Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Only months after kidnapping the Duke of Ormond, Irish radical Thomas Blood was at it again, this time attempting to steal the Crown Jewels.
In December 1670, Thomas Blood, believed on all sides to be a dangerous republican revolutionary, tried to hang the Duke of Ormond like a common criminal on the gallows at Tyburn. His plan went awry, but once again Blood, his son-in-law Thomas Hunt and the rest of the gang eluded the authorities. Five months later, the Irishman was back in the capital, this time with a plan to steal the Crown Jewels.
Imma claimed to be a harmless peasant, but there was something about him that Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria, found downright uncanny.
In 679, King Ecgfrith of Northumbria’s imperial ambitions were severely dented at the Battle of Trent, when he failed to defeat King Ethelred of Mercia somewhere near Lincoln, and lost control of the Kingdom of Lindsey. After telling us about this sorry business, Bede recalled hearing a story about one of Ethelred’s thegns (royal servants), told to him by friends who had it from the man himself.
Luka had netted a nice little haul of stolen coins and antiques, but he could not resist stripping down the historic Icon of the Sign too.
The ‘Virgin of the Sign’ is a twelfth-century icon of the Virgin Mary kept to this day in Great Novgorod, Russia — the ‘sign’ refers to the promise made by the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz, that one day a virgin would conceive and bear a son. In 1170 the icon saved the city from a siege, and a special church was built for it, but it would seem that by the seventeenth century the mystique was beginning to wear off.
Simonides always believed that a man with a trade was wealthier than a man with a full purse.
The following Fable, from the collection of first-century Roman poet Phaedrus, concerns Simonides (?556-468 BC), a Greek lyric poet remembered among the ancients for his miraculous escapes, his long career composing songs flattering the rich and celebrated, and his eager love of money.
The Bishop of Myra’s ceaseless toil to put an end to the worship of Artemis made him some dangerous enemies.
By the 320s, Christians in the Roman Empire were no longer discriminated against, but that did not mean life was easy. As this story shows, the warm-hearted yet combative Bishop of Myra (now Demre in Turkey) made himself some dangerous enemies by continuing to insist that there was one God and one Truth, and that the popular and profitable religions of Rome were the delusions of a dark power.
A prophet-for-hire agreed to help Balak, King of Moab, try to do something about the flood of Israelites pouring into his kingdom.
The story of Balaam and his ass, told in the Book of Numbers, is set in the late thirteenth century BC, some forty years after the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt. Now they were massing in Moab on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, ready to cross the River Jordan into their Promised Land; but Balak, King of Moab, was feeling far from hospitable and already had a plan for moving them on.