Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
After Mr Fitzwarren took away Dick’s cat, even the charms of Alice Fitzwarren were not enough to keep him in that house another day.
What follows is a paraphrase of the famous story of Dick Whittington and His Cat as told in verse by Richard Johnson in his Crowne Garland of Goulden Roses (1612), and in prose by Thomas Heywood in The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington (1659). Sir Richard Whittington (?1354-1423) was a real historical person, so some notes are added to help separate fact from fiction.
When Sir Rodbert became Brother Martin, he found the change so difficult that he began to wonder if even the saints were against him.
The following story is paraphrased from The Little Book of the Wonderful Virtues of St Cuthbert, compiled by Reginald of Durham, a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham in the latter half of the twelfth century. It tells of monk Martin, who in the world had been Sir Rodbert, a prosperous knight, but who found the simple life of the Abbey challenging and exasperated his tutors with his oddly sluggish wits.
The modern match is ignited by friction, a simple idea but one which had not occurred to anyone until 1826, when a Stockton pharmacist dropped a stick.
Until 1826, lighting a fire, a candle or a pipe was not an easy business. Matches as we know them were in their infancy, a toilsome affair requiring a man to juggle little bottles of noxious chemicals and perhaps a pair of pliers. But that year, a merry pharmacist from Stockton-on-Tees called John Walker (1781-1859) liberated us from all this, and quite by accident.
As he sat in his guest room at Durham Abbey, Ranulf de Capella could think of nothing but finding someone to rid him of his painful toothache.
Reginald of Durham was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham from about 1153 until his death some forty years later. The Abbey church housed the coffin and body (untouched by time, despite being regularly opened to view) of seventh-century miracle-working bishop St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and from the steady stream of pilgrims who came to visit the shrine Reginald collected a fund of amazing tales.
The lord of Benares is so partial to venison that fields lie fallow and marketplaces stand empty while his people catch deer for him.
The following tale comes from the collection known as the Jataka, a series of fables setting out the wisdom of Siddhartha Gautama, the fifth- or fourth-century BC teacher of enlightenment. This particular story is set in the deer park near Varanasi (Benares) in Uttar Pradesh where tradition says that Gautama Buddha first taught.
Mill owner William Grant was deeply hurt by a scurrilous pamphlet circulated by a fellow businessman, and vowed the miscreant would live to regret it.
Among the many memorable characters in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby are Ned and Charles Cheeryble, the vehemently philanthropic brothers who employ Nicholas on a delicate mission to Walter Bray. They are widely believed to be based on William (1769-1842) and Daniel (?1780-1855) Grant of Ramsbottom in Lancashire, and from this tale one can see the similarities very clearly.