The Old English name means goat home. The story it became famous for has nothing to do with goats. Sometime in the reign of King John - tradition is vague about the exact year - the king's surveyors came through Nottinghamshire mapping a royal highway. A road through Gotham would have meant a road the villagers had to maintain at their own cost, with the king and his retinue passing through whenever they pleased. Madness, in the early thirteenth century, was widely believed to be contagious. So when John's knights rode into the village they were met by people doing the absolute strangest things their imaginations could produce. The most famous was the cuckoo bush. The villagers had built a fence around a thorn bush in the meadow, hoping, they explained, to keep the cuckoo prisoner so that summer would never end. The knights left. The road was rerouted. The cuckoo, of course, simply flew over the fence.

The Wise Men of Gotham became a stock figure of English humour - foolish on the surface, ingeniously practical beneath. By the time Washington Irving was a young satirist in the new United States, the joke had crossed the Atlantic. In Salmagundi, Irving's mock newspaper of 1807, New York's pompous citizens became the new Wise Men of Gotham. The name caught. By the time Bill Finger and Bob Kane were creating Batman in 1939, Gotham was already New York's literary nickname, and Gotham City the obvious choice for the fictional metropolis above which the Bat-Signal would shine. DC Comics has even acknowledged its English ancestor: in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight No. 206, the Nottinghamshire Gotham exists within the DC universe. In 2014 the village sign was stolen three times in four years. The thieves, predictably, were Batman fans.

There is still a Cuckoo Bush. There is also still a Cuckoo Bush Mound at the edge of the village, which is in fact a Neolithic burial mound roughly 3,000 years old, excavated in 1847 and almost certainly the site the legend latched onto. The medieval villagers, in other words, were probably weaving their joke around something that already felt impossibly ancient even to them. The Cuckoo Bush Inn carries the story forward; the wind vane in the village square depicts the legends of Gotham; the twelfth-century parish church of St Lawrence, dedicated to the Roman martyr Lawrence, anchors the older part of the village. A second pub on the green is the Star Inn. Three pubs is generous arithmetic for 1,567 people, but Gotham has always punched above its weight in folklore.

The hill west of the village, Gotham Hill, holds Britain's largest deposits of gypsum, the mineral that becomes plaster and plasterboard. From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, a two-mile branch off the Great Central main line carried the output of the gypsum mines and a plaster factory westward. The line is now a footpath; the old workings sit quiet on the hillside, slowly reabsorbed by Gotham Hill Pasture, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. On 2 August 1984 a tornado tore through the village at about 5:50 pm, uprooting trees, throwing garden sheds onto power cables, and stripping roofs. No one was hurt. The Wise Men, by then, had presumably told the storm to fly over the cuckoo's fence.

Most places struggle to be famous for one thing. Gotham gave the world a stock phrase, a major American city's literary nickname, and, eventually, the most iconic urban setting in comics - and it did so by playing dumb. The trick the medieval villagers worked on King John's knights was a small political victory: refuse the king's road by acting too mad to be governed, then watch the king choose a different route. Centuries later, Washington Irving recognised what the villagers had done and applied the same affectionate irony to his own city. Manhattan, like Gotham, has been pretending to be foolish - and quietly outsmarting its rulers - for a very long time.