Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

← Page 1

697

St George, Patron Saint of England

George served in the Roman army and lies buried in Israel, yet he makes an ideal patron for England.

It is sometimes said that England’s patron saint, St George, is not very English. Yet Britain in his day was part of the Roman Empire, and George refused to help the Roman Emperor send troops against his own people, meddle with the Church or impose cruel and arbitrary punishments — all key provisions of The Great Charter of 1215. You can’t get more English than that.

Read

Picture: © Josep Renalias, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

698

The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus

Maximian and his friends refused to take part in a multi-faith day of prayer for unity.

In the days of the Roman Emperor Theodosius (r. 402-450) doubts were again being raised about the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of bodies. Just at that moment, a letter came to the Imperial court in Constantinople from nearby Ephesus, where the Bishop had seen with his own eyes a quite extraordinary tale of life after death.

Read

Picture: © Sailko, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

699

Deborah and Sisera

The Israelites turn to Deborah for help after twenty years under the harsh rule of King Jabin and his stern general Sisera.

Deborah was the fourth of the Judges, a series of prophets who ruled Israel when they first entered Canaan, their Promised Land. The message of their stories was that if Israel turned from God to worship the gods of the nations, then God would let the kings of the nations have their way until Israel repented.

Read

Picture: © Rama, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 France.. Source.

700

The Battle of the Winwaed

In 655, the future of England as a Christian nation hung by the slenderest of threads.

Following the conversion of Ethelbert, King of Kent, in 597, one after another the Kings of England’s kingdoms were baptised; Sigeberht of the East Angles even resigned his crown to his brother Anna, in order to become a monk. But Cenwalh of Wessex remained unmoved, as did his brother-in-law Penda, mighty lord of Mercia.

Read

Picture: © Philip Halling, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

701

Three Ages of Empire

Sir Charles Lucas looked back at the role of the Government, the military and private enterprise during three centuries of British adventure overseas.

To end the six-volume ‘Oxford Survey of the British Empire’, Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas looked back over the history of England’s overseas adventures from time of Queen Elizabeth I to the end of the Victorian Age. He concluded that there had been three quite distinct eras, and began by looking at the character of our enterprise during the upheavals of the seventeenth century.

Read

Picture: Hastings County Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

702

Timely Progress

Sir Charles Lucas argued that the Industrial Revolution happened at just the right time for everyone in the British Empire.

From the 1850s, railways, steamships and the electric telegraph allowed Britain and the scattered nations of her Empire to increase cooperation. Even better, said colonial administrator and historian Sir Charles Lucas, such innovations came too late for politicians in London to use them to tighten their control.

Read

Picture: © Biswarup Ganguly, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.