The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Abbot Elfric unpacks the meaning of the gifts of the Three Wise Men.
In Anglo-Saxon England, January 6th was named the Epiphany, referring to the showing forth of Christ’s divinity. On this day, Abbot Elfric tells us, the English Church celebrated chiefly the Baptism of Christ, but also the Wedding at Cana, and the visit of the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem.
Young Thomas Arne goes to extreme lengths to conceal his musical talent from his family.
Thomas Arne (1710-1778) remains one of England’s greatest composers, though overshadowed now by his contemporary George Frideric Handel. He wrote the music for the National Anthem and ‘Rule Britannia!’ and composed dozens of popular songs and operas, but if his father had had his way, Thomas would have been a bored London attorney.
James Hargreaves’s historic invention was not without its critics when it first appeared.
James Hargreaves (?1720-1778) was one of a number of eighteenth-century Lancashire inventors who transformed textile production from a cottage handicraft into a mechanised industry. His ‘Spinning Jenny’ of 1764 cleared a bottleneck in cloth production that proved the social benefits of automation and accelerated the industrial revolution.
Samuel Smiles explains how Tudor England was transformed from sleepy backwater to hive of industry.
Samuel Smiles has been writing about England’s sluggish economy early in Elizabeth’s reign, with London acting as little more than a trading post for prosperous merchants in Amsterdam and Antwerp. Something needed to change the culture in England’s declining market towns.
The Pope and the King of Spain decide that the time has come to rid England of her troublesome Queen, Elizabeth I.
In 1558 Mary I of England, a Catholic married to King Philip II of Spain, died. Her crown passed to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I, dashing the hopes of Philip and of Pope Pius V for a united Catholic Europe. When Elizabeth began helping persecuted Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands, it was the last straw.
Sir Humphry Davy pleads with Britain’s scientists not to be bought by Napoleon’s gold.
Soon after Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on his quest for a united Europe in 1803, Sir Humphry Davy gave a lecture in which he urged Britain’s scientists to support their country’s sovereignty and commercial freedom, rather than sell out their country in the expectation of funding from Napoleon’s Europe.