The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.