The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Queen Elizabeth I’s quick thinking and command of five European languages made her a dangerous enemy in a war of words.
In 1588, King Philip of Spain sent a vast Armada against England. As the husband of the late Queen Mary I, he thought the English crown should have gone to him and not to her half-sister Elizabeth, and now Elizabeth was supporting Protestant rebels in the Spanish Netherlands. Hoping to daunt this upstart Englishwoman, he threatened war in Latin verse, no less; but the Queen was not a novice in the art of verbal fencing.
Luka had netted a nice little haul of stolen coins and antiques, but he could not resist stripping down the historic Icon of the Sign too.
The ‘Virgin of the Sign’ is a twelfth-century icon of the Virgin Mary kept to this day in Great Novgorod, Russia — the ‘sign’ refers to the promise made by the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz, that one day a virgin would conceive and bear a son. In 1170 the icon saved the city from a siege, and a special church was built for it, but it would seem that by the seventeenth century the mystique was beginning to wear off.
Many of Australia’s first cities were planned by British bureaucrats who had never been there, which may explain why they put them in the wrong places.
In 1835, John Batman (1801-1839) of Launceston in Tasmania set out across the Bass Strait in the schooner Rebecca to explore Port Philip, a large, sheltered bay on the southern coast of Australia. What he saw only confirmed what he had heard from others, and on June 8th he jotted down in his diary, next to a sketch of the place where the Yarra empties into the Bay: ‘reserved for a township and other purposes’.
William Murdoch and Samuel Clegg brought warmth and light into the country’s streets, factories and homes, but the public didn’t make it easy.
Before natural gas there was coal gas, which warmed living rooms and lit streets all over the United Kingdom until the 1960s. Coal gas does not occur naturally, and Archibald Cochrane (1748-1831), 9th Earl of Dundonald, discovered it only by chance, while making coal tar near Culross Abbey in the 1780s. It fell to another Scotsman to make coal gas commercially viable.
The Tilers and Thatchers of fourteenth-century York tell how Joseph and Mary fared after they were turned away by the innkeepers of Bethlehem.
From at least the 1370s, a series of pageants was put on in the city of York for Corpus Christi, a summertime Church festival dedicated to the Eucharist. Dramatising the life of Jesus Christ, the plays were performed by members of the Guilds of skilled trades or ‘mysteries’ (hence ‘mystery plays’). The Nativity fell to the Tilers and Thatchers, who began with Joseph and Mary trying to settle into a tumbledown Bethlehem stable.
While Joseph is away trying to find light for the darksome stable, Mary brings into the world the Light of everlasting Day.
The Tilers and Thatchers of fourteenth-century York continue their Nativity play, with Mary alone in the ramshackle Bethlehem stable — Joseph her betrothed guardian has gone out into the cold night air to find some light. She is praising God, and awaiting the birth of the miraculous child foretold to her by the archangel Gabriel nine months ago in Nazareth.