The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Edmund Burke would not congratulate the French revolutionaries on their ‘liberty’ until he knew what they would do with it.
In 1789, the French Parliament relieved King Louis XVI of his constitutional privileges, and amidst chaotic scenes proclaimed that henceforth ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ would define their Government. Some believed that France was becoming more like England, and that Louis would be retained to add, like England’s George III, regal pomp to a liberal democracy. Edmund Burke wasn’t convinced.
A monk living in the tumbledown hermitage that had once belonged to St Cuthbert reluctantly decided that it needed more than repairs.
After many years of tramping about the Kingdom of Northumbria preaching the gospel and healing the sick, monk Cuthbert retired to the island of Inner Farne, just over a mile off the coast at Bamburgh. In 685, he reluctantly combined this with being Bishop of Lindisfarne, six miles further north; but he still managed to live out most of his days in his cell. He was buried on Lindisfarne, but seemingly left something behind.
As various ball sports began to take hold in England, King Edward III became convinced that Government action was required.
In 1363, with England’s glorious victories at Crécy and Poitiers nearly twenty years behind him, King Edward III was seized with anxiety lest England’s famous archers should squander their skills on such fripperies as football and quoits. He therefore issued an order prescribing stiff penalties for those who put amusement ahead of the defence of the realm.
When the capital of the Roman Empire was in the grip of a violent earthquake, it fell to one small child to save all the people.
According to tradition, the Trisagion or Thrice-Holy Hymn was revealed by angels one September 24th during the tenure of Patriarch Proclus of Constantinople (434-446). Some thirty years later Peter, the abrasive Patriarch of Antioch and a former fuller by trade, took it upon himself to add an extra line. Three centuries after that John Damascene was still upset about it.
On October 13th, 1399, Henry Bolingbroke was crowned King Henry IV of England in Westminster Abbey.
The reign of Richard II began with the Peasants’ Revolt, and by 1399 he had done little to win his unhappy people over. He had become both greedy and extravagant, and when the powerful Percy family in Northumberland encouraged Richard’s second cousin Henry Bolingbroke to claim the crown, he won it with only a few hundred men. On Monday October 13th, 1399, Henry was crowned at Westminster Abbey.
As late as the fifteenth century, criminals on the run could find refuge in the precincts of England’s great churches.
From at least the time of King Ine of Wessex in 693, criminal first offenders fleeing to the protection of the Church could expect at least safe conduct out of the kingdom, and even a pardon. The custom persisted at Durham long into the fifteenth century, but was increasingly abused and records ended abruptly in 1503, during Henry VII’s reign.