The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
When the Reformers sold off the treasures of Durham Cathedral, they sold a priceless piece of Scottish history into oblivion.
The Black Rood of Scotland was an heirloom of the Scottish royal family, captured by the English at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 and added to the treasures of Durham Abbey. After the sixteenth-century Reformers ransacked the cathedral, the cross disappeared. A generation later, the Rites of Durham recalled some of the wonderful history of the vanished relic in a breathless tale, edited here by John Davies in 1671.
After the murder of King Duncan, Lady Macbeth is alarmed to see her husband losing his grip on reality.
Macbeth has stabbed Duncan, King of Scots, as he lay in his bed, hoping to give a little assistance to a witch’s prophesy that he would one day be King. Both Macbeth and his wife, who is the driving force behind the plot, are understandably jittery; but it soon becomes clear to the ever-competent Lady Macbeth that her husband is losing his grip.
Nearly seventy years after his death, the roguish laird still cast a spell over the farm-folk of the Highlands.
In 1803, William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their friend Samuel Coleridge travelled to Scotland, taking in beautiful Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. They begged bed and board from a startled Scottish farmer, and at breakfast the following morning (it was Saturday August 27th) the Macfarlanes told them in their slow English about Rob Roy.
The Revd Edmund Dixon urged young people to think about what a little politeness could do for them.
In 1855, the November 24th issue of Charles Dickens’s Household Words carried a long article on good manners. Written by frequent contributor the Revd Edmund Saul Dixon, it took a look at etiquette in England, France and Arab lands, and the Arabs were the clear winners. The opening lines impressed on young readers the importance of courtesy, in a fashion suggesting that Dixon had a quite remarkable pet dog.
The Nika Rebellion drew a rising Roman general against some rioting sports fans, and it was a tense game.
In a brilliant but turbulent career, Flavius Belisarius (?505-565) would recover North Africa from the Vandals and Rome from the Ostrogoths, and he would save Constantinople (the imperial capital) from the Huns. But before all this happened, he was involved in quite a different kind of campaign, the Nika Rebellion of 532, which began as a brawl amongst sports hooligans.
A half-starved cat is recruited by the Allies in the fight against Hitler.
In June 1941, some six months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour brought the USA into the Second World War, the USSR declared herself for Britain and her Empire, at a time when European states from Finland to Greece had been unable to stem the Nazi tide. This little tale is based on events recounted by Ovadi Savich, originally in Soviet War News.