Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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1237

The Battle of Agincourt

One of the best-known of all battles in English history, but not because of the conflict of which it was a part.

Agincourt is not remembered today for its place in the Hundred Years’ War, a dispute over the royal family’s inherited lands in France, which England lost. Thanks to a 1944 movie version, it is remembered as a symbol of Britain’s backs-to-the-wall defence against Nazi Germany, which the Free French helped us to win.

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Picture: © Penny Mayes, Wikimedia Commons. Licence CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

1238

The London and Birmingham Railway

The textile moguls of Manchester and Liverpool engaged the Stephensons to complete their link to the capital.

After the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was linked to Birmingham by the Grand Junction Railway, it made sense for the business tycoons of the North West to extend this exhilarating new form of transport to London, and George and Robert Stephenson were given the job.

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Picture: © Tony Hisgett, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

1239

The Outbreak of the Great War

Germany felt she had a right to an empire like Britain’s, and she was willing to get it at the expense of her neighbours.

In 1871, Otto von Bismarck hammered Prussia and other small princedoms of the region into a new united Germany. The new Union greedily coveted British industrial progress and colonial expansion, but as John Buchan wrote, ‘she began too late in the day, and could succeed only at the expense of her neighbours’.

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

1240

A Pyrrhic Victory

The ancient Greek King knew victory had cost his army more than it could afford to lose.

In 279 BC, forty-two years after his illustrious predecessor Alexander the Great died, Pyrrhus, King of Epirus and Macedonia, halted the advance of the Roman Republic at Asculum (Ascoli Satriano) in Apulia, southern Italy. The cost to his army was so great that he famously declared that another such victory would utterly ruin him - a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ indeed.

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Picture: © Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-CA 2.5.. Source.

1241

The Man Who Left No Footprints

A young monk was rewarded for taking his duties as guest-master seriously.

In about 658, Abbot Eata sent Cuthbert from Melrose Abbey away south to Ripon, to be the guest-master in a new monastery there. It was while he was at Ripon that Cuthbert had a remarkable experience which left him trembling with excitement and fear.

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Picture: © Richard Croft, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

1242

The Rewards of Treachery

Cicero warns those who seek power through civic unrest that they will never be the beneficiaries of it.

In 63 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) accused Lucius Sergius Catilina of scheming to overthrow the Republic. In exposing the plot, he warned the Senate against five kinds of political troublemaker, including those who stir up ill-feeling and violence at home, hoping to be the beneficiaries of it.

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Picture: Photo by Jensens, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.