History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
A much-travelled Spanish visitor amazes an English audience with his tales of wonder overseas, until he is brought up short by his servant.
As a young man, James Howell (?1594-1666) had toured extensively abroad and studied several foreign languages. In 1642, his lavish tastes landed him in the Fleet prison for debt, and there he began to write professionally; that same year, he published a handbook on travel, in which he made a little digression on the subject of the tales travellers tell on their return.
On Easter night, monk Reginald woke from a doze to find the aged hermit Godric singing lustily.
St Godric of Finchale (?1065-1170) was a bed-ridden invalid near the end of a long and eventful life when Reginald, a monk from the nearby Durham Abbey, went to see him in his hermitage in a bend of the River Wear. It was a Saturday, the night before Easter Day. Back in the Abbey church, the monks were eagerly awaiting the sunrise, but Reginald had dozed off.
Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
The British drink almost 36 billion cups of tea each year, a trend set by King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine. The tea itself came exclusively from China, which by the early Nineteenth Century had become a cause for concern. What if China were to close her ports to Europe, as neighbouring Japan had done? So the Government set up a Tea Committee.
In the days of King James I, Thomas Coryat visited Italy and came home with an affected Continental habit: eating with a fork.
When Peter Damian, Bishop of Ostia, learnt that the late Maria Argyropoulaina (?-1007), daughter-in-law to the Doge of Venice, had eaten with a little fork rather than her fingers, he denounced it as unnatural. But on a tour of Italy in 1608, Englishman Thomas Coryat found that forks were now everyday items, and he even brought the fashion back home.
A London barrister indulges in courtroom theatrics to win a case, but it turns out that not everything is as it seems.
In 1858, a witness testified in a US court to seeing a man murdered in bright moonlight; but in a dramatic twist, defence attorney Abraham Lincoln swept out an almanac showing this was not possible, and the case fell through. Over twenty years earlier, Robert Southey had recorded a bizarre parallel involving a barrister at the Old Bailey, only there was an even more dramatic twist to that tale.
On the day that Manfred, Prince of Otranto, expected his son Conrad to marry the Marquis of Vicenza’s daughter, grotesque tragedy struck.
Horace Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’ (1765) was suggested by a dream, and the tumbled nightmare of a tale, masquerading as an historical document, left many a Georgian reader cowering under the bedclothes. It opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, waiting impatiently for the marriage of his son Conrad to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza.