The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Peter de Brus and his tenants agreed to work together after King John ordered a crackdown on unpaid rents.
About six years before King John reluctantly signed ‘Magna Carta’ in 1215, some of those who made him sign it had already begun enacting its principles of liberty and honest government up in Yorkshire.
The Master and his brother Henry must decide which of them goes to fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie.
It is 1745, and James - the Master of Ballantrae - and his younger brother Henry both want to fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie. But one of them must stay at home and make peace with King George II, in case he wins, and James suggests a way of deciding who it shall be.
Parted from his beloved Julia, Proteus follows his friend Valentine to Milan, where he meets the bewitching Silvia.
Valentine and Proteus are the two gentlemen in question, from Verona in northern Italy. However, as Elizabeth Bennet might say, one had got all the gentlemanliness, and the other all the appearance of it...
Five young women cared enough about a man’s wedding-day to make the smallest of sacrifices, and received the best of rewards.
The Parable of the Ten Virgins was told as a caution to those who think that conscientious preparation for the Hereafter is unnecessary. Five young women hired as lamp-bearers for a Jewish wedding assumed they could beg, borrow or buy oil when the time came.