The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
James Edward Austen-Leigh tells us what it was that made his aunt, the celebrated novelist Jane Austen, so remarkable.
James Austen-Leigh has been describing the accomplishments of his aunt, the novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817). She was fluent in French, he tells us, and a decent pianist with a pleasant singing voice; she was much addicted to the novels of Samuel Richardson and the poetry of George Crabbe, and well-read in English history too.
Sir Richard Steele takes up arms against the kind of wit who thinks you can be as nasty as you like provided you make people laugh.
One day, a shy young man addressed a stranger and was handed a withering put-down. A thoughtless onlooker was highly amused, but Richard Steele was full of righteous indignation. You may mock mankind, he said, but not men; never take aim at the weak, and never be witty in anger. And he fell to musing on what makes a good satirist.
After the death of King Edgar, powerful court factions struggled for power by hiding behind his two sons, twelve-year-old Edward and his younger step-brother Ethelred.
Edward became King of England in 975, aged twelve. His stepmother Ælfthryth at once sidelined him, and sought to rule through her own boy Ethelred, barely eight. Edward’s party supported the revival of England’s monasteries whereas Ælfthryth campaigned to dissolve them, and in 978 his principles cost Edward his life. Roger of Wendover (?-1236) accused Ælfthryth of the murder, but there was a twist in the tale.
In 978, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan, was being battered in a stormy meeting when he — along with England’s rich monastic heritage — had a miraculous escape.
In 975, King Edgar died and left the country to his son Edward, aged twelve. At once Edward’s stepmother Ælfthryth moved to promote the interests of her own son Ethelred, just eight. As her flagship policy, she chose to defy her late husband’s wishes and close down the monasteries recently revived by the Bishop of Winchester, Æthelwold. Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was forced to back his man.
One Christmas Eve back in the twelfth century, a monk keeping midnight vigil in Lindisfarne priory watched spellbound as two great doors opened all by themselves.
During Viking raids in 793, the monastic community on Lindisfarne hastily exhumed the body of St Cuthbert (?635-687) and fled. After two hundred years of wandering they found a home for him at Durham, and in 1093 the Bishop of Durham re-established the priory on Lindisfarne. In the early days it was staffed by just a couple of Durham monks, but one Christmas, we are told, they received some visitors.
Following a very grand coronation at Bath in 973, King Edgar travelled to Chester and showed his people that he had become a mighty lord indeed.
King Edgar (r. 959-975) was crowned at Bath in 973 after a frustrating delay while St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, satisfied himself that Edgar, a tearaway in his youth, had acquired sufficient maturity. That Edgar had now grown to be a king of great power and glory would have been acknowledged even by Kenneth II, King of Scots — through gritted teeth.