The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Back in the eleventh century English refugees founded New York, but it wasn’t in North America.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, a group of English noblemen sold their estates and set sail for anywhere not ruled by Normans. Their wanderings took them to Constantinople (or Micklegarth), at that time beset by another overbearing Norman, Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, and the Seljuk Turks.
In Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, a man from Kent founded a glittering church for English refugees.
Goscelin of Canterbury was a Flemish monk who settled in England during the 1060s. He preserved many records of the English just in time to save them from obliteration by the Normans, who overran the country’s highest offices following the Conquest of 1066. As he tells us, however, not everyone could bear to stay and watch.
Orderic Vitalis regrets the passing of a society far more refined and advanced than that which supplanted it.
Many have portrayed the Norman Invasion of 1066 as a welcome injection of Continental sophistication into a rustic England, but that was not the opinion of Orderic Vitalis (1075-?1143) somewhat nearer to the action. He was inclined to acquit William himself, but regarded his French lieutenants as barbarians unworthy of the civilisation they had ruined.
When the Normans came in 1066 they deliberately destroyed English chant, the last survivor in Western Europe of a tradition five centuries old.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, ambitious Norman clergymen lined up to do whatever King William wanted in exchange for preferment — and what William wanted was to eradicate English identity, bringing the country into line with the ways of the near Continent.
Advice is a dangerous gift, and for centuries our greatest writers have wondered how to dispense it safely.
‘It is always a silly thing to give advice,’ says Erskine in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr W. H., ‘but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.’ Back in 1750 the Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), suggested a way to sugar the pill.
The steering committee for the Great Exhibition of 1851 turned down all 245 designs submitted for the iconic venue.
Sir Joseph Paxton, a consultant to the Duke of Devonshire, was the man who designed the ‘Crystal Palace,’ the enormous cast iron and glass conservatory that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 seen by over six million people. Not only was the design groundbreaking, but the way Paxton brought it to the attention of the Building Committee was decidedly modern too.