859
Arthur Huntingdon discovers that his wife is planning to leave him, and take their little boy with her.
Arthur Huntingdon is drunken, unfaithful and abusive, and teaching his young son to be like him. His wife Helen has had enough, and plans to take little Arthur to America, supporting herself as an artist of some talent. Unwisely, she has committed her plans to her secret journal, and her husband has just read it.
Posted June 1 2018
860
The way St Cuthbert found water for his island retreat confirmed that Northumbria’s church was the real thing.
Unlike some later chroniclers, Bede did not transpose well-known miracles from one saint to another. He researched authentic miracles of Northumbrian saints and found close (but never exact) matches in the lives of saints from the Roman Empire, to show that Christianity in the British Isles was cut from the same cloth.
Posted May 30 2018
861
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
A good example of the way Bede uses miracles comes from the story of Cuthbert’s barley. Some later chroniclers took a story about Anthony of Egypt and some wild asses and transposed it, donkeys and all, onto more recent saints. Bede, however, was content to draw parallels with a quite different miracle attributed to St Cuthbert.
Posted May 30 2018
862
The Northumbrian monk was touched by two thieving birds who repented of their misdeeds.
Cuthbert had a particular attachment to the many wonderful birds of the Farne Islands, which remained a key feature of devotion to the saint at his shrine in Durham. He was not, however, a bird-pleaser any more than he was a people-pleaser, and if his birds needed a little moral correction he would steel himself to provide it.
Posted May 30 2018
863
In April 1203, a royal prince and heir vanished from Rouen at just the right moment for King John.
Prince Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was a nephew of King Richard I who from an early age seemed destined to inherit the throne of England. When Richard died in 1199, however, Arthur was only twelve, and support from the French King, Philip II, served only to increase tensions with his uncle John.
Posted May 28 2018
864
On his travels through China and Tibet, Roman Catholic missionary Évariste Huc came across a novel way of telling the time.
Évariste Régis Huc was a Roman Catholic missionary who wrote of his travels through China, Tartary and Tibet at a time when such travels were rare for Europeans. The following anecdote tells how his party was momentarily stumped by a Chinese boy’s ability to tell the time by examining a cat.
Posted May 26 2018