, Okay, the king is not allowed to just come on people's property and take whatever he wants. You know, we've we've been down that road before with King John Magna Carta those days. Like, we're not, we're not doing that. We know that that's not okay. But salt Peter is different because salt Peter is

important to our national defense. And if it's important to our national defense, then okay.

Maybe the king can come on your your property and he can look for it. But the way it's happening now is not okay. The way it's happening now they're coming in, they're tearing up these houses, they're coming whenever they want, they're staying for however long they want. So no, we're going to limit that. So they set a time limit, they say, okay, the salt Peter men can come, but it has to be between sunset or sunrise and sunset. It can't just be willy-nilly whenever they want. And if they just came to your house, they can't come again with the next week. They have to make

well, you know, a long enough time has to have passed. And I don't know what that magic long enough time was, but long enough was kind of how it was portrayed. And then, and here's the big part. Here's where I want to get to. He said, this is Sir Coke. He said, anything that they move, any floorboard they pick up, any stone they move, whatever it is that they're moving, they have to put the property back in the same position they found it in,

no more, no less in the same position or a condition rather. And so this was a really big deal. It doesn't sound normal, right? Well, of course, if I destroy your house looking for something, I need to put it back. But people, obviously the Kingsmen were not doing that. And so this became really important because this beset the stage for what in America we call taking clause, and that's the Fifth Amendment, and just compensation. So what the taking clause says, and we've talked about it before, but what the taking clause says is basically,

the government can't take something or they can't take something if it's a public good or if it's collecting on a tax, like if you didn't pay your taxes, they need to collect, they can take your property, they can take, you know, whatever it is. But they have to give you just compensation. Now, what does that mean? Just compensation when we think of it in legal terms is they have to make you whole, okay? If the government comes on your property and looking for salt, Peter, they have to and they pull up the floorboards when they leave, they have to make you whole. When they

leave, they have to put everything back to where it was, no more, no less just how it was when they found it. And so this is going to lay the foundation, this 1606 case is going to lay the foundation for how in American law, we deal with property rights, how in American law, we look at what the government can and can't do, and this idea of making you whole kind of looks, doesn't look the same all the time. So in some instances, the government has been allowed to take property and like build a road through your house if they call it a public good, which

they kind of stretch that meaning so that can go into a whole other thing, but they sometimes will take your house and they have to give you the rule under the Fifth Amendment is they have to give you fair market value for your property. And so that's the making you whole. Yes, they took the house, but they have to make sure that they compensate you in a way that matches what they took, even though sentimental value and all that, we won't get into that today, it's just the principle of it. So this is huge. So the 1606 case is going to lay the foundation for the Fifth Amendment and for

how we do property rights in America. And what's cool is the way we do lawsuits here, when you go to the Supreme Court, the lawyers who are defending their case, they go back to old lawsuits. So this they'll say, okay, this is unconstitutional. And it's unconstitutional. Because if you remember in 1985, there was this law lawsuit and blah, blah, on the judges decided this. So in lawsuits today, in these cases, they're still citing the 1606 case over gunpowder. And this is where my nerd is going to come out. I just think that is so cool. I think something as, you know, seemingly

random as the salt Peter, which I didn't know anything about until I had to look into it, because I was doing some research on a court case, the Supreme Court that's going to happen in a couple months, and they were citing the 1606 case. So I think that's really fun. Maybe you think it's nerdy, but I think it's fun. So we will leave it there for today, and we're going to pick back up and we're going to talk about Sir Edward Koch in a different episode, because I said Koch, it's Koch, I mess it up myself every time I see it, I get all turned around. But Sir Edward

Koch, we're going to go and dive into some other things he says in a couple more episodes. So stay tuned for that. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.