The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A Danish soldier in the seventeenth century imposes the severest sentence he can think of.
Flensburg is now in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, but until 1864 it was Flensborg, an important harbour town in the Kingdom of Denmark. At one time, brewing was a major industry, and if this story is to be believed, to be deprived of a drop of Flensborg beer was as much as man could bear.
In a translation from the Authorized Version of the Bible, published in 1611, St Mark recounts the discovery of Christ’s empty tomb.
This translation of St Mark’s breathless account of the resurrection of Jesus was made in the reign of King James VI and I, and published in 1611. The language was deliberately archaic, even for William Shakespeare’s time, and translated the traditional ‘Byzantine’ text of the New Testament rather than the academic reconstructions preferred since the 19th century.
A 9th century Irish monk scribbled some verses about a beloved cat into his copy book.
An anonymous ninth-century Irish monk – possibly Sedulius Scottus, driven onto the Continent by Vikings – penned a little poem about his cat Pangur Bán (Fuller the White) into his scrapbook, sharing the precious space with Latin hymns and noble quotations.
The Nazi-collaborating Vichy government in France paid Rugby League the supreme compliment: they banned it.
In France, Rugby League is not perhaps the most fashionable code of Rugby. But it does have the proud distinction of having been banned by the Nazis’ French friends, making it a form of the game with special appeal to those who see themselves as a bit of a rebel.
The less glamorous code of Rugby football, but the best for sheer speed and strength.
Rugby League is a form of the sport of Rugby Football that dominates in northern England, but is overshadowed in the south by more fashionable Rugby Union. Once the only professional form of the game, over the years Rugby League has became the faster, harder, and arguably more exciting code.
Abbot Elfric expounds a Palm Sunday text to explain how Christianity combines orderly behaviour with intelligent and genuine liberty.
In a sermon for Palm Sunday, Abbot Elfric (955-1010) of the monastery in Eynsham in Oxfordshire drew on the Biblical account of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to show that Christianity tames the wildness of man not by the bridle of coercion and law, but by the wisdom of reason and freewill.