The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Will Langland, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, dreams he is looking for his old friend Piers the Ploughman in Jerusalem just when Christ rides in on a donkey.
William Langland’s ‘Book of Piers the Ploughman’ is a late fourteenth-century dream sequence that tumbles together Christian reflection with social commentary much as John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ would later do. In Passus 18, Will has fallen asleep during Lent, and his dream takes him confusedly to Palm Sunday, a week before Easter.
Maria Montessori takes some of her pupils up onto a roof terrace, and witnesses a eureka moment.
Whereas many educators in her day ran classrooms like battlegrounds between teachers and unwilling pupils, Italian doctor Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was convinced that children rejoice in learning so long as teachers do not meddle. The following anecdote appeared in a pamphlet written for the Board of Education in 1912, and shows that joy in abundance.
Henry V’s chaplain Thomas Elmham, an eyewitness of the battle of Agincourt, gave us this account of the King in the moments before the fighting began.
William Shakespeare was not alone in dramatising King Henry V’s rousing speech before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Henry’s chaplain Thomas Elmham (1364-?1427), who was present, also recorded the king’s words to his troops. We join him just as the famous stakes on which the French cavalry would impale themselves have been driven into the muddy ground.
Edmund, King of the East Angles, is given a stark choice by the Viking warrior who has ravaged his realm.
Some four years after the Great Heathen Army of the Vikings landed in 865, Hingwar ravaged the Kingdom of the East Angles with indiscriminate bloodshed. He then sent a messenger to their lord, King Edmund, in his now silent Hall, bearing an ultimatum: to live and be Hingwar’s vassal, or to die. What follows is said to be the story as told by an eyewitness.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf reminds us that God’s gifts to men are many and varied, and nobody ever gets them all.
‘Now there are diversities of gifts,’ St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, ‘but the same Spirit.’ Cynewulf (possibly the eighth-century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) confirms that the gifts given by God to mankind are many and different, and also explains why it is that no one should expect to be good at everything.
Archdeacon and diplomat Peter of Blois was a frequent guest at the laden tables of King Henry II, but he had little appetite for the fare on offer.
Hollywood has made us familiar with the image of medieval kings at table with their nobles, the tables groaning under the weight of platters of venison and flagons of wine, and everyone rejoicing in plenty. What Hollywood does not tell us, but Henry II’s courtier Peter of Blois (?1130-?1211) does, is that most of it was well past its sell-by date.