Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
The strange-but-true story of a Lady Day tradition.
In the days of King Stephen (r. 1135-1154), Lady Tichborne in Hampshire warned her heirs never to fail in their charity to the poor. To do so, she said, would be bring the family line to an abrupt end, and six hundred years and one meddlesome magistrate later, her unlikely fears came true.
The legend of how Rome was settled gave rise to the March festival of Roman motherhood.
Romans began March, the month of the war-god Mars, by celebrating the ‘Matronalia’, a kind of mothers’ day with presents for the ladies and a day off for slaves. The strange juxtaposition of war and love was said to go back to the legend of how Romulus’s Rome was settled.
A man born blind is healed by Jesus, but finds himself a social outcast as a result.
Jesus has been avoiding Jerusalem, but now he has taken the fateful step. Immediately he engulfs himself in controversy by coming to the aid of a woman accused of adultery, and by appearing to claim to be God. When he heals a blind man on the Sabbath the Pharisees hope he has at last done something they can prosecute him for.
In the populist democracy of 5th-century BC Athens, heroes fell as quickly as they rose.
After Pericles died, the Peloponnesian War with Sparta (431-404 BC) was carried on by other leaders in the radical democracy of Athens, including his nephew Alcibiades, and Nicias. Fighting a war and pleasing a people that brooked no failure in their heroes was not an easy matter.
The leader of 5th-century BC Athens lavished public money on the city and its adoring citizens, and wherever he led they followed.
The story of Pericles, the 5th-century BC Athenian leader, is one of personal magnetism and a matchless cultural legacy, and also a warning. Democracy should give us the freedom to demand more of ourselves. If we use it merely to demand more from politicians, we corrupt ourselves and them too.