British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
When Malcolm III, King of Scots, met Princess Margaret of Wessex, he knew at once that he had found a woman capable of setting an example to a whole nation.
Following the Norman Invasion in 1066, Prince Edgar, whose claim to the throne was at least as strong as William of Normandy’s, allied with King Sweyn II of Denmark (who also had a decent claim) to unseat William. However, the crafty William bought Sweyn off at the last moment, leaving Edgar and his sisters little option but to flee into Scotland.
Berwick Sayers tells how his friend, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, set out on his last voyage.
Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him his wife Jessie and two children, and a treasury of tuneful and often innovative music that is beginning to be appreciated again today. A close family friend, Berwick Sayers, tells of his last hours.
Edmund, King of the East Angles, is given a stark choice by the Viking warrior who has ravaged his realm.
Some four years after the Great Heathen Army of the Vikings landed in 865, Hingwar ravaged the Kingdom of the East Angles with indiscriminate bloodshed. He then sent a messenger to their lord, King Edmund, in his now silent Hall, bearing an ultimatum: to live and be Hingwar’s vassal, or to die. What follows is said to be the story as told by an eyewitness.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf reminds us that God’s gifts to men are many and varied, and nobody ever gets them all.
‘Now there are diversities of gifts,’ St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, ‘but the same Spirit.’ Cynewulf (possibly the eighth-century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) confirms that the gifts given by God to mankind are many and different, and also explains why it is that no one should expect to be good at everything.
Back in the eleventh century English refugees founded New York, but it wasn’t in North America.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, a group of English noblemen sold their estates and set sail for anywhere not ruled by Normans. Their wanderings took them to Constantinople (or Micklegarth), at that time beset by another overbearing Norman, Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, and the Seljuk Turks.
In Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, a man from Kent founded a glittering church for English refugees.
Goscelin of Canterbury was a Flemish monk who settled in England during the 1060s. He preserved many records of the English just in time to save them from obliteration by the Normans, who overran the country’s highest offices following the Conquest of 1066. As he tells us, however, not everyone could bear to stay and watch.