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 privileges granted to European merchants in fifteenth-century London led to seething resentment in the City.
The Hanseatic League was a confederation of merchant guilds and towns that gained a stranglehold on trade in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Lübeck and other elite centres waxed fat, while to varying degrees towns from Novgorod to London were forced to accept restrictions on trade and political interference as the price of doing business. The yoke was heavy, and it chafed.
The city of Great Novgorod in Russia was a mediaeval pioneer of a decidedly rumbustious kind of parliamentary democracy.
In the thirteenth century, England was the westernmost partner of the Hanseatic League, a German-dominated European trade bloc. At the eastern end, in Kievan Rus’, was Novgorod, which shared with London a Viking past and a rebellious public. But even the barons who made John sign Magna Carta (1215) and Henry III the Provisions of Oxford (1258) dreamt of nothing like democracy in Novgorod.
Lord Halifax tacks gratefully into the Winds of Liberty, though he trims his sails to avoid being blown into republicanism.
Following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, opponents of George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, dubbed him ‘the Trimmer’ for charting a nice course between the King’s claims on power and Parliament’s defence of liberties. Halifax gleefully embraced the label, and privately circulated The Character of a Trimmer (1685) to champion a liberal constitution years ahead of its time.
After safely negotiating the alluring Sirens, Odysseus and his crew must now decide which of Scylla and Charybdis would do the least damage.
Before Odysseus and his crew set sail from her island, Circe warned them all of the dangers they would face in returning to Ithaca. Assuming they passed safely by the alluring Sirens, they would then have to navigate a course between a gangly, voracious six-headed monster on one side and a ghastly, throbbing whirlpool on the other — a choice between bad and worse.
Following the Restoration of King Charles II, the country charted a well-planned course between the extremes of civil licence and Government control.
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, won for himself the nickname of ‘the Trimmer’ for his ability to sail a course between political extremes. It was intended as a snub, but he wore the badge with pride, maintaining that we needed both Charles II’s strong government and also Parliament’s vigorous defence of civil liberties in order for our country to prosper.
Armed with a length of stout cord and a large ball of wax, Odysseus and his crew prepare to face the music of the Sirens.
Odysseus and his crew have parted, not without misgivings, from the paradise island of the goddess Circe. Before they set off for home and the island of Ithaca, Circe warned them about the Sirens. The sailor who once listens to their music will be drawn irresistibly into their meadow, there to sit spellbound forever by song among the other little heaps of withered flesh and bleaching bone.