The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
King Canute enacted a memorable demonstration of the limits of government power.
This famous story is regarded as a fable by many but it is a very early one, being already established only a century or so after the time of King Canute (Cnut), who reigned from 1016 to 1035. It is important to be clear that Canute was not trying to prove he could ‘turn back the tides’. He was trying to prove that he couldn’t.
A brief introduction to England’s rulers, beginning with the only one named ‘the Great’.
At the end of the 9th century, the eastern side of England was occupied by Danish invaders with their own government (‘the Danelaw’), and King Alfred of Wessex on the south coast inherited a kingdom on the edge of extinction. Little more than a century later, his successors had united all England under them.
England’s rulers from the king who lost his crown to the Danes, to the French duke who took the crown from the English.
The House of Wessex consolidated its rule in 10th-century England, until Ethelred ‘the Unready’ came to the throne in 978. Thereafter, the kingdom was weakened by corruption and intrigue at court, and in 1013 the Danish King Sweyn took the English crown...
Young William’s hat caught the eye of Matthew Boulton, and the world was never the same again.
The invention of the steam engine and the railways changed the world out of all recognition. It might never have happened had the firm of Boulton and Watt, pioneers in the steam engine, not employed a self-taught Scotsman with a very unusual hat.
William Murdoch’s experiments with steam traction impressed his next-door neighbour, with world-changing results.
The clever hand-powered wooden tricycle that a young William Murdoch built with his father made a triumphant reappearance many years later as a miniature steam-powered vehicle. That in turn led to the railway revolution – courtesy of his next-door-neighbour.
Cuthbert trusted that keeping his promised fast would not do him any harm.
A shieling is a temporary stone hut, built for the summer months when sheep or cattle are taken to higher ground. Bede tells us that a near-contemporary, the seventh-century saint Cuthbert, once had a remarkable experience in one of these huts, as he was journeying across the empty moorland of Northumbria.