|Jafar says: Read my lips and come to grips with the reality!|
|“||Well, we could save money on clothes...||„|
|~ Please note Tom never said such in the legend. This is just added humorously by Terry Deary|
In the legends of Lady Godiva, Peeping Tom was an antagonist. However, he was really just invented by the Church for morality and chivalry.
In later tales, Peeping Tom became a symbolic figure who embodies perversion, specifically the crime of voyeurism(derived from his surname Voyeur) - which is when someone observes another without their permission or knowledge (also known as "creeping").
The story was that when the Lady Godiva went down Coventry town naked on horseback, the "good" citizens of the town stayed in to "give the countess privacy." Peeping Tom was the only one mean enough to stay out and wickedly spy on the countess' nakedness. He took lustful delight in doing so.
In some versions of the story, God Himself punishes the pervert for breaking the town's oath. God strikes Tom with blindness, a fitting punishment for such an unholy sin. Tom is left as a living example of God's wrath, and henceforth townsfolk mocked him for being the pervert in town.
In later stories Peeping Tom is an individual known for stalking others and looking through windows, hoping to catch people naked or engaged in sexual acts - this behavior would lead him to become a symbol for the all-too-real practice of "creeping".
Peeping Tom was invented to encourage people to respect ladies and be virtuous like the nobility. However, he was never in the original story, (although there certainly were perverted figures like him; who broke oaths and took delight in chaos; such an individual may have been embellished in the Church's version of the tale) and the people of Coventry may not have gone inside at all. A humorous twist to a humorous legend.