Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
The Northumbrian monk was touched by two thieving birds who repented of their misdeeds.
Cuthbert had a particular attachment to the many wonderful birds of the Farne Islands, which remained a key feature of devotion to the saint at his shrine in Durham. He was not, however, a bird-pleaser any more than he was a people-pleaser, and if his birds needed a little moral correction he would steel himself to provide it.
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
A good example of the way Bede uses miracles comes from the story of Cuthbert’s barley. Some later chroniclers took a story about Anthony of Egypt and some wild asses and transposed it, donkeys and all, onto more recent saints. Bede, however, was content to draw parallels with a quite different miracle attributed to St Cuthbert.
The way St Cuthbert found water for his island retreat confirmed that Northumbria’s church was the real thing.
Unlike some later chroniclers, Bede did not transpose well-known miracles from one saint to another. He researched authentic miracles of Northumbrian saints and found close (but never exact) matches in the lives of saints from the Roman Empire, to show that Christianity in the British Isles was cut from the same cloth.
In April 1203, a royal prince and heir vanished from Rouen at just the right moment for King John.
Prince Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was a nephew of King Richard I who from an early age seemed destined to inherit the throne of England. When Richard died in 1199, however, Arthur was only twelve, and support from the French King, Philip II, served only to increase tensions with his uncle John.
Douglas Jardine came up with a plan to deprive the watching public of one of the finest sights in all sport.
The ‘Bodyline’ Test series between Australia and England in 1932-33 remains one of the most controversial moments in cricketing history. It all stemmed from the almost freakish genius of Don Bradman, who to this day remains far and away the best batsman the game has ever seen, but England captain Douglas Jardine was determined to see as little of him as possible.
In the year that Napoleon’s quest for European Empire faltered at Moscow, President Madison of the USA came to his aid.
In 1783, the American War of Independence ended with the creation of a new sovereign nation, the United States of America. Peace was short-lived, however, as zealous statesmen in Washington were itching to see revolution sweep on through Europe’s monarchies and across Britain’s Empire – especially Canada.