Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Fursey was a 7th-century Irish monk whose visions of the afterlife made a great impression on St Bede.
Shortly before Lent each year, the Church dedicates one Sunday to reflection on the Last Judgment. For the seventh-century monk Bede, the go-to authority on the matter was Fursey (?597-650), an Irish missionary to the Kingdom of the East Angles just a generation earlier, who had received several visions of the soul’s journey to heaven.
A stranger warns the people of Shorapur that they will come to regret their hospitality.
In 1850, Charles Dickens’s magazine ‘Household Words’ carried this curious tale, written by Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor, who at the time was a correspondent on ‘The Times’ in India. Set in the legendary past, the story concerns the town of Shorapur in India, which in Dickens’s time was still a semi-independent Kingdom, and a question as simple as it is timeless: Cats, or Dogs?
A fierce Victorian rivalry sprang up between two football teams from the industrial heartlands of the North East.
Sunderland AFC is a team in the English Football League with a proud history, six times champions of the top flight and twice winners of the FA Cup. Their first trophy, Football League Champions, came in 1892, but in those days they were not the only league side from the busy industrial town on the Wear.
A Roman general asks his officers to decide where their priorities lie.
Constantius I Chlorus was supreme commander of the Roman Army in Britain and Gaul, and a co-ruler of the Roman Empire from 293 to 306. His son Constantine the Great became the first Roman Emperor to allow Christians to worship freely, and although Constantius was not a Christian himself, it is clear where his son acquired his respect for religious liberty.
Ten British POWs in German-occupied Poland decide to help a young Jewish woman escape the SS and a death march to the sea.
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
After more than a month in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, Moses finds that the Israelites are growing rebellious.
The Israelites have at last escaped slavery in Egypt, but now another test lies before them: the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. The food and flocks they have brought out with them cannot sustain them for ever, especially if they have no water.