Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
James calls Fr Huddleston to his brother’s deathbed, ready for a most delicate task.
As King, Charles II was officially the Head of the Church of England, an ever-so-modern, Protestant church. But like his father before him, and his brother James, his sympathies lay with the older Roman ways, and in 1685, lying in his bed at Whitehall Palace and facing his last hours on earth, he had an agonising decision to make.
The wronged hero vanquishes a dreadful monster with the help of a winged horse, but then it all goes to his head.
The detailed myth of Bellerophon comes from a variety of ancient sources, but the basic tale is found in Homer’s ‘Iliad’. It is a tale of the ‘pride that goeth before a fall’ (Proverbs 16:18), and has a starring role for that most noble of all mythological figures, Pegasus, the winged horse.
The blushing clergyman’s daughter is recognised today as one of the great figures of English literature.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was not especially well-known in her own day, but has subsequently become recognised as one of the foremost novelists in English. Her dry wit, sparkling characters and radical themes have endeared her novels and herself to millions, not least Winston Churchill.
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.