The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Flemish merchants hoping to prosper in Russia’s commercial capital received a nasty shock.
In 1553, Richard Chancellor led an expedition to see whether the Northeast passage might be used to reach Russia, bypassing the jealous states of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic shore. The gamble paid off, and before long the English were rewarded by the chance to visit Great Novgorod, the founding city of Russia and the country’s commercial capital.
Ivan the Terrible offered free trade to English merchants throughout his dominions.
In 1553, Edward VI gave letters into the hand of Richard Chancellor, to present to the ruler of Moscow should the Englishman’s dangerous voyage of exploration through the icy waters of the northeast passage succeed. Despite grave hardships the English won through, and following year Tsar Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) wrote a reply — unaware that Edward was dead, and Queen Mary would be reading it.
Rudyard Kipling believed that a better appreciation of ancient Greece and Rome could help the English be less insular.
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more people asked why English schools taught Latin and Greek. Rudyard Kipling was one of those who resisted the trend. The value, he said, lay not in ‘intellectual training’, which can be acquired in other ways, but in the development of humility and respect — like playing cricket long enough to realise just how good Ranjitsinhji was.
Faced with a choice between silence, dungeon or exile, William Cobbett chose exile — and then had to make sense of it.
In March, 1817, English radical William Cobbett fled to the US, in the belief that he was about to arrested for his cheap, popular and highly critical digest of Parliamentary news, the Political Register. A few months later, he wrote back home to his supporters from his Long Island farm explaining how, as an expat, he would balance his divided loyalties.
Leigh Hunt looks back to a memorable event in a long life.
Leigh Hunt first published this delightful poem (which he labelled a Rondeau, though hardly in the technical sense of that term) in The Monthly Chronicle for November 1838. It was inspired by a impulsive greeting from Jane Welsh, wife of Thomas Carlyle.
On a money-spinning pilgrimage to Canterbury, a Pardoner says the quiet part out loud.
Pardoners, in pre-Reformation England, raised funds for the Pope by selling Indulgences, blessings that relieved sinners of some of the punishment they could expect to undergo in Purgatory after death. Naturally a Pardoner attached himself to the pilgrims walking to Canterbury, and he was refreshingly open about his profitable game.