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The eighth-century English bishop and poet Cynewulf takes us to the threshold of God’s holy city, and gives us a choice.
Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) presents the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a choice given to all mankind: what kind of life do we want in the hereafter, and what are we prepared to do in order to obtain it?
In 1381, young King Richard II was faced with a popular uprising against tax rises.
After the Black Death wiped out nearly three-quarters of England’s population in the 1340s, fit working men were scarce, and wealthy landowners had to bid for every labourer’s favour. The Government hurriedly capped wages and banned labouring men from buying luxury food or clothing. Astonishingly, London then raised taxes to pay for the faltering Hundred Years’ War.
Jack Cade brought a protest to London with right on his side, but then threw it all away.
In 1450, King Henry VI was embroiled in the Hundred Years’ War with France. He was losing the war, and everyone knew it; but his noblemen were making a lot of money out of trampling on the rights of Englishmen in the war’s name. Kent was especially hard hit, and late that May Jack Cade emerged as the leader of the county’s discontent. This was how Charles Dickens told his story.
When the Reformers sold off the treasures of Durham Cathedral, they sold a priceless piece of Scottish history into oblivion.
The Black Rood of Scotland was an heirloom of the Scottish royal family, captured by the English at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 and added to the treasures of Durham Abbey. After the sixteenth-century Reformers ransacked the cathedral, the cross disappeared. A generation later, the Rites of Durham recalled some of the wonderful history of the vanished relic in a breathless tale, edited here by John Davies in 1671.
On the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 24th, 1497, Venetian navigator John Cabot claimed North America for the King of England.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and was hailed as the first European to see the Americas. But this was not North America, the region where the great English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States would later rise. That was discovered — or rediscovered, since the Vikings had been there long before — five years later in 1497.
The Despensers ensured that King Edward II never left their sight, but it was what Queen Isabella was doing that should have worried them.
Throughout his calamitous reign, Edward II relied on others to do his thinking for him. First there was Piers Gaveston, who thought seriously about very little. Then there was Hugh Despenser (here named Spencer) and his father, more intelligent but just as ambitious. As for entrusting the affairs of State to his beautiful, neglected wife Isabella, that never occurred to him; but it did occur to Isabella.
Edward II hoped to outshine his famous father by bringing Scotland under the English crown, but Robert the Bruce was ready for him.
In June 1306, Robert I of Scotland was driven from his throne by Edward I of England. Edward’s persistence earned him the name ‘Hammer of the Scots’, but it was Robert’s persistence that told in the end. Tradition says he had learnt it from watching a gutsy spider; but Edward’s death on July 7th, 1307, must have played a part, for Edward II was nothing that his father had been.