"Feudal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... From this feudal Baron, who chose his nest upon the principles on which an eagle selects her eyry, and built it in such a fashion as if he had intended it, as an Irishman said of the Martello towers, for the sole purpose of puzzling posterity, there was, or conceived ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... "a group of men bound to each other by solidarity of functions in society," such as the Brahmins of India and the feudal nobility, Prof. Millioud says that he will use the terms as equivalent or nearly equivalent to a "directing class." Quoting the article from Vorwaerts which led to the suspension of that Socialist organ and which "admits by implication that responsibility for the war falls on Germany," ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... velocity of a drive! On the declivity of a meadow, inviting our reflection, rises a little Saxon church, grey with antiquity, and solemnized by its surrounding memorials of "Here lies."—Across the heath, encircled with fences of uncouth stones, stands a stern record of feudal yore; at the next turn peeps the rectory, encircled with old firs, trained fruit trees, and affectionate ivy; beneath yon darkened thickets rolls the lazy Ure, expanding into laky broadness; and, beyond yon western woods, which embower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... sisters was made apparent to our eye, in which the magic Isle of Prospero rose before us in its mysterious and haunted beauty, and in which the knightly character of the hero of Agincourt received its true interpretation from the pomp of the feudal age, and you will own you could not strip the scene of these effects without stripping Shakespeare himself of half the richness and depth of his conceptions. But that was the least merit of that glorious management. Mr. Macready ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... was saying, madam," continued Ralph, disregarding the interruption, "I told him that I should not have thought of one exempted from feudal service in the camp, by our noble Knight, being deficient in his dues in his absence. I told him we should see how he liked to be sent packing to Bordeaux with a sheaf of arrows on his back, instead ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... those great feudal princes still extant among the Austrian nobility, took a traditional pride in encouraging genius, and found in Franz Schubert a noble object for the exercise of his generous patronage. He was almost ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... foolish piece of business, Temple. There is no justification for that sort of thing, and if Rutter wasn't a feudal king up in his own county there would be trouble over it. It's God's mercy the poor fellow wasn't killed. Fine beginning, isn't it, for a happy ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... had therefore given themselves wholly to that deep admiration which must affect all educated men on seeing the banks of the Rhine and the scenery of Suabia between Mayenne and Cologne,—a strong, rich, vigorously varied nature, filled with feudal memories, ever fresh and verdant, yet retaining at all points the imprints of fire and sword. Louis XIV. and Turenne have cauterized that beautiful land. Here and there certain ruins bear witness to the pride or rather the foresight of the King of Versailles, who caused to be pulled ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... became the agents of the general commerce of Southern Europe, they had scarcely any competitors: the thing would not have been done at all without them, and there was really no limit to their profits except the limit to what the ignorant feudal nobility could and would give for the unknown luxuries then first presented to their sight. At a later period competition arose, and the profit of this operation, like that of others, became amenable to natural laws. The carrying-trade was taken up by Holland, a country with productions ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... his new masters, could scarcely betray so much ignorance of the history of his country, so much bigotry, such a want of candour and discrimination. If Mr. Froude's great work has any fault, it is his unconscious prejudice against Ireland. He knows as well as anyone the working of the feudal system and the clan system in Scotland in the same age. He knows with what treachery and cruelty murders were perpetrated by chiefs and lairds, pretenders and usurpers—how anarchy, violence, and barbarism reigned in that land; yet, when he ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the wrong perspective and run their heads against walls and make themselves miserable. You gain a lot, but you miss one thing. You know nothing of the heart of the crowd. Oh, I don't mean the people about Etterick. They are your own folk, and the whole air of the place is semi-feudal. But the weavers and artisans of the towns and the ordinary farm workers—what do you know of them? Your precious theories are so much wind in their ears. They want the practical, the blatantly obvious, spiced with a little emotion. Stocks knows their demands. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... castles themselves are but green mounds and shattered ruins: the place that once knew them, knows them no more—nay, many a race since theirs has died out and been forgotten in the very land which they occupied with all the authority of feudal proprietors and feudal lords. What, then, would it avail the reader to know their names, or the evanescent symbols of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... fair-haired German of ancient Swabian stock, heir to the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the Italian language its first development, and laid a basis for the evolution of knowledge and art where hitherto ecclesiastical fanaticism and feudal brutality had alone contended for power, a monarch who gathered at his court the poets and sages of eastern lands, and surrounded himself with the living products of Arabian and Persian grace and spirit—this man I beheld betrayed by ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the immolation of the Irish people to the Moloch of territorial despotism. It is the effort to render impossible those human sacrifices, those holocausts of Christian households, that the priests of feudal landlordism denounce so frantically ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than his earlier ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal homage. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... was could be easily defended. But with land it was different. Property in land was recognized both among the English and, of course, with the Normans; and in ways so similar that it was very easy for the Normans to impose the feudal system upon England. There had been no feudal system before the Norman Conquest; there were then three kinds of land: the rare and exceptional individual land, owned by one man—always a freeman, not a villein or slave—and this was ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... awoke, and grew tired of the din. Guy Pearson, too, had got a black eye from a brick bat, and the assailants were clambering over the outer wall. So the Baron called for his Sunday hauberk of Milan steel, and his great two-handed sword with the terrible name:—it was the fashion in feudal times to give names to swords: King Arthur's was christened Excalibar; the Baron called his Tickletoby, and whenever he took it in hand, it was ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... declared war against their overlord. The knights of the Rhineland were called upon to suppress the flames of rebellion. On receiving the pressing call of the Emperor, Broemser did not hesitate for a moment but resolved to obey his feudal superior. ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking economic significance in these class differences is the distinction maintained between the employments ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of the range of rock, with huts for his followers; and became known directly all over the country as Sir Roger de Rockville, or Sir Roger of the hamlet on the Rock. Sir Roger, no doubt, was a mighty hunter before the lord of the feudal district: it is certain that his descendants were. For generations they led a jolly life at Rockville, and were always ready to exchange the excitement of the chase for a bit of civil war. Without that the country would have grown dull, and ale and venison lost their flavor. There was ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... was content to publish under his own name works of which he certainly had no reason to be ashamed. One of the earliest of these was, "La Jacquerie"—a sort of long melodrama, or series of scenes, illustrating feudal aggressions and cruelties in France, and the consequent peasant revolts of the fourteenth century. It shows much historical research and care in collection of materials, is rich in references to the barbarous customs and strange manners of the times, and, like the "Chronicle of Charles ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... climb brought its reward at length, and Donald's eye caught sight of a clearing, and unmistakable signs of near-by civilization, if a scattering mountain settlement of primitive dwellers in that feudal country which lies half in West Virginia, half in Kentucky, may ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... advances with the progress of society like all other sciences. The poetry of the last forty years already shows symptoms of life in exact proportion as it is imbued with this science. There is least of it in the exotic legends of Southey, and the feudal romances of Scott. More of it, though in different ways, in Byron and Campbell. In Shelley there would have been more still, had he not devoted himself to unsound and mystical theories. Most of all in Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with human life in the middle ages, shows how supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition appeared to the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the conception seemed, of a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... Moreover, she was of good birth; Chaucer tells us a great deal about her beautiful behaviour at table and her courtesy, which shows that she was a lady born and bred; indeed, his description of this might have been taken straight out of one of the feudal books of deportment for girls; even her personal beauty—straight nose, grey eyes, and little red mouth—conforms to the courtly standard. The convents were apt to be rather snobbish; ladies and rich burgesses' daughters got into them, but poor and low-born girls never. ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... assailed them for half a century. We have written these words because a Republican is the only man likely to speak well of the Bonaparte family. It was, and is, and will be the dynasty of the people, standing there from 1804, a fearful antagonism against the feudal age and its ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... priest had said concerning her and her zeal for their common desire had piqued his curiosity, and his imagination had been aroused by the picture of a romantic young woman giving her fortune to save the souls of the people of Messina; his people whom he regarded and who regarded him less as a feudal lord than as a father and a comrade. He had pictured her as a nervous, angular woman with a pale, ascetic face, and with the restless eyes of an enthusiast, dressed in black and badly dressed, and with ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... toward the castle at the south side of the town, but were prevented from entering by a guard of feudal retainers, who looked as if they had been well drilled. They were as solemn as the vultures that sat perched along the rampart overlooking a great artificial moat dividing the town from the high hill ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... seclusion from sin"; but in later times it became a haunt of rapparees, and its thick foliage provided what Spenser would call "a meet house for rebels." In later times Freney, a noted highwayman, whose exploits delighted the Irish peasant, here found a refuge. Bunratty Castle was a strong place in feudal times. Here Rinuccini, the Papal Legate to Ireland in 1641, sojourned, and his papers contain many references to the picturesqueness of the surrounding country, and its herds of wild deer. Between Newmarket and Ardsollus ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... repetition of the same strain. These three led to Meyerbeer, a cunning fellow who profited by everything, introducing symphony into opera after Weber, and giving dramatic expression to the unconscious formulas of Rossini. Oh! the superb bursts of sound, the feudal pomp, the martial mysticism, the quivering of fantastic legends, the cry of passion ringing out through history! And such finds!—each instrument endowed with a personality, the dramatic recitatives accompanied symphoniously ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... they executed a new note plus the accrued interest and mortgaged more of the ranch. Frequently they paid the interest and twice they paid half the principal, bidding for one more chance and getting it. And all these years they have lived like feudal barons on their principal, living for to-day, reckless of to-morrow. Theirs has been the history of practically all of the old California families. I am convinced it would be no kindness to Don Miguel ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... significance. His age is marked by a steady increase in the national power at home and abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation "by a side door," and by the final separation of England from all ecclesiastical bondage in Parliament's famous Act of Supremacy. In previous reigns chivalry and the old feudal system had practically been banished; now monasticism, the third mediaeval institution with its mixed evil and good, received its death-blow in the wholesale suppression of the monasteries and the removal of abbots from the House of Lords. Notwithstanding the evil character ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... when Rome was to assume another aspect. The incursions of the northern hordes were eventually too frequent and too powerful for Rome; so, about the sixth century, the banks of the Rhine were strewed with Roman ruins, as at present with feudal ones. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Helveticis, l i. c. 3, p. 11, 12. Within the ancient walls of Vindonissa, the castle of Hapsburgh, the abbey of Konigsfield, and the town of Bruck, have successively risen. The philosophic traveller may compare the monuments of Roman conquest of feudal or Austrian tyranny, of monkish superstition, and of industrious freedom. If he be truly a philosopher, he will applaud the merit and happiness ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... share in the advantages which the New World offered to those who would venture therein. Both landowning and landholding classes, gentry and tenant farmers alike, were clamoring, the one for an increase of their landed estates, the other for freedom from the feudal restraints which still legally bound them. The land-hunger of neither class could be satisfied in a narrow island where the law and the lawgivers were in favor of the maintenance of feudal rights. The expectations of all were aroused by visions of wealth from the El Dorados of the West, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... British Columbia packers wanted a cinch, a monopoly, which in a measure they had. They were an anachronism, MacRae felt. They regarded the salmon and the salmon waters of the British Columbia coast as the feudal barons of old jealously regarded their special prerogatives. MacRae could see them growling and grumbling, he could see most clearly the scowl that would spread over the face of Mr. Horace A. Gower, when he learned that ten to twenty thousand Squitty Island salmon were passing down ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... on account of their inhuman cruelty, for, wherever they settled, the original towns and their inhabitants completely disappeared from the face of the earth. In their own country they had the feudal system and a priestly government: the Druids were their only rulers, who avenged the oppressed people on the lords, but in their turn became tyrants: all the people were in the condition of serfs, a proof that the Gauls, in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... transgressions of these unprincipled marauders, but that you should afford them your protection, notwithstanding your laudable zeal for the laws they are in the habit of infringing. We shall be finely helped, if the churl Saxons should have realized your Grace's vision, of converting feudal drawbridges into gibbets; and yonder bold-spirited Cedric seemeth one to whom such an imagination might occur. Your Grace is well aware, it will be dangerous to stir without Front-de-Boeuf, De Bracy, and the Templar; and yet we have gone too far ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... persons are cruel and bloodthirsty, because in them bloodthirstiness is a raging insatiable passion. In a civilized country those possessed by this passion are forced to control it through fear of the consequences, or to gratify it upon the brute creation. But in earlier days, when feudal lords were supreme in their domains, there have been frightful instances of their excesses, and the extent to which some of the Roman emperors indulged their passion for ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... behind all this, I found it was in the life of one young man, a simple, holy life burning with a passion for Jesus. In this life could be found the kindling of the tender flames burning so hotly in these young hearts. He was a young American officer engaged, by the feudal lord of the province, to teach military tactics and English. He dared not teach Christianity; that would have meant instant dismissal. So for two years he lived the message, so simply and lovingly that he won the love of his pupils. Then they came Sundays to his house to hear him read ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... woods, for such was antiently the scite of the town. This name it has preserved, with less alteration in the mode of spelling than almost any other town in the kingdom, through the barbarous reigns of the Saxon kings, the oppressive system of the feudal times, the dark gloom of monkish superstition, and the fatal revolutions occasioned by the civil commotions ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... dignity of a Scotch landlord had been formed upon what he had heard of the Highland Chiefs; for it is long since a lowland landlord has been so curtailed in his feudal authority, that he has little more influence over his tenants than an English landlord; and of late years most of the Highland Chiefs have destroyed, by means too well known, the princely power which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... describe classes of sinners that do not exist."—Mag. cor. "Because the nations among which they took their rise, were not savage."—Murray cor. "Among nations that are in the first and rude periods of society."—Blair cor. "The martial spirit of those nations among which the feudal government prevailed."—Id. "France, which was in alliance with Sweden."—Priestley's Gram., p. 97. "That faction, in England, which most powerfully opposed his arbitrary pretensions."—Ib. "We may say, 'the crowd which was ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... have had a new, strange experience. Even yet I can scarcely comprehend that you and Mr. Bodine could speak to your children, and dictate to them in matters relating to their happiness as you both have done. It savors more of feudal times than of this ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... the Duke: and he bowed to the Duke, and the Duke bowed to him: and now, to instance the peculiar justness in the mind of Mr. Raikes, he, though he worshipped a coronet and would gladly have recalled the feudal times to a corrupt land, could not help thinking that his bow had beaten the Duke's and was better. He would rather not have thought so, for it upset his preconceptions and threatened a revolution in his ideas. For this reason he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been attached to this provision, as establishing the principle of taxation by consent, but its scope was limited to the barons (and the city of London), and the word "aids'' was omitted from subsequent issues of the charter. The barons, on their part, covenanted to claim from their feudal tenants only the above three customary aids. The last levy by the crown was that of James I. on the knighting of his eldest son (1609) and the marriage of his daughter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... York that lie west of the river counties, were generally, if not invariably, simple concessions of the fee, subject to quit-rents to the king, and reservations of mines of the precious metals, without any of the privileges of feudal seignory, as existed in the older manors on the Hudson, on the islands, and on the Sound. Why this distinction was made, it exceeds our power to say; but, that the fact was so, as a rule, we have it in proof, by means of a great number of the original patents, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... Empire may instead offer German socialism the opportunity of emerging from its voluntary impotence and redeem itself by breaking down the feudal political regime of the empire, taking away from Russian absolutism the assistance it has hitherto enjoyed, and contributing to alter decisively the aims of all ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... bailiff (bailli), or seneschal in feudal days, was the principal officer of any noble importance. He it was who held the feudal court of assizes when the lord was not present himself. A great noble often also had a prevote, where small matters were settled, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... fashionable traveller in Europe? You say-yes! rummaged all the feudal castles of England, sought out the resting places of her kings, heard some one say "that is poet's corner," as we passed into Westminster Abbey, thought they couldn't be much to have such a corner,—"went to look" where Byron was buried, moistened the marble with a tear ere we were conscious ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... before the arrival of the Hano, another bloody scene had been enacted in Tusayan. Since the time of the Antelope Canyon feuds there had been enmity between Awatubi and some of the other villages, especially Walpi, and some of the Sikyatki refugees had transmitted their feudal wrongs to their descendants who dwelt in Awatubi. They had long been perpetrating all manner of offenses; they had intercepted hunting parties from the other villages, seized their game, and sometimes killed the hunters; they had fallen upon ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... look upon us as friends, Dorothy; trust us, and you will find more happiness here than you suspect. Castle Craneycrow was born and went to ruin in the midst of feud and strife; it has outlived its feudal days, so let there be no war between us," said her ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... feet of a buck being called umbles, were formerly made into a pie for the retainers or feudal servants. Hence arose the old saying of "You shall ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... Capulet hated the serving-men of Montague, so the oldest servants of the Mountains hated the older servants of the Reddys. The men made the masters' quarrel their own. There was a feudal spirit in the matter, and half the fights of this outlying district of the parish were provoked by that ancient history of the brook. At this time of day it mattered very little indeed if the history was true or false, for neither proof nor disproof ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and the books and the teachers of the ancient Greek language were dispersed through Europe. The epoch from which modern invention took its rise, commenced much earlier. The feudal system, one of the most interesting contrivances of man in society, was introduced in the ninth century; and chivalry, the offspring of that system, an institution to which we are mainly indebted for refinement ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... chase and tourney, but likewise in literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every great feudal baron, or by the jongleurs, who wandered from court to castle. There is a whole literature of these romans d' aventure in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are {20} very long—often thirty, forty, or ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... practically an absolute monarchy. Only the highest class was consulted in the Great Council and the advice of these the King was not obliged to follow. Later, as a result of the memorable controversy between King John and his feudal barons, the Great Council regained the power which it had lost. Against the King were arrayed the nobility, the church as represented by its official hierarchy, and the freemen of the realm, all together ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Chirk Castle, now the home of Mr. R. Myddelton Biddulph, a combination of a feudal fortress and a modern mansion. The ancient portion, still preserved, was built by Roger Mortimer, to whom Edward I. granted the lordship of Chirk. It was a bone of contention during the Civil Wars, and when they were over, $150,000 were spent in repairing the great quadrangular fortress. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... those causes which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to increase information, and to secure the liberty of the mass of the people. The invention of printing; the reformation; the destruction of the feudal system, at least in its most objectionable, degrading, and paralizing features; the contentions between the nobility and the sovereigns, and between the latter and the people; gave a stimulus to the human mind, and thus enlarged its capacities, desires, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... his congregation and stamped itself on their memories. It is seen, too, in his political views. The Radical Parson, the upholder of Chartism, was in many ways a strong Tory. He had a great belief in the land-owning classes, and an admiration for what remained of the Feudal System. He believed that the old relation between squire and villagers, if each did his duty, worked far better than the modern pretence of Equality and Independence. Like Disraeli, like Ruskin, and like many other men of high imagination, he distrusted the Manchester ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the domain of the Gaetani family in the Roman Campagna, was an ancient city with a feudal castle, situated in the foothills of the Volscian mountains. Above it and to one side were the ruins of the great castle of Norba; below were the beautiful remains of Nymsa; while at its foot, extending to the sea, lay the Pontine marshes. ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... "You know my feudal castle at Pludun-Herlouet, near Saint Jacut-de-la-Mer, which I bought two years ago, and in which I have not yet set foot? Very well, then! The day after to-morrow, which is the first of May, we will ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... information as to the commercial causes of war, nor about the part which the clerical vote may have played throughout Europe in supporting military systems. I do not even find anything about the sacred cause of democracy, the resolve of a self-governing people to put an end to feudal rule. Instead I discover a soldier-boy who obeys and keeps silent, and who, in his inmost heart, is in the grip of terrors both of body and soul. Poor, pitiful soldier-boy, marking yourself with crosses, performing genuflexions, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... traditions now become decidedly more trustworthy, although still largely mixed with fable. Woo-Wang was brave and upright. Under him a momentous change in government took place. By him the kingdom was divided into seventy-two feudal states. Internal divisions and struggles resulted from this new political system. The Tartars availed themselves of the weakened condition of the nation, to make predatory incursions. In this period of disorder ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... particular abhorrence, and numerous attempts were made at different periods to put a stop to the grievous exaction, but the progress of public opinion was so little advanced, and the regard for the ancient trammels of feudal arbitrariness so deep-seated, that not until 1781 was any serious resistance made. In that year a person named Johnston stood upon what he considered his rights, and would allow no acquaintance to be made between his meal and the iron ladle ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... was first established in England, there was no distinction of freehold and copyhold; the latter, according to Blackstone, was a possession acquired by a vassal subsequent to the Norman feudal system. Copyholders being thus considered as slaves, were, notwithstanding their possessions, deemed unworthy of the franchise; and from this refinement, on the arbitrary principles of the Normans, every copyholder was deprived of a vote, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... leading from Havre de Grace to Rouen, was, in the sixth century, the seigniory of one Vauthier, chamberlain to Clotaire I., the royal son of Clovis and Clotilda. Nothing whatever is known of the earlier part of Vauthier's history, more than that he held the fief of Yvetot from Clotaire by the feudal tenure of military service. An able and trustworthy statesman in the council-chamber, a valiant and skilful commander in the battle-field, the chamberlain lived on terms of the most intimate familiarity with his king, who ever lent a ready ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... unexpected outburst, so unlike her cousin's usual language; but the charm was broken by its ending with the tremendously long name of Enguerrand, which always made her laugh, it was in such perfect harmony with the feudal pretensions of ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... discover that, just as reasonably as they, not content with denying the Christian dogma, proceed to deny the existence of a God, and the religious life of humanity, their ancestors might have proceeded, from their denial and rejection of the feudal system, to the rejection of every form of social organization, or have declared art extinct forever during the transition period when the Greek form of art had ceased to correspond to those aspirations of the human mind which prepared the way for the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Christian ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... English aristocracy,—could I, who have been listened to by two thousand of my countrywomen,—and men,—while I spurned the unmanly, inhuman errors of primogeniture,—could I, think you, hold my tongue beneath the roof of a feudal lord!" Caroline Spalding knew that her friend could not hold her tongue, and hesitated to answer. There had been that fatal triumph of a lecture on the joint rights of men and women, and it had rendered poor Wallachia Petrie ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... as the "Farmer Duke," from his love of agriculture and rural pursuits, though he was a D.C.L. and F.R.S. and possessed the feudal dignity of Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex. His father had been Prime Minister; but the son made no effort to shine in politics and contented himself with developing the resources of his estates and adding to the wealth ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... he stood up and took leave of his desk and of his fellow-clerks punctiliously. He emerged from under the feudal arch of the King's Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street. The golden sunset was waning and the air had grown sharp. A horde of grimy children populated the street. They stood or ran in the roadway ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... arrangement.—such an arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in "All's Well that ends Well." He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... all, high chimney stacks and the aerials of a mighty wireless plant dominated the entire works. A private railroad spur pierced the western side of the enclosure, for food and coal supplies, as well as for the handling of the numerous imports and exports of this wonderfully complete feudal domain. As the colony lay there basking in the sunshine of early spring, under its drifting streamers of smoke, it seemed an ideal picture of peaceful activities. Here a locomotive puffed, shunting cars; there, a steam-jet flung its plumes of snowy vapor ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... feudal law, women were not considered as persons of any importance whatever. The rights of husbands were practically absolute, and led to much abuse, as they had a perfectly legal right to punish wives for their misdeeds, to control their conduct in such a way as to interfere with their personal liberty, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... "betters" as unspeakably and immeasurably above them. Dependence was in the order of nature, and a man of Haydn's good sense was the last in the world to starve and fret because his freedom to practice his art and develop his powers was complicated with a sort of feudal service. Some strong souls may find an empty purse the truest source of inspiration, as Mr Russell Lowell declares it to be; but it is very much to be doubted whether a careful investigation would show that a great man's best work was done with the ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... baptism, Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the Emperor Constantine, from whom they claimed to be descended, and Mirandola from the place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy of Modena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudal lords. Pico was the youngest of the family, and his mother, delighting in his wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famous school of law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have had some presentiment of his future fame, for, with a faith in omens characteristic ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Confucianist and not a religionist of any kind), and what he was trying to do, especially that it isn't merely relief. He is desirous to preserve the old Confucian standards only adapted to present economic conditions; it is essentially a morality of feudal economic relationships, as perhaps you know, and he thinks the modern factory employers can be brought to take the old paternal attitude to the employees and thus forestall the class struggle here. The radicals laugh at the notion here much as they would in the United States, but for my part if he ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... architecture, towered high above all the surrounding dingy offices and squalid tenements. Its massive construction, steep walls, pointed turrets, raised parapets and long, narrow, slit-like windows, heavily barred, gave it the aspect of a feudal fortress incongruously set down plumb in the midst of twentieth-century New York. The dull roar of Broadway hummed a couple of blocks away; in the distance loomed the lofty, graceful spans of Brooklyn Bridge, jammed with its opposing streams of busy inter-urban traffic. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... shrug, the sole reason for which seems to be that there is no other just like it in the city. I myself have always considered it imposing and majestic; but to the average man it is too suggestive of Old-World feudal life to be pleasing. On this afternoon—a dull, depressing one—it looked undeniably heavy as we approached it; but interesting in a very new way to me, because of the great turret at one angle, the scene of that midnight descent of two men, each in deadly fear of the other, yet quailing ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... justice and humanity. But amidst the abject superstition which now prevailed, the military spirit also had universally diffused itself; and though not supported by art or discipline, was become the general passion of the nations governed by the feudal law. All the great lords possessed the right of peace and war: they were engaged in perpetual hostilities with each other: the open country was become a scene of outrage and disorder: the cities, still mean and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the castle of Belcaro, conveyed to her by its owner, into a monastery. She visits the Salimbeni in their feudal castle at Rocca D'Orcia, for the purpose of healing their family feuds. While here she learns miraculously to write. She also visits ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... in which Francis had hardly looked upon the matter before, and he was obliged to own that even private assassination, detestable as it was, yet caused much less suffering than feudal war. Still, he was not disposed entirely to give in to ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... loveable. Grapes, mulberries, rice, and stuff called maize, which looked exactly like our American corn, grew together like a happy family of sisters, and from the hills dotted about, more thickly than Mamma's crowns on her toilet things, looked down old feudal castles as melancholy as the cypresses that stood beside them, like the sole friends of ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... particular enterprises in question were prevented. The adoption of a registry was refused, on the alleged ground of its inconsistency with the French institutions of the province, and no measure to attain this desirable end in a less obnoxious mode, was prepared by the leaders of the Assembly. The feudal tenure was supported, as a mild and just provision for the settlement of a new country; a kind of assurance given by a committee of the Assembly, that some steps should be taken to remove the most injurious incidents of the seignorial tenure, produced no practical results; and the enterprises ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... commented, 'you see what comes of living with feudal personages. You turn a feudal personage yourself, and find yourself taking part in knightly tournaments. Well, so I set off for my father's,' Bazarov wound up, 'and I've turned in here on the way ... to tell you all this, I should say, if I didn't think a useless lie a piece of foolery. No, I turned ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... too late now, its a horrible bore to go up to Northumberland and the 'Towers' alone, though when one has had as much trouble with one's tenants as I, one must victimise oneself, I suppose. 'Tis a grand old place, picturing as it does the feudal times, if only it were not so desolate. I wonder what Lady Esmondet or Vaura would think of it, how lovely she would look standing in the Tower windows with the fresh air blowing her beautiful hair and her gown close about her; but I forget it is late, and I am dreaming, her hair will be confined ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... and principal of all rule and authority in the kitchen department, was filled with wrath at what she considered an invasion of privilege. No feudal baron in Magna Charta times could have more thoroughly resented ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... these States of every sort and size and variety. Some were Kingdoms, like Prussia, some were Electorates, like Hanover (under our English George III.), some were Grand Duchies, some were Bishoprics, some were Free Cities, and some were simply feudal estates in which, owing to the absence of a central authority, noble families had risen to the rank of independent powers. These families were the descendants of those "robber-barons" whose castles on the Rhine and all over South and West Germany the tourist finds so picturesque. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... contrast between the beauties and circumstances of her native country compared with the frontiers of Silesia, where a pretty feudal tyranny exists, displays still more the fine ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... altogether ignorant. Beside the wickedness of these things, their impolicy was not less conspicuous. The oppression of the Moors, and the expulsion of both Moors and Jews, destroyed the mechanical and commercial industry of Spain; the overthrow of the feudal power and privileges of the nobility, and the establishment of despotism in the crown, checked the growth of civil freedom, as the introduction of the Inquisition induced religious bigotry, and withered ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Christians, led by their theory of a revealed divine law which treated women as inferior beings and useful only as prey, Lecky says ("European Morals," vol. 1, page 358): "But in the whole feudal [Christian and chiefly Canon] legislation women were placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire. The complete inferiority of the sex was continually maintained by the law; and that generous public opinion which in Pagan Rome had frequently revolted against the injustice ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... to the chief as their patron, and received from him assistance and protection. The clients were generally foreigners who came to settle at Rome, and not possessing municipal rights, were forced to appear in the courts of law, &c. by proxy. In process of time this relation assumed a feudal form, and the clients were bound to the same duties as ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... of fidelity and obedience that an individual owes to his government or sovereign, in return for the protection he receives. The feudal uses of these words have mostly passed away with the state of society that gave them birth; but their origin still colors their present meaning. A patriotic American feels an enthusiastic loyalty ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the noble beast was in sooth worthy of the steed which bore him. Both were caparisoned in the fullest trappings of feudal war. The arblast, the mangonel, the demiculverin, and the cuissart of the period, glittered upon the neck and chest of the war-steed; while the rider, with chamfron and catapult, with ban and arriere-ban, morion and tumbrel, battle-axe and ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lay beneath him, every field and dyke and hedgerow, every curve of coast and curvet of breaking wave as clear and near as if he could have touched them merely by reaching out his finger. But Louis Raincy nourished no historical wraths nor feudal jealousies. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... necessity of resting his power on a democratic basis, he promulgated a constitution modelled on the charter of Louis XVIII., and known as the Acte Additionnel, which, however, satisfied no one. The royalists objected to its anti-feudal spirit, the revolutionists and moderates to its express recognition of an hereditary peerage, and its tacit recognition of a dictatorial power. It was by no means with a light heart that Napoleon took leave of Paris on June 7, having appointed a provisional government, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... life of the people. The great mass of the people care as little for wealth as they do for books. The same argument as to the diminished returns of literature may be repeated to describe the diminished returns of private property. The economic revolution since feudal days has exhausted the values of private property in satisfying human need. The time was when property had an infinite value for expressing personality. In days to come private property will still have this value for many individuals. But among common folks generally ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... where the tangled bear-brake plainly enough indicates what inhabitants are native there. Often a mountain torrent comes pouring its silver tribute to the stream, and were there occasionally a ruined abbey, or feudal castle, to mix the romance of real life with that of nature, the Ohio would ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... anything of what I saw on my way thither, except that there were miles of dark, silent, barrack-like buildings, with highly ornamental gateways, and long rows of projecting windows with screens made of reeds—the feudal mansions of Yedo—and miles of moats with lofty grass embankments or walls of massive masonry 50 feet high, with kiosk- like towers at the corners, and curious, roofed gateways, and many bridges, and acres of lotus leaves. Turning along the inner moat, up a steep slope, there are, ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... lived when the warrior caste and the priestly or philosophical class were alone in honour, and the really useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from Greece and Rome to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honour, and where the really useful and working part of the community, though not nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were practically not much better off than slaves, and not more ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... of Ungeist, with a passion for clap-trap, only wanting to be left alone to push trade and make money; so ignorant as to believe that feudalism can be abated without any heroic Stein, by providing that in one insignificant case out of a hundred thousand, land shall not follow the feudal law of descent; without a single vital idea or sentiment or feeling for beauty or appropriateness; well persuaded that if more trade is done in England than anywhere else, if personal independence is without a check, and newspaper publicity unbounded, that is, by the nature of things, to be great; ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... acquired to the crown enabled the sovereign to encroach on the separate jurisdictions of the barons, and produced a more general and regular execution of the laws. The counties palatine underwent the same fate as the feudal powers; and, by a statute of Henry VIII.,[*] the jurisdiction of these counties was annexed to the crown, and all writs were ordained to run in the king's name. But the change of manners was the chief ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... lay the long arm of the sea that ran up between us and the city. On the opposite side were woods, and beyond them rose the citadel, on the other side of which the city lay nestling at its base like those Rhenish towns which lie at the foot of feudal castles. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... old days of France the fair, when no one dared question the divine right of the sovereign, or the purity of the church,—when the rights of the feudal seigneurs were unchallenged, and they could head or hang, mutilate or quarter their vassals at their pleasure,—when freedom was a word as unmeaning as it is now tinder his sacred majesty, Napoleon the Third, there came to the capital, from Touraine, an artizan, named Anseau, who was as cunning ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... forth from John Adams a "Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Laws,"—a work, which although it was of a general character in regard to government, yet manifested democratic sentiments unusual in those times, and indicated that republican institutions were the proper ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... number of horses and carriages, with a piano and a cow. There was a farmer's lodge at the landing, and over the rocks and amid the trees the picturesque roof of the villa of the sole proprietor of the island appeared, and gave a feudal aspect to the domain. The sweet grass affords good picking for sheep, and besides the sheep the owner raises deer, which are destined to be chased and shot ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... shillings a week; but I received ten dollars for the last ten days of my engagement, which brought me on a level with my Parisian friend. These were, I believe, high wages. We worked twelve hours a day. The city of Berlin had outgrown the feudal usages of Hamburg and Leipsic, and we were no longer lodged under the same roof with the Herr, nor humbly ate at his table. Alcibiade had an apartment in a rambling house with a princely staircase, but the central court of which ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... the pride of the merchant— the influence of wealth is again realized by cheap purchases of the national domains—the abandoned abbey becomes the delight of the opulent trader, and replaces the demolished chateau of the feudal institution. Full of the importance which the commercial interest is to acquire under a republic, the wealthy man of business is easily reconciled to the oppression of the superior classes, and enjoys, with great dignity, his new elevation. The counting-house of a manufacturer of woollen cloth ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... waxed mighty through her commerce, {20} holding a high place among the Italian cities which had thrown off the feudal yoke and become republics. Wealth gave the citizens leisure to study art and literature, and to attain to the highest civilization of a thriving state. The Italians of that time were the carriers of Europe, and as such had intercourse with every nation ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... social order. There are two elementary sources of feudalism. The feudal system in its developed state based on land-holding. Other elements of feudalism. The rights of sovereignty. The classification of feudal society. Progress of feudalism. State of society under feudalism. Lack of central authority in feudal ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and the masses of the old French revolution, achieved in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases the task of their time: the emancipation and the establishment of modern bourgeois society. One set knocked to pieces the old feudal groundwork and mowed down the feudal heads that had grown upon it; Napoleon brought about, within France, the conditions under which alone free competition could develop, the partitioned lands be exploited the nation's unshackled ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... rendered in return. The lord lived in his castle, and the peasantry worked his land and supported him, fighting his battles if the need arose. This condition of society was known as feudalism, and the feudal relations of lord and vassal came to be the prevailing governmental organization of the period. Feudalism was at best an organized anarchy, suited to rude and barbarous times, but so well was it adapted to existing conditions that it became the prevailing form of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... figure of old Edith Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse and "thick-coming" recollections; and that striking picture of the effects of feudal tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and the Black Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful hunter), and his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the Children of the Mist, and the baying of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the help of a few more murders) he kept some sort of rude order and justice in the wretched land. Remember him, for, bad man as he is, he does represent a principle. He initiated, by that gift of the lands to his soldiers, the feudal system in Italy. I do not mean that he invented it. It seems rather to be a primaeval German form, as old as the days of Tacitus, who describes, if you will recollect, the German war-kings as parting the conquered lands among their 'comites,' ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... these things more clearly than European lovers of liberty, because Americans are detached from the actual conflicts by the Atlantic, and because Americans have had no real contact with the feudal or the imperial system for nearly 300 years. Pilgrim and Puritan, Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran and Catholic alike left the feudal system and autocratic government behind them when they crossed the Atlantic. Americans, therefore, cannot help hoping that two results ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... gentleness of nature. On the part of the former, however, this connection was one in which love had little share: its chief purpose would have been attained by the birth of a male heir to the name and property of the feudal chieftain; and this was an event to which he looked ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... representatives of themselves and their partners arrived in Carolina in 1670, bringing with them that pompous and preposterous anachronism, the "Fundamental Constitutions," contrived by the combined wisdom of Shaftesbury and John Locke to impose a feudal government upon an immense domain of wilderness, they found the ground already occupied with a scanty and curiously mixed population, which had taken on a simple form of polity and was growing into a state. The region adjoining Virginia was peopled ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... to the Evening Post. These were of a merely local and temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, Marco Bozzaris—though declaimed until it has become hackneyed—gives him a sure title to remembrance; and his Alnwick Castle, a monody, half serious and half playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life, has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... (ajutorita), which was raised when the other taxes ran short. Moreover, there were taxes in kind on malt, salt, fish, cattle, and horses, payable to the prince. The landlord (boyard) was entitled to land and pasturage tax, the tenth of the earth's productions, feudal service, bee, pig, and sheep taxes, and in addition to these a rate was levied upon bees, pigs, tobacco, wine, and sheep, for the benefit of the prince.[138] Whilst these imposts and the extraordinary ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson |
