Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
One week into a Lenten retreat with the Bishop of Hexham, a boy’s miserable life is turned right around.
Bishop John of Hexham (?-721) is better known today as St John of Beverley, as he had been Abbot of the monastery in Beverley, North Yorkshire, before being elevated to the See of Hexham. His contemporary Bede was a great admirer, and told this story of him.
A faithful but unprepossessing pet is turned out of hearth and home.
This Russian folktale is a story about a tom cat who is abandoned by his fastidious owner, but shows all the philosophical resilience of cats, and reinvents himself as Cat Ivanovitch, Head Forester of all the animals of the wood. But he could not have done it without the help of a little vixen called Lisabeta, and a good deal of luck.
As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.
The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.
The unsung surveyor from Cheshire, who built railways and made friends across the world.
The Victorian railway engineer Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) is not the household name that he perhaps ought to be, chiefly because he worked through agents and alongside partners. Nonetheless, his knowledge and business acumen lies behind much of the rail network in Britain, and helped start the railway revolution from France to Australia.
Richard I thought a veteran Crusader and conqueror of Saladin could handle a few French peasants.
Richard the ‘Lionheart’ is best remembered today as the King of England during the time of Robin Hood, an association made for us by Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Ivanhoe’. He was an inspiring general in the Third Crusade, courageous and ruthless, but his death was testimony to the caprices of Fortune.
The Northumbrian monk is duped into wasting one of his beautifully-crafted sermons on a row of dumb rocks.
This story about St Bede from the 13th century ‘Golden Legend’ (some five centuries after Bede died) is not attested in earlier sources, and Bede himself has taught us to be wary of taking such stories on trust. On the other hand, it is a very good story, and deserves to be retold.