Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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1063

The Outbreak of the Second World War

The only truly global conflict in history began when German troops crossed into Poland in September 1939.

The Second World War began twice, once in September 1939 for the countries of western Europe, and then again in February 1941 with the entrance of Japan and the United States of America. For those early months, long and bruising, Great Britain stood alone against almost every government from Norway to Spain.

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Picture: © Imperial War Museums, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

1064

Abraham Darby I

To the poor of England, the Worcestershire man gave affordable pots and pans, and to all the world he gave the industrial revolution.

Seventeenth-century England’s industrial productivity had stalled. Her forests could no longer supply charcoal for smelting; iron was mostly imported from Russia and Sweden; fine metal kitchenware was a luxury of the rich. Government funded various barren initiatives, but Worcestershire entrepreneur Abraham Darby (1678-1717) made the breakthrough.

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Picture: © Basher Eyre, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

1065

The War of the Spanish Succession

After Louis XIV’s grandson Philip inherited the throne of Spain, the ‘Sun King’ began to entertain dreams of Europe-wide dominion.

The War of the Spanish Succession dragged on from 1702 to 1713, as the states of Europe scrambled to prevent France acquiring control not only over Spain but over territories and trade from Italy to the Netherlands. Indeed, the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV tried to add England to his bag, which proved to be a serious mistake.

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

1066

The Arts of Fair Rowena

Charles Dickens believed that Britain’s Saxon invaders gained power by force of arms – but not by weapons.

Whether or not the fifth-century Saxon warlords Hengist and Horsa were historical figures (St Bede and JRR Tolkien both thought so), the Saxon invasions, and General Flavius Aetius’s failure to respond to Roman Britain’s heartbreaking appeals in the late 440s, were quite real.

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Picture: By Gabriel von Max (1840-1915), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

1067

The Voice of an Angel

A tenth-century Greek monk is joined by a total stranger for Mattins.

In the days of St Dunstan (r. 959-988), Archbishop of Canterbury to King Ethelred the Unready, over in Greece an otherwise comfortably obscure fellow monk – we still do not know his name – was entertaining a guest of even greater royalty.

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

1068

The Economic Case for Generous Wages

Adam Smith asks employers to pay the most generous wages their finances will allow.

Adam Smith would not have liked the so-called Living Wage. ‘Law can never regulate wages properly,’ he wrote, ‘though it has often pretended to do so.’ But he did like generous wages, out of hard-headed business sense - an argument much more likely actually to raise wages than merely cost jobs.

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Picture: © David Dixon, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.