The fourteenth century is not one which the English celebrate with any great pride - if, indeed, at all. The population had been halved by the Black Death, two kings wrested from their throne, and English dreams of empire had crumbled in the attrition of the hundred years war. Not quite the end of the world, but you could definitely see it from there. In the candlelit Kentish dark, and with his quill on vellum, the then Clerk of Romney wrote up his Register. Daniel Rough added a short epigram which may well have been his critique on the times in which he lived: Si sapiens fore vis sex servus qui tibi mando Quid dicas et ubi, de quo, cur, quomodo, quando. If you wish to be wise I commend to you six servants Ask what, where, about what, why, how, when. Some six hundred years later, the relationship with France was healing, the British Empire far exceeded expectations, and a journalist called Rudyard Kipling had a story published in a womens' magazine. The Elephant's Chi...
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