Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Peter the Great wanted Russia to join the nations of Western Europe, but the nations of Western Europe refused to make room for him.
On the eve of the Great Northern War (1700-1721), most Europeans saw Russia only as an uncouth land useful as a supplier of wax, hemp and leather goods. Her ambitious new Tsar, Peter I, swore that Germany would soon admire her industry, and France her elegance, and that the Dutch and English would salute her navies; but without a European seaport, all this was an idle dream.
John’s enduring influence is evident today in the rich sights and sounds of Christian liturgy.
St John Damascene (676-749) was Syrian monk and a contemporary of our own St Bede, both of them highly respected scholars with a deep love for Church music. John left us an exposition of Christian theology of enduring importance throughout east and west; he compiled a wealth of hymns, collects and prayers; and he saved Christian iconography everywhere from the hands of extremists.
Shortly before Easter, an ivory box went missing from the gifts presented at the shrine of St Cuthbert.
Reginald (?-?1190) was a monk of Durham Priory where St Cuthbert, the seventh-century Bishop of Lindisfarne, lay buried behind the High Altar. Pilgrims came from all over the country with stories of the saint’s miraculous interventions, and Reginald compiled a catalogue of them, and of the miracles reported at Cuthbert’s shrine. Some he witnessed with his own eyes, such as this one.
A monk living in the tumbledown hermitage that had once belonged to St Cuthbert reluctantly decided that it needed more than repairs.
After many years of tramping about the Kingdom of Northumbria preaching the gospel and healing the sick, monk Cuthbert retired to the island of Inner Farne, just over a mile off the coast at Bamburgh. In 685, he reluctantly combined this with being Bishop of Lindisfarne, six miles further north; but he still managed to live out most of his days in his cell. He was buried on Lindisfarne, but seemingly left something behind.
The politicians of Novgorod, angry at Moscow’s interference, thought they would teach her a lesson by selling out to Poland.
In 1471, even as England was being torn apart by the Wars of the Roses, the little republic of Novgorod was rent by its own bitter divisions. The meddling of upstart Moscow in their historic city had become insupportable, and many in the Veche, Novgorod’s civic Council, cried that independence could be achieved only by submission to the King of Poland.
Back in the days of the prophet Samuel, so the story goes, a grandson of Trojan hero Aeneas brought civilisation to the British Isles.
Geoffrey of Monmouth (?-1155) was residing in Oxford when, in the 1130s, he wrote his majestic History of the Kings of Britain, in which he entrances us with tales of Merlin and Arthur. He also seized on a throwaway remark in the ninth-century chronicle History of the Britons, that ‘The island of Britain derives its name from Brutus, a Roman consul’, to romance the following tale.