Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
The Israelites crossed over into the Land of Promise, only to find their progress barred by the well-fortified city of Jericho.
In 1300-1250 BC or so, the people of Israel escaped a life of forced labour in Egypt, and fled east and north into the desert. Assured by Moses and his brother Aaron that a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ awaited them, they endured forty years of wandering before reaching the borders of Canaan. As the brothers had now died, the task of making a home there fell to Joshua.
Walter Map was so tired of being on the road in the entourage of King Henry II, that he began to wonder if the whole court was under a spell.
King Henry II (r. 1154-1189) spent much of his reign on the road, in England and his estates in France. This gruelling schedule of marches took its toll on his retinue, among whom was Walter Map, a churchman and lawyer. It was as if Henry, he complained, had been laden with the burden of King Herla. What follows here is a summary of the tale that Walter then told.
Sir Edward and Lady Pellew were on their way to a dinner engagement one stormy day, when their carriage was caught up in tragedy at sea.
Edward Pellew (1757-1833), 1st Viscount Exmouth, served in the Royal Navy for fifty years, rising to the rank of Admiral and playing a leading role in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He is remembered for several acts of courage, such as the occasion when he rescued some five hundred passengers from a wreck off Plymouth Hoe during a violent storm.
The Wind and the Sun compete to see which of them can make an unsuspecting traveller shed his cloak.
The following Aesop’s Fable dramatises a lesson which would seem particularly relevant to the time in which we live. Blessings and persuasion will win hearts, whereas threats and force will win at most resentful compliance, and more likely angry rebellion.
One Christmas Eve back in the twelfth century, a monk keeping midnight vigil in Lindisfarne priory watched spellbound as two great doors opened all by themselves.
During Viking raids in 793, the monastic community on Lindisfarne hastily exhumed the body of St Cuthbert (?635-687) and fled. After two hundred years of wandering they found a home for him at Durham, and in 1093 the Bishop of Durham re-established the priory on Lindisfarne. In the early days it was staffed by just a couple of Durham monks, but one Christmas, we are told, they received some visitors.
Hassan slipped across to Ithaca because it was in British hands and the Turkish authorities on the Greek mainland must not know what he was going to do.
The British liberation of the Ionian Islands during the Napoleonic Wars presumably displeased the French, and was no doubt disquieting for the Ottoman imperial government that for over two centuries had occupied the Greek mainland. But it was good news for Hassan. He wanted to be baptised a Christian, and for reasons of his own it was imperative that the Turkish authorities know nothing about it.