The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
After winning the English crown at the Battle of Hastings, William of Normandy ensured everyone understood what kind of man their new King was.
Edward Freeman — Liberal politician, Balkan nationalist, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford — was a man of vigorous (and at times objectionable) opinions, but in the following passage he puts that passion to good use. He casts an eye for us upon the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the day when William of Normandy seized the English crown from Harold Godwinson.
Sir Humphry Davy explains in simple terms what it is that leads to scientific progress.
In 1812, research chemist and popular lecturer Humphry Davy was knighted for his services to Science. In that same year, he published an overview of his discipline, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, and prefaced it with an introduction to the basics of the new scientific method. There were, he said, three essential components to it.
William Burdon gives us a character sketch of his friend the ‘Count’, who did not let his small stature cramp his style or narrow his mind.
Joseph Boruwlaski, who was originally from Halicz (then in Poland, now in the Ukraine), settled in Durham after years of touring Europe as a violinist, an entertainer and frankly a curiosity, for he was barely thirty-nine inches high. William Burdon offered to help him financially but Joseph would not hear of it as his modest needs were by now satisfied — which Burdon would have thought typical of the man.
A veteran of the Battle of Salamanca in 1812 was boasting of his lieutenant’s bravery when his wife sprung some unwelcome news upon him.
Joseph Boruwlaski knew how it felt to be ever on the edge of bankruptcy. Barely thirty-nine inches in stature, he had relied for over seventy years on the generosity (and curiosity) of noble and royal patrons, and on fees earned from the violin concerts he gave across Europe. The following events, which occurred some time after the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, therefore touched him deeply.
In the days of Henry II, relations with our cross-Channel neighbours were fractious, but we were fast friends with the people of Norway.
Charles Isaac Elton, QC (1839-1900) was a distinguished barrister, antiquary and Somersetshire MP. Following a tour of Norway in 1862-3, he recorded some of his experiences in a little traveller’s guide, Norway, the Road and the Fell, (1864) in which he celebrated Britain’s natural affinity with her northern neighbour.
The privileges granted to European merchants in fifteenth-century London led to seething resentment in the City.
The Hanseatic League was a confederation of merchant guilds and towns that gained a stranglehold on trade in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Lübeck and other elite centres waxed fat, while to varying degrees towns from Novgorod to London were forced to accept restrictions on trade and political interference as the price of doing business. The yoke was heavy, and it chafed.