British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
With Christianity faltering in the British Isles, Pope Gregory took the first definite steps towards restoring its vigour.
Romans brought the gospel to Britannia in the late first century, but the influx of pagan Angles and Saxons after the Romans abandoned the province in 410 all but snuffed the Church out. One man was determined to rekindle it, and the Kingdom of Kent was to be the touch-paper.
In 1014, Norwegian prince Olaf Haraldsson sailed to the aid of King Ethelred the Unready in his struggle with the Danes.
In 1014 Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard, who had ousted Ethelred the Unready, unexpectedly died. Ethelred and his Norse ally Olaf Haraldsson each raised a fleet and swept up the Thames to London, but Sweyn’s son Cnut was barring their way, his Danes strung right across the Thames on a wooden bridge.
Zealous convert Olaf Tryggvason went from England to Norway to spread the Gospel, but it seemed the Lord did not like Olaf’s way of doing it.
When Olaf Trygvason returned from England to Norway in 995, he seized the crown of Earl Hakon and declared himself King with the intention of converting all Norway to Christianity. His method was to ask nicely and then slaughter anyone who refused; happily, in Rogaland a higher power than Olaf was at work.
Abdullah Abdul Kadir gives us his first-hand impressions of the Founder of Singapore and of his first wife, Olivia.
In 1808, young colonial secretary Stamford Raffles went down the Malaysian coast from Penang to the formerly Dutch colony of Malacca as a rest cure. There, Raffles and his wife Olivia made the acquaintance of Abdullah Abdul Kadir, a local teacher of Malay, who left us his pen-portrait of them.
The busy trading hub of Malacca was to be consigned to history, until Stamford Raffles saw that history was one of its assets.
Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is known today as the founder of Singapore, but his first foray into statecraft came when he was still in his late twenties. In 1808, as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang he penned an impassioned report which saved Malacca, modern-day Melaka in Malaysia, from oblivion.
An aristocratic widow advertises for a husband, and among the line-up of natty and noble suitors is a rough-and-ready Olaf Tryggvason.
In 984, exiled Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason lost his wife Geira, and went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage through Britain, before suddenly becoming a Christian in the Isles of Scilly. Hearing that Gyda, the King of Dublin’s sister, had summoned a Thing (a Viking council) to choose a husband, Olaf returned to England.