The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Forced from his throne and threatened with murder, Edwin makes a curious bargain for his deliverance.
Deprived of his throne in about 604, King Edwin of Deira and Bernicia — later known as Northumbria — fled York and went south to Mercia, only to find his usurper, brother-in-law and mortal enemy, Æthelfrith, still pursuing him to the death. But a night-time visitor gave him a new hope, and a curious sign to remember it by.
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.