The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The Bishop of Myra’s ceaseless toil to put an end to the worship of Artemis made him some dangerous enemies.
By the 320s, Christians in the Roman Empire were no longer discriminated against, but that did not mean life was easy. As this story shows, the warm-hearted yet combative Bishop of Myra (now Demre in Turkey) made himself some dangerous enemies by continuing to insist that there was one God and one Truth, and that the popular and profitable religions of Rome were the delusions of a dark power.
On the annual Remembrance Day of ancient Athens, Pericles rose to remind the people of the City that grief alone was not the best way to honour the fallen.
In the winter of 431 BC, their annual Remembrance Day had a special resonance for Athenians: war had broken out with Sparta, a city felt to stand for crushing State control, even as Corinth stood for licentious ruin. Rising to deliver the keynote address, Pericles asked Athenians not just to grieve for the dead, but to cherish a City founded on liberty and self-control as a living monument to heroes.
For centuries our coal industry was plagued by regulations and taxes, but a tax imposed in 1667 seemed to have nothing to do with coal at all.
Coal-burning was heavily regulated as early as 1306 by Edward I — ostensibly on environmental grounds, though the powerful charcoal lobby was not at all displeased to see this new competitor hobbled by Parliament. Yet supplies of wood for charcoal dwindled, and coal could no longer be ignored; so from Elizabeth I onwards, the coal industry was less regulated, but more taxed.
Lord George Gordon marched at the head of 50,000 protestors to the House of Commons, to demand that George III’s England did not become like Louis XVI’s France.
The ‘Gordon Riots’ of 1780 were a protest against the Papists Act (1778), which eased the ban on Roman Catholics in Government. Fearing the Pope would meddle in English politics as he apparently meddled all over Europe, Lord George Gordon MP led an unruly mob to the Commons with a petition for repeal. In Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens dramatised what unfolded on the stairs up to the Visitor’s Gallery.
Mary I’s fear for her throne had risen to such a pitch that her Chamberlain felt threatened by a three-year-old child.
In the Spring of 1554, Queen Mary I was in tense negotiations to marry the King of Spain. Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, had been widely expected to wear the crown beside her, but now she charged him with conspiring with rebel Sir Thomas Wyatt and threw him in Tower; and on March 17th, he was joined by Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth, rumoured to be Edward’s new love. Yet Mary’s minders did not feel safe.
In 1657, Sir John Evelyn celebrated Christmas in a church for the first time in years. Unfortunately, someone told the authorities what he was doing.
In 1649, the execution of King Charles I left England in the hands of a Parliament of hardline Protestants determined to purge the Church of superstitious mumbo-jumbo. On Christmas Day 1657, Sir John Evelyn avoided the now dirty, unloved churches, clumsily improvised prayers and muddle-headed preachers, and found an old-fashioned Prayer Book service; but he did not enjoy it in peace.