Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
After two years in South Africa, a Scottish civil servant began turning out best-selling adventure tales.
John Buchan (1875-1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, was a man of many talents: classicist, barrister, writer of serious history and rattling adventure yarns, influential member of the Church of Scotland, high-flying Westminster MP, and from 1935, Governor-General of Canada.
In 1822, a rich and beautiful young woman took the cause of Greek independence into her capable hands.
The Greek war of independence lasted from 1821 to 1827, and resulted in a partial liberation from the oppressive rule of the Ottoman Turks which had begun with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Manto Mavrogenous (1796-1848) was one of the struggle’s most romantic and most tragic figures.
A traveller went into a Shropshire pub looking for information about a patch of grass with peculiar properties.
Oswald was King of Northumbria from 634 to 642, when he was defeated, aged 38, in battle by the pagan King Penda at Maserfield near modern-day Oswestry in Shropshire. He was soon venerated as a saint, for his own piety, and for bringing St Aidan over from Iona to preach Christianity with a simple kindness others had not shown.
An Arthurian knight commits a dreadful crime against a woman, and is sent by Queen Guinevere on a fitting errand.
Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ include a story told by a much-married lady from Bath named Alison. She prefaces it by complaining at great length that she has been made to feel guilty for marrying five times, and still more so for demanding some equality in the home. Yet, she says, sometimes that works out rather well.
An obscure officer in the Roman Army gains a dizzying promotion after performing a simple act of kindness.
In the fifth century, about the time when St Patrick was preaching in Ireland, far away in the Roman Empire’s glorious capital of Constantinople an obscure Roman soldier performed a kindness for a blind man which brought the most rapid promotion one could ever imagine.
The leader of a wolf-pack makes some sheep an offer they’d better refuse.
This little Aesop’s Fable comes from the collection of Babrius, a poet from Syria in the second century AD. It is, sadly, a story as relevant today as it ever was. The cunning wolves manage to persuade the sheep that their true enemies are the sheepdogs.