"Peasantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction ensued. In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt worse than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the absence from his teaching of any tangible system of church government; and Lollardry came to be the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... account. Lanark, who had been left as the chief of the Government after the capture of his brother, endeavoured for a while to hold his ground. He recalled Monro and the relics of the Scottish army from England, and took the field with their joint forces. Meanwhile, the zealous Covenanting peasantry of the western shires, nicknamed Whigs or Whigamores, having obeyed the summons of Argyle, Loudoun, and the Earls of Eglinton and Cassilis, and marched eastward to assist their brethren round Edinburgh, the forces of the Anti-Engagers had swelled into an army of more than ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of the traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the Trappist monks, who seemed to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... other, and this is as it ought to be, for bread is the staff of life, and many of the other things we eat are garnishings. It is said we cannot live on bread alone, but this is untrue if the loaf is a proper one; at one time our prisoners were fed on it alone, and the peasantry of many countries ...
— The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book • Thomas R. Allinson
... the years he spent in this monotonous place, without any society worth speaking of, with only the shabbiest collection of books, with hardly any interest in life except the sky, and the hills, and the peasantry?' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... their circumnavigation of the globe, as to render superfluous more than a few passing allusions. When near enough to distinguish the minor features of the island, the terraced slopes of the mountainsides converted into vineyards and gardens studded with the huts of the peasantry, presented a pleasing aspect to visitors, whom a week's sailing had brought from the snow-clad shores of England. Here and there a whitewashed chapel or picturesque villa lent a charm to the scenery by contrasting strongly with the patches ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... still wilder wanderers of Scandinavia in fierce combats that he was too little skilful to record, and which appears so obscure and remote to his descendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an outline proportionally sharp and well-defined to the intelligent peasantry of Iceland. Their Barbours and Blind Harries came a few ages sooner than ours, and the fog, in consequence, rose earlier; and so, while Scotch antiquaries of no mean standing can say almost nothing about the expedition or death-bed of Haco, even the humbler ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... these fetes, the number of which is infinite, but which occur only, in each locality, once a year, there exist also those merry meetings, which, like the Sunday, are understood by the peasantry as a general holiday. Amongst these, the most animated and attractive, and more usually marked by happy incidents, is that of the first of May. At the earliest dawn of day, the tones of the bagpipe may be distinguished in the distance, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... improving vegetables by particular modes of culture, was just beginning to be known in Europe. All China, at that time, was comparatively a garden. When the King of France introduced the luxury of silk stockings, which, about eighteen years afterwards, was adopted by Elizabeth of England, the peasantry of the middle provinces of China were clothed in silks from head to foot. At this period, few or none of the little elegancies or conveniences of life were known in Europe; the ladies' toilet had few essences to gratify the sense of smell, or to beautify, for ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... mean well toward Gretchen? He was a thorough man of the world; he knew innocence at first glance, and Gretchen was both innocent and unworldly. To the right man she might be easy prey. Never to a man like Colonel von Wallenstein, whose power and high office were alike sinister to any girl of the peasantry; but a man in the guise of her own class, of her own world and people, here was a snare Gretchen might not be able to foresee. He would watch this fellow, and at the first sign of an evil—Carmichael's muscular brown ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... meantime, had been left to the care of theapothecary's boy, whose tender mercies were now, for the first time in his life, demanded towards a fainting lady; for the poor raw country lad, having to do with a sturdy peasantry in every-day matters, had never before seen the capers cut by a lady who thinks it proper, and delicate, and becoming, to display her sensibility in a swoon; and truly her sobs, and small screeches, and little stampings and kickings, amazed young gallipot. Smelling salts were ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... the eminent author alludes in a before- quoted extract from his work, and which he erroneously styles "a charm," is here given in full. The reader will observe that it partakes not the least of the nature of a charm. It would seem to have some analogy with the "Keen," or Wail of the Irish peasantry.] ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... committee, class, peasantry, nobility, are, grammatically, singular, but they are often so modified by their surroundings as to convey a plural idea, and when so modified the verb must be plural. When the collective noun conveys the idea of unity, the verb ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... outpouring of the sewers, a flood of base desires invaded every square and cross-road, ever more putrid and more swollen," D'Annunzio retired to Francovilla-al-Mare, a few miles from his birthplace. There he lives in seclusion, esteemed by the simple-minded, honest, and somewhat fanatical peasantry, to whose quaint and primitive manners his books owe ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... harping in the stomach of the people, and while it continues we cannot cease to draw attention to it. And Gokhale urged that "even this deplorable condition has been further deteriorating steadily." We have no figures on malnutrition among the peasantry, but in Madras City, among an equally poor urban population, we found that 78 per cent. of our pupils were reported, after a medical inspection, to be suffering from malnutrition. And the spareness of frame, the ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... in the gorgeous splendor of diamonds and other precious stones, of flowers and laces; the gentlemen in their gold-embroidered uniforms, their breasts ornamented with orders; but among them were seen also the dark figures of Lutzow's riflemen, the plain coats of the citizens, and even some of the peasantry in their becoming rural costumes. All classes were represented at this great ball, which the municipal authorities of Breslau gave in honor of the Emperor of Russia, for these representatives of all ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... hands, I found, had first led her to discover that I was the lady. I had, of course, my quantum of reverences; for the politeness of the north seems to partake of the coldness of the climate and the rigidity of its iron-sinewed rocks. Amongst the peasantry there is, however, so much of the simplicity of the golden age in this land of flint—so much overflowing of heart and fellow-feeling, that only benevolence and the honest sympathy of nature diffused smiles over my countenance ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... to grandeur, or even beauty, the scenery through which we now travelled was not to be compared with the sublime passes of the Pyrenees, or with many spots which we had beheld; but in truth, a hamlet uninjured and tenanted by its own rude peasantry, a field of Indian corn exhibiting no wasteful track of foragers, nay, a single cottage with its flowers and evergreens budding around it, was at this a more welcome object to our eyes than the wildest ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... who lives chiefly at Vienna, although, I believe, in great retirement, spending 200l. upon himself, and giving away 2,000l.—Mr. Edward Kenyon spoke of you to me as having such opportunities of knowing both the city and the country as rarely befell even a resident, and what you say of the peasantry gives me a strong desire ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... it had no equivalent advantages. There appeared no reason, in short, why general emancipation would not do as well in 1834 as in 1840. Finally, a strong conviction existed that from peculiarity of climate and soil, the physical wants and necessities of the peasantry would compel them to labor for their subsistence, to seek employment and wages from the proprietors of the soil; and if the transformation could be safely and quietly brought about, that the free system might be cheaper and more profitable ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... processions of the temples: and the Rata-mahat-mayas and headmen have a pride in exhibiting the number of retainers who follow them to the field, and the performances of the tame elephants which they lend for the business of the corral. Thus vast numbers of the peasantry are voluntarily occupied for many weeks in putting up the stockades, cutting paths through the jungle, and relieving the beaters who are engaged in surrounding and ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... rising proving successful. Pearse was not even an Irishman, being the son of an English convert to Catholicism who had emigrated to Ireland, but he was an enthusiastic Gaelic scholar, and there was nothing he loved better than wandering among the peasantry of Galway and Connemara, while in his own establishment all ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... farming are not the best, and an acre of land produces scarcely one-third as much as the same area is made to yield in other states. The farming class, or peasantry, was in a condition of serfdom until within a few years. Poverty unfits them to compete with farmers of western Europe; moreover, the laws of land ownership and tenure also serve ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... by preventing any political sect from settling into power, except under such conditions as, in its own interest, the church should prescribe. The party of the president (the Buonapartists) gradually and steadily gained over all the others; the soldiery and the peasantry were Napoleonist; the church saw this, and threw its weight into the presidential scale. The union of peasant proprietary, the army, the church, the Buonapartists proper, and the friends of order, who believed in the oath of the prince-president, constituted the will of France;—the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it was emptied on the mass of yellow husks, mixed with earth, which made the floor of the granary. The count bought what was needed for the household; the farmers and tenants, indeed, every one around Clochegourde, sent buyers to the Mignonne, a pet name which the peasantry give even to strangers, but which in this case ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... they stopped at Castel Franco, which presents one of the best specimens of an Italian town, and Italian peasantry, that a stranger can ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... in the coarse cloth of the country, made in the style common among the peasantry of Bergen; but the delicacy of his limbs, the smallness of his head, the easy elegance of his poise, and the natural gracefulness of his movements and attitudes, all seemed ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... quite certain," declared Flockart. "The fact is that there's so much tradition and legendary lore connected with the old place, and its early owners were such a set of bold and defiant robbers, that for generations the peasantry have held it in awe. Hence all sorts of weird and terrible stories have been invented and handed down, until the present age believes them ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... native's eye; The stately port, slow step, and visage dark, Still mark enduring pride and constancy. And, if the glow of feudal chivalry Beam not, as once, thy nobles' dearest pride, Iberia! oft thy crestless peasantry Have seen the plumed Hidalgo quit their side, Have seen, yet dauntless stood—'gainst ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... ignorant, whose earliest recollections do not cling round the story and the characters of the great Epics. The almost illiterate oil-manufacturer or confectioner of Bengal spells out some modern translation of the Maha-bharata to while away his leisure hour. The tall and stalwart peasantry of the North-West know of the five Pandav brothers, and of their friend the righteous Krishna. The people of Bombay and Madras cherish with equal ardour the story of the righteous war. And even the ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... in this manner, there is no limit to the travels it may take. Curiously enough, the very legend before us in all its details has found a home among the English peasantry. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould collected in Yorkshire a story which he contributed to Henderson's Folklore of the Northern Counties, and entitled The Fish and the Ring. {2} In this legend a girl comes as the unwelcome sixth of the family of a very poor ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... voice. Cadurcis, though so young, was gifted with an innate fastidiousness, that made him shrink from a rude woman. His feelings were different in regard to men; he sympathised at a very early age with the bold and the energetic; his favourites among the peasantry were ever those who excelled in athletic sports; and, though he never expressed the opinion, he did not look upon the poacher with the evil eye of his class. But a coarse and violent woman jarred even his young nerves; and this woman ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... cleaning a byre, with whom I fell into talk. The man was to all appearance as heavy, as hebete, as any English clodhopper; but I knew I was in Scotland, and launched out forthright into Education and Politics and the aims of one's life. I told him how I had found the peasantry in Suffolk, and added that their state had made me feel quite pained and down-hearted. "It but to do that," he said, "to onybody that thinks at a'!" Then, again, he said that he could not conceive how anything could daunt or cast down ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... probably be the last. It will be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia, where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-rescuing, wrong-redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the revolt is clearly established by the Milanese journals and by the fact that Landrieux forthwith accepted the command of the rebels at Bergamo and Brescia.[75] But while these cities espoused the Jacobin cause, most of the Venetian towns and all the peasantry remained faithful to the old Government. It was clear that a conflict must ensue, even if Bonaparte and some of his generals had not secretly worked to bring it about. That he and they did so work cannot now be disputed. The circle of proof is ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... seigneurs, left the country. In Canada there remained a priesthood, largely native, but soon to be recruited from France by the upheaval of the Revolution, a few seigneurial families, natural leaders of their race, a peasantry, exhausted by the long war but clinging tenaciously to the soil, and a good many hardy pioneers of the forest, men skilled in hunting and in the use of the axe. Out of these elements, amounting in 1763 to little more ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... misshapen fields seem trim paddocks, wavering and serpentining furrows appear straight and regular lines of tillage, weed-grown fields look marvels of cleanliness and care, while the lounging and ragged population were to be passed off as a thriving and industrious peasantry, well paid and contented, were difficulties that Mr. Kearney did not propose to confront. Indeed, to do him justice, he thought there was a good deal of pedantic and 'model-farming' humbug about all that English passion for neatness he had read of in public journals, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... well to be angry when he reflects that, to maintain this reckless and utterly useless extravagance of the king and the court, the millions of the peasantry of France were compelled to live in mud hovels, to wear the coarsest garb, to eat the plainest food, while their wives and their daughters toiled barefooted in the fields. One would think that guilty consciences would often be appalled by the announcement, "Know ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... footmarks are very numerous, and are attributed by the peasantry to different saints. Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall, in their account of Ireland, refer to several curious examples which are regarded by the people with superstitious reverence, and are the occasions of religious pilgrimage. Near the chapel of Glenfinlough, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the Bog of Allen. It is available for through passengers for Connemara. For miles, the undulating bog land, green and brown. The King's County still remains out of the primeval forests, and its great peat fields are the only source of wealth to the surrounding peasantry. Athlone, some two miles below Lough Ree, on the Shannon, is the military key to the Province of Connaught. The keep of the old Castle, dating from King John's reign, remains, but the bridge and salmon weir are of more interest. In 1691 Ginckle ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... quality who suddenly found herself in the most dangerous pangs of labour. All the skill of the physicians who had been summoned proved futile; the lady was at the point of death; at last, in sheer despair, they summoned a midwife of great repute among the peasantry, but whose practice did not include the gentry. From the first treatment of this woman, who appeared modest and diffident to a degree, the pains ceased as if by enchantment; the patient fell into an indefinable calm languor, and after some ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and which culminated in the Wyndham Purchase Act, have created a new Ireland. Mr. Redmond, speaking a year or two ago, said that Ireland "was studded with the beautiful and happy homes of an emancipated peasantry." It is a true picture, but it is a picture of the result of Unionist policy in Ireland, a policy which Mr. Redmond and his friends, including the present Government, have done their best to hamper. The driving power of the agitation ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... content is indeed the bane of industry. But instances of a different sort may be found, in various of the Irish peasantry. Amongst them we may behold men struggling with adversity with all the strongest powers of mind and body; and supporting irremediable evils with a degree of cheerful fortitude which must excite at ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... tradition. Thus it may be said that so long as any of these three are alive, a faint flicker of living Cornish remains, even if there is no verity in the weird legends of the survival of more as an esoteric language among the peasantry and the mining and fishing folk of the West. But even if the spoken Cornish be dead, its ghost still haunts its old dwelling, for the modern English speech of West Cornwall is full of Celtic words, and nine-tenths of the places and people ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... A.D. 1430 the houses of the peasantry were "constructed of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were of turf—a stiffened bull's-hide served for a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread. Cabins ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... he had all the coarseness without the sentiment of the French peasantry, whence he sprang; that his political radicalism attests a lack of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere artist; that he had no conception of the beautiful, the exquisite—the fact remains that he triumphs over ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... fathers' farms; women were washing clothes or preparing the evening meal over little charcoal fires. A certain quantity of meat had been served out to each family, and they were therefore doing better than in their own houses, for meat was a luxury seldom touched by the French peasantry. ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... third-rate theatre. His father had meanwhile deceased and left him the property; but to make the debut referred to, he sold almost his entire inheritance. As may be supposed, his failure was signal. However easy he had found it to amuse the rough, untutored peasantry of his neighborhood, the test of a large and polished city ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Blessed Virgin. These objects, with them, stand for religion. A father who comes with his child in his arms to receive the medal will not die without confessing himself."—The reader will find on the clergy and peasantry in the south of France details and pictures taken from life in the novels of Ferdinand Fabre ("L'abbe Tigrane," "les Courbezons," "Lucifer,," "Barnabe," "Mon ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others. Mazzini, that greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the condition of the South European peasantry, said: "Education is not merely a necessity of true life by which the individual renews his vital force in the vital force of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead and living, by which he fecundates all ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... alternative; he must vastly increase his forces, while assuming the pacifist role. He must pretend to be severe with the aristocracy of his army—the apple of his eye—and to be full of sympathetic concern for the welfare of the working classes and peasantry, whom he fears or despises, and who are nothing but cannon fodder to him. And he does these things in order to sow seeds of mutual distrust between France ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... for plundering, from which troops had made descents upon the lands bordering on the sea, and after carrying away every thing which chance threw in their way, had always returned to their ships before their noise had collected the peasantry. For this reason the hurry and consternation in the city was, on the present occasion, the greater. And, by Hercules, they had neither an efficient army at home, nor a general, whom they could oppose to ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... although he would declare they were true ones and was always careful to point them with an excellent moral, dealt largely with the old Scottish fairy folk, and with the many superstitions handed down from generation to generation amongst the peasantry. ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... moment with an old acquaintance of Jack's,—the very woman who had taken so much pleasure in terrifying him when he was little. Bowed, as nearly all the peasantry are by their daily labor, burned by the sun, and powdered by the dust, old Sale yet retained a little life in her sharp eyes. She spoke of her good man, who had been sick for months,—who could not ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... practically acquainted with the state of the country, overrun as it is in many places by vast iron-works, which have brought together a great and reckless population, and inhabited in all by a discontented and ill-instructed peasantry. Population had advanced with unexampled rapidity—having increased, from 1831 to 1841, thirty-six and a tenth per cent in Monmouthshire; the greatest increase during the same period of any county in the British empire.[3] Here then, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... the superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the measure of comfort and success there is in our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... by Monsieur de Bourbonne, an old country magnate, who had reason to think a great deal about her during the winter of this year. He belonged to the class of provincial Planters, men living on their estates, accustomed to keep close accounts of everything and to bargain with the peasantry. Thus employed, a man becomes sagacious in spite of himself, just as soldiers in the long run acquire courage from routine. The old gentleman, who had come to Paris from Touraine to satisfy his curiosity about Madame Firmiani, and found it not at all assuaged by ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of "The ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Something like a rude prosaic outline of several of the most noted of the Northern ballads, the adventures and depredations of the old ocean kings, still lends life to the evening tale; and among others, the story of the Haunted Ships is still popular among the maritime peasantry. ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean all America, Spanish-speaking as well as English-speaking; ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... manufactures,—sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish in feeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholic brethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; the Catholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, and almost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportion of the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession of landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly has a celebrated Irish patriot ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and subtlety were not to be found in Uruj there was one who never failed to exhibit these qualities when they became necessary, and Kheyr-ed-Din once more came to the front. The Russian peasantry have a saying that "God is high and the Czar is far away." In the sixteenth century the Grand Turk was in every sense "far away" from the struggling corsairs on the littoral of Northern Africa, and was a sovereign of such great and mysterious might that any man with a less fine instinct ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... population. For we must not forget that while France weaves silks and satins to deck the wives of German financiers, the Empress of Russia, and the Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and while Paris fashions wonderful trinkets and playthings for rich folk all the world over, two-thirds of the French peasantry have not proper lamps to give them light, or the implements necessary for modern agriculture. Lastly, unproductive land, of which there is plenty, would have to be turned to the best advantage, poor soils enriched, and rich soils, which yet, under ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... would then have them led home by his men in the middle of the night, all dead drunk, torches in hand, and making the forest resound with ribald songs. Libertinism completed the demoralization of the peasantry. In every family the Mauprats soon had their mistresses. This was tolerated, partly because it was profitable, and partly (alas! that it should have to be said) because it gratified vanity. The very isolation of the houses ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... because it is humble, and consists not in choosing what is good, but in disguising what is rough, extends itself into every species of art. The most definite instance of it is the dressing of characters of peasantry in an opera or ballet scene; and the walls of our exhibitions are full of works of art which "exalt nature" in the same way, not by revealing what is great in the heart, but by smoothing what is coarse ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... having been subjected to such cruel treatment from some country clowns; or, which is more probable, it may have been originally invented as a satire on the rude manners and uncouth conduct of the peasantry of ancient times. The story may also have been framed, to account, in a poetical manner, for ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Brunswick—the power which the Reformation gave to the State introduced an unmitigated despotism. Every security was removed which protected the people against the abuse of the sovereign power, and the lower against the oppression of the upper class. The crown became, sooner or later, despotic; the peasantry, by a long series of enactments, extending to the end of the seventeenth century, was reduced to servitude; the population grew scanty, and much of the land went out of cultivation. All this is related by the Protestant historians and divines, not ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... that their colonial craze will last long. There is, in all Europe, no country to which colonies are so entirely useless; for the French never emigrate and seldom even travel; and to send conscripts to tropical settlements cannot be popular with the peasantry. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... Danes. He then told the count that Edmund intended to reconnoitre the place alone, and that he hoped he and his people would attack the town, while the Saxons in their galley made an assault from the sea. The count replied that the peasantry could not be induced to ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... Constantinople, where the custom is now universal, smoking was thought to be so ridiculous and hurtful, that any Turk, who was caught in the act, was conducted in ridicule through the streets, with a pipe transfixed through his nose. In Russia, where the peasantry now smoke all day long, the Grand Duke of Moscow prohibited the entrance of tobacco into his dominions, under the penalty of the knaut for the first offence, and death for the second; and the Muscovite who was found snuffing, was condemned to have his nostrils split. The Chambre ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... (1827-), though painting little besides the peasantry, is no Millet follower, for he started painting peasant scenes at about the same time as Millet. His affinities were with the New-Greeks early in life, and ever since he has inclined toward the academic ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... been for a month in ignorance of all that had passed outside the walls, and had from day to day been eagerly looking for the arrival of Sir Walter Manny with his army to their relief. Once past the French lines they inquired of the peasantry, and heard to their surprise that the English fleet had not ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... rather than soldiers, there was no force permanently kept up. Every man was expected to know something of military duty, and all were able to build stockades. From the fact that the flesh of wild fowl formed one of the principal articles of food, the peasantry throughout the country were all accustomed to the use of the gun, and were ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... desolate island, than I was with the vessel which proved the means of thus opening to view a country capable of supporting a future nation, and which, we trust, will be the means of relieving the Hobart Town country of its over-stocked cattle, and the Mother Country of her surplus and half-starved peasantry. Futurity must develop this prophecy! Further travelling and examination only added to my pre-conceived estimate of this extremely interesting and extensive territory; consisting of plains or downs at least twenty miles long by a width of 10 miles, ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... soul, and that the idea of his duty as king towards France, a prey to all the evils of civil and foreign war, was the determining motive of his resolution. It cost him a great deal. To the Huguenot gentry and peasantry who had fought with him he said, "You desire peace; I give it you at my own expense; I have made myself anathema for the sake of all, like Moses and St. Paul." He received with affectionate sadness ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the perfect preciousness and distinction of truthfulness. Truthfulness in manners gives distinction and dignity in all classes of society; truthfulness gives that simplicity of manners which is one of the special graces of royalty, and also of an unspoiled and especially a Catholic peasantry. Vulgarity has an element of restless unreality and pretentious striving, an affectation or assumption of ways which do not belong to it, and in particular an unwillingness to serve, and a dread of owning any obligation of service. Yet service perfects manners ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... presses so heavily? Few houses, where such could by any possibility be housed, are to be seen from the roadside. There are so very few cottages and so very many gentlemen's houses that I am forced to believe that the peasantry have almost entirely disappeared. Yet I know there must be laborers somewhere to keep the place ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... and all describing him as a political foe to the established government. To all of these hypotheses there are two very obvious and decisive objections. The first is, that Robin Hood, as already remarked, is not so much as named in contemporary history. Whether as the unsubdued leader of the Saxon peasantry, or insurgent against the tyranny of Henry or Edward, it is inconceivable that we should not hear something of him from the chroniclers. If, as Thierry says, "he had chosen Hereward for his model," it is unexplained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... what proportion of unmarried dames will there be, if drafting continues, and the war becomes a permanent annual subject of draft? The prospect is seriously and simply frightful! The wreck of morality in France caused by Napoleon's wars is notorious, for previous to that time the French peasantry were not so debauched as they subsequently became. But this shocking subject ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... for the blockade of the British Isles had not existed. When the custom-house officers succeeded in seizing contraband goods they were again taken from them by main force. On the 2d of July a serious contest took place at Brinskham between the custom-house officers and a party of peasantry, in which the latter remained masters of eighteen wagons laden with English goods: many ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... The peasantry of Scotland are certainly on a poor footing all over the kingdom; and yet they look better, and are better cloathed than those of the same rank in Burgundy, and many other places of France and Italy; nay, I will venture to say they are ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... and monasteries of this time are often thought of by those who know least about them as little interested in anything except their own ease and certain superstitious practices. As a matter of fact, they cared for their estates, and especially for the peasantry on them, they provided lodging and food for travellers, they took care of the ailing of their neighborhood, and, besides, occupied themselves with many phases of the intellectual life. It was a well-known ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... of Egypt was the annual rising of the Nile. About midsummer, the peasantry who lived along the banks would find the river gradually beginning to rise. The stream became more turbid, too, as the bosom of the waters swelled. No cause for this mysterious increase appeared, as the sky remained ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... those rural fetes, where the peasantry of France gather on the village green, to mingle in the exhilarating dance. An aged couple came forward, hand in hand, in coarse grey overcoats, wooden sabots, and flapped hats, fastened by gray handkerchiefs under their chins. Two tight ropes were stretched parallel ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Mountain ash, is used by the Scottish peasantry with the same view; and a small twig of it is sewed up in the cow's tail, to preserve the animal and its produce from the influence ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... reins of government. In his time the two factions, known by the nicknames of "the Hooks" and "the Cods," kept the land in a continual state of disorder and practically of civil war. They had already been active for many years. The Hooks were supported by the nobles, by the peasantry and by that large part of the poorer townsfolk that was excluded from all share in the municipal government. The Cods represented the interests of the powerful burgher corporations. In later times these same principles and interests ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... those fighting names that stir up a true Scotchman's blood like the sound of a trumpet. These traditional tales and ballads have lived for ages in mere oral circulation, being passed from father to son, or rather from grandam to grandchild, and are a kind of hereditary property of the poor peasantry, of which it would be hard to deprive them, as they have not circulating libraries to supply them with works of fiction in ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... passed thro' Arnay-le-Duc, a pretty country village, three leagues from Yozy, and it being their annual fair-day, we had an opportunity of seeing all the peasantry, dressed in their best, and much chearfulness, not only in the town, but upon the road before we arrived, and after we passed it. Amongst the rest of the company, were a bear and a monkey, or rather what Buffon calls the maggot. I desired ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... productive granary of the world. In the wake of these priestly pioneers followed the trader and adventurer to assist in solving the secrets of unknown rivers and illimitable forests. From the hardy peasantry of Normandy and Brittany came reinforcements to settle the lands on the banks of the St Lawrence and its tributary rivers, and lay the foundations of the present Province of Quebec. The life of the population, that, in the course of time, filled ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... being now approaching the Archbishop's palace, one saw on the right, hard by the inn that is called the Zebra, a strange thing—two men not kneeling but standing! Standing in the front rank of the kneelers; unconscious, transfixed, staring. Yes, and clothed in the coarse garb of the peasantry, these two. Two halberdiers sprang at them in a fury to teach them better manners; but just as they seized them Joan cried out "Forbear!" and slid from her saddle and flung her arms about one of those peasants, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... excepting the knight and his attendants, the place was deserted by all. He paced through the village to seek a shelter for the night, and despairing to find one either in the inaccessible tower or the plundered huts of the peasantry, he directed his course to the left hand, where he spied a small, decent habitation, apparently the abode of a man considerably above the common rank. After much knocking, the proprietor at length ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the electors.... The persistent threat held out by certain Republicans to destroy the Church, either by a hypocritical fulfillment of the Concordat or by the forcible separation of Church and State, has been skilfully used by their adversaries amongst the peasantry, who dread nothing so much as having to pay their cure themselves. The Government was so well aware of this fact, that in some of the departments the Catechism was ordered to be recited in the schools during the last week before the elections, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... of an unusually severe winter in Switzerland that turned Brougham aside into the longer and less travelled route via the Corniche, the marvellous Roman road at that time fallen into oblivion, and little used even by the local peasantry. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... ago, in the neighbourhood of Kilkargan, and, so far as I know, everywhere the feeling is as bitter as ever, among those who have been dispossessed, and also among the tenants and peasantry, who have found themselves handed over to the mercies of Dutchmen, or other followers of William. At Kilkargan there was not that grievance; but, although they had still one of the old family as their master, ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... According to the promise of their appearance, they were selected for the royal schools of Boursa, Pera, and Adrianople, intrusted to the care of the bashaws, or dispersed in the houses of the Anatolian peasantry. It was the first care of their masters to instruct them in the Turkish language: their bodies were exercised by every labor that could fortify their strength; they learned to wrestle, to leap, to run, to shoot with the bow, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Sir Marmaduke's mansion by moonlight. All the peasantry are discovered asleep on the ground, as at the end ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the twelfth century, society, as we have seen, contained kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, citizens, peasantry, the germs, in fact, of all that goes to make a nation and a government; yet—no government, no nation. We have come across a multitude of particular forces, of local institutions, but nothing general, nothing public, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the road with a small cask of wine in a cart. One of the staff-officers instantly appropriated the keg, and proceeded to share his prize most generously. Never had I tasted anything so refreshing and delicious, but as the wine was the ordinary sour stuff drunk by the peasantry of northern France, my appreciation must be ascribed to my famished condition rather than to any virtues of ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... same Christian name,—oppressors will appear in the country, and the people will change their own land for a strange one." All these personages have appeared since; and it is the common opinion of the peasantry, that the consummation of the prophecy was fulfilled, when the exaction of the exorbitant rents reduced the Highlanders to poverty, and the introduction of the sheep banished the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... amusing. La Tina is the rustic mistress to whom the sonnets are supposed to be addressed; and every one knows that rusticale and contadinesca is that naive and pleasing rustic style in which the Florentine poets delighted, from the expressive nature of the patois of the Tuscan peasantry; and it might have been said of Malatesti's sonnets, as of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... their religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left without much moral or religious training of any sort. "We saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time, "and ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... talked to Andy about it, and he liked the idea immense. Andy was a man of an involved nature. He was never content to plod along, as I was, selling to the peasantry some little tool like a combination steak beater, shoe horn, marcel waver, monkey wrench, nail file, potato masher and Multum in Parvo tuning fork. Andy had the artistic temper, which is not to be judged as a ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... pounds, {104} the people became a degraded populace, not much better, or less disorderly than the Lazzeroni of Naples. A donation of corn was a bribe to a Roman citizen; {105} though there is not, perhaps, an order of peasantry in the most remote corner of Europe, who would consider such a donation in ordinary times as an object either worthy of clamour or ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... merely attuning myself to your mood, as I thought. The real truth is that I know more of the Parthians, and Medes, and dwellers in Mesopotamia—almost of any people, indeed—than of the English rustics. Travel and exploration are my profession, not the study of the British peasantry.' ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... should not think they got much of it. But it does seem strange that no other amusement can be found for them than the beer-shop. Can't they read? Can't they practise light and interesting handicrafts at home, as the German peasantry do?' ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious gratitude the material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... be well they should replace, no interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately bloom under their supervision. The excuse of their folly is in two words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry. The measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral practice. To the world their serious faces were never deformed by ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it as a disgraceful proceeding. Many lives would be saved, and he and his officers would preserve theirs. The step, however, was strongly opposed by Lord Grey, who implored the Duke to face any danger rather than requite with ingratitude and treachery the devoted attachment of the western peasantry. Abandoning this project, Monmouth, hearing that there was a rising of the inhabitants of the districts in the neighbourhood of Bridgewater, determined to return thither, and re-entered that town on the 2nd of July, having passed through Wells on his way. He now thought of fortifying ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... But I do say it to create alarm. We do not appear to me to be half alarmed enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the most obvious means of self-defence. As for the spirit of the peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the English; ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... language of the country now went, from behind a wall built by the roadside. It had been done at about five in the afternoon, in full daylight; and, as was surmised by the police, with the consciousness of many of the peasantry around. He had been walking along the road from Cong to his own house, and had been "dropped," and left for dead by the roadside. Dead, indeed, he was when found. Not a word more would have been said about it, but for the intervention of the police, ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... the days of organizing and consolidating among Jews and Gentiles alike. At the time when Abraham Lincoln was proclaiming his famous "United we stand, divided we fall," Julius Slovacki in Poland pleaded the cause of the peasantry of his country, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle issued a call to the entire house of Israel "to defend the honor of the Jewish name wherever it is attacked; to encourage, by all means at our disposal, the pursuit of useful handicrafts; to combat, where necessary, the ignorance ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... seem to be moving through a fantastic world in which Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Malvolio might feel at home; but with Dame Chat, Gammer Gurton and Hodge we feel the solid earth beneath our feet and around us the strong air which nourished the peasantry and ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... of his, an artist's superstition merely, may be mentioned. The Caros, like some other local families, suggested a Roman lineage, more or less grafted on the stock of the Slingers. Their features recalled those of the Italian peasantry to any one as familiar as he was with them; and there were evidences that the Roman colonists had been populous and long-abiding in and near this corner of Britain. Tradition urged that a temple to Venus once ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of others and promote the cause. He convinced himself, by studying the question at first hand, that the Baluch Am[i]rs, who ruled the country, were not only aliens but oppressors of the native peasantry, not only ill-disposed to British policy, but actively plotting with the hill-tribes beyond the Indus, and at ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... great, and the value set upon them is proportionably high. Nor must the shepherds themselves be passed over without notice. They are a shrewd, sagacious set of men, many of them by no means uneducated, as is the case generally with the peasantry in the north of England. Indeed, it is from this class that many scholars and mathematicians have done so much credit, and I may add honour, to the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland. An anecdote is related of ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... for all, or perhaps they did not realize the dire distress that prevailed in Ireland. However that may have been, Fergus prospered in his trading, and bought grain, and wine, and fat oxen and sheep, so that he loaded many ships with full freights of provisions, enough to carry the starving peasantry through the famine year till the next harvest. At last all his money was spent, all his ships were laden, everything was ready, and the little fleet lay in harbour, only awaiting a fair wind, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... May, 1302; and amongst the modern frescoes which cover the walls of the Grande Salle des Echevins in the Hotel de Ville, with its roof of fourteenth-century woodwork, is one which represents the return from the Battle of the Golden Spurs, that famous fight in which the hardy peasantry of Flanders overthrew the knights of France whom Philip the Fair had sent to avenge the blood of the Frenchmen who had died on the terrible ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... town and the rustic life of England—forgetting this man, if we can—putting out of mind the country church-yard and the broken heart—let us cross the water again, and ask who has associated himself most closely with the Italian peasantry and the bandits of the Pyrenees? When the traveller enters his little chamber beyond the Alps—listening to the dim echoes of the long passages and spacious corridors—damp, and gloomy, and cold—as he hears the tempest beating ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... however, began to revive about 1890, and dairy farming is prosperous; but the condition of the vilayet is far less unsettled than that of Macedonia, owing partly to the preponderance of Moslems among the peasantry, and partly to the nearness of Constantinople, with its Western influences. The main railway from Belgrade to Constantinople skirts the Maritza and Ergene valleys, and there is an important branch line down the Maritza valley to Dedeagatch, and thence coastwise to Salonica. After the city of Adrianople ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... speedily overcome by the enemy, who marched on quietly, feeling alternately puzzled and astonished at never being confronted by any French forces. As the invaders drew nearer to Paris they found an abundance of vegetables and fruit at their disposal, but most of the peasantry had fled, taking their live stock with them, and, as a German officer told me in after years, eggs, cheese, butter, and milk ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... Peasantry, who have fallen idle and have got the Devil at your elbow; interesting White Felonry, who are not idle, but have enlisted into the Devil's regiments of the line,—know that my benevolence for you is comparatively trifling! What I have ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Lockhart "Valladolid." It is one of the few old romances which have kept alive in oral tradition till the present day, and are still repeated by the Spanish peasantry (cf. Antologia, X, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... not like any better. One of these is to make them into oil, as the people do in the South of Europe; this oil is used to burn in their lamps and as an article of food. 'In Piedmont, among the light-hearted peasantry, cracking the walnuts and taking them from the shell is a holiday proceeding. The peasants, with their wives and children, assemble in the evening, after their day's work is over, in the kitchen of some chateau ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... their own. Paul, to whom nothing human was alien, studied them with keen curiosity. He found them gay-hearted, chivalrous gentlemen, and soon shared their enthusiasm for horses. His experiences with the 9th Brigade are described in his letters. The psychology of the French peasantry and tradespeople with whom he came into contact also vastly interested him. It was very responsible work he had to do for a lad of 19, but he did it ably and zealously. He liked the work for its variety; it involved a great deal of riding on horseback and much motoring, and gave opportunities ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... of our Government. "Sir," said Bukhtawur Sing, "the people who reside in the country know nothing about your Government paper; it is only the people of the capital that hold it or understand its value. The landholders and peasantry would never be able to keep it in safety, or understand when and ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... law and law-enforcement machinery. They were free of the burden of Jim Crow. Along with white citizens they were given better schooling, a major factor in improving status. The mass migration also meant that this part of America's peasantry was rapidly joining America's proletariat. The wartime shortage of workers, coupled with the efforts of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and other government agencies, opened up thousands of jobs previously ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and the guerilla bands would melt away to nothing. Other generals, furious at the savage nature of the warfare, and the incessant toil and loss entailed upon their troops, allowed the latter to do as they pleased, and burning houses and dead bodies marked their course. Then the peasantry, now turned guerillas, retaliated as savagely, giving no quarter, sacrificing all prisoners, and putting the wounded to death, sometimes with torture. On both ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... homestead. How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe—"a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices"—with its "strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago, is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour modern literature has few happier scenes than the fireside at the "Rainbow," ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... in devoting himself to law was the same that had led him to the ministry,—his desire to be a blessing to his fellow-beings. He saw the peasantry cheated and imposed upon because of their ignorance, and determined to become their champion. Kruesi thinks that his study of the law must "have produced negative results by showing him the insufficiency of human legislation to do away with abuses, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... that except Greece, he was never so attached to any place in his life as to Ravenna. The peasantry he thought the best people in the world, and their women the most beautiful. "Those at Tivoli and Frescati," said he, "are mere Sabines, coarse creatures, compared to the Romagnese. You may talk of your English women; and it is true, that out of ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... an unknown grave, his very name forgotten; but still the sad ending of the maidens is remembered, and even unto this day the cavern is denominated the "Cave of the Seven Sisters." Such is the above legend as it still exists amongst the peasantry, and any of your contributors would extremely oblige by informing me of the name of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... of this order of things alike detrimental to the well-being of society. First there does not exist, at least in the agricultural districts, any middle class of society at all, which is everywhere divided into two orders,—the gentry and the peasantry. In cities and large towns the case is, of course, different; for there the cultivation of letters and of trade has its influence on the human mind; and professions hold something like the rank which ought of right to belong to them when they are what is called liberal. But in the ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... the city.* This enclosure formed a kind of citadel, where the garrison could hold out when the outer part had fallen into the enemy's hands. The times were troublous; the open country was repeatedly wasted by war, and the peasantry had more than once to seek shelter behind the protecting ramparts of the town, leaving their lands to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... execution of their decrees. So soon as the duke (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of armed men to suppress this audacity in the country parts, and to disperse this rustic assembly. In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasantry and many other rebels were forthwith arrested; their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent home thus mutilated to deter their fellows from such enterprises, and to render them more prudent, for fear of worse. After this experience, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... found to be too severe for the impoverished country. A low Nile and a famine resulted in a demand for an investigation into the administration, and the following year Ismail was obliged to authorise a commission of inquiry. The waste, extravagance, and wholesale extortion from the peasantry revealed by this report made a deep impression upon Europe, and Ismail was forced to disgorge the estates which he ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... And, according to him, everything went wrong: the soil simply devoured the seed sown in it, the weather was never such as it should be, the seasons no longer came in their proper order. Briefly, it was all a premeditated disaster brought about by some evil power which had a spite against the peasantry, who were foolish to give their sweat and their blood to such a ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... relief upon the scene around them. The whiteness of the linen worn by the paludiers (the name given to men who gather salt in the salt-marshes) contrasts vigorously with the blues and browns of the peasantry and the original and sacredly preserved jewelry of the women. These two classes, and that of the sailors in their jerkins and varnished leather caps are as distinct from one another as the castes of India, and still recognize the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... not to speak of the unnameable iniquities of Liege, the world knows where the barbaric spirit of Europe had its central home—in Berlin, not in Petrograd; in the proud hearts of the German over-lords, not the meek ones of the Russian peasantry. ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... superb old nut-cracker countenance, and he with the dyspepsia of more than thirty summers causing him to deal gently with the fish-balls. They sat within sound of the bell of the Ritualistic Church, the ringing of which was forever deluding the peasantry of the surrounding country into the idea that they could certainly hear their missing cows at last (hence the name of the church—Saint Cow's); while the sonorous hee-hawing of an occasional Nature's Congressman ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... Hugh Cameron, Esquire, of Buffalo, N. Y., for this strange and strikingly beautiful legend. Mr. C. informs me that it has long formed a part of the fire-side lore of his own clan; and, from a remote period, has lived in the memory of Scotland's peasantry. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... of the peasantry was deep-rooted; and there they were careful to take up the knife and fork and lay them down on the plate crossed before commencing ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... said in endeavouring to identify it with the grona fina. At all events, this is the same species as the gronilla found on the hairs of the green oaks in Andalusia; and in some years large and valuable crops of the gronilla are gathered in that part of Spain by the peasantry, and sold to the Moors to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... lady must firmly demand from her servants is respect. The harassed and troubled American woman who has to cope with the worst servants in the world—the ill-trained, incapable, and vicious peasantry of Europe, who come here to be "as good as anybody," and who see that it is easily possible to make a living in America whether they are respectful or not—that woman has a very arduous task ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... at such a project, as it would affect their personal interests, and their discontents were increased by the conversion of considerable quantities of land from a state of tillage to that of pasturage, for the purpose of feeding more cattle. By this measure, great numbers of the peasantry were deprived at once, not only of employment, but of their cottages. Many small farms were indeed still let to some cottagers at rack-rent, which cottages had the right of commonage, guaranteed to them in their leases; but afterwards the commons were enclosed, and no recompense ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... whole battalion was lined up before the colonel while the adjutant read aloud the law which we boys term the "riot act." This document informed us very clearly that if any soldier was found to have taken anything from the peasantry for his own use; if any man was found drunk on active service, or if he committed any other crime or offense which might be counted as minor to these two, the punishment for a first offense would be six months first field punishment. For any ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... the German element in St. Louis be ignored. The part played by this people in the Civil War is a matter of history. The scope of this book has not permitted the author to introduce the peasantry and trading classes which formed the mass in this movement. But Richter, the type of the university-bred revolutionist which emigrated after '48, is drawn more or less from life. And the duel described ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is wearied with much toil the desire to cultivate the mind, or the cultivation it has already received, is gradually wiped out. Thus it was with my parents. They had dropped from swelldom to peasantism. They were among and of the peasantry. None of their former acquaintances came within their circle now, for the iron ungodly hand of class distinction has settled surely down upon Australian society—Australia's democracy is only ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... for the benefit of the learned members of a university. As the author himself has informed us they were all preached at Golden Grove, to the family and domestics of his patron and perhaps in addition to these, to a few of their neighbours and as many of the peasantry on the estate as could understand English.(63) The common people in England were so much accustomed in those days to hear Latin spoken in the pulpit, that they were sometimes led to undervalue a preacher who did not make some ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... being connected with the army, we were continually among the soldiers, listening with boyish eagerness to their experiences: and well remember, with horror, to this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed and pillage, and the recital of their foul actions against the miserable peasantry, which ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... short advance up the glen, the bottom of which we had attained by this ugly descent, brought us in front of two or three cottages, one of which another blink of moonshine enabled me to rate as rather better than those of the Scottish peasantry in this part of the world; for the sashes seemed glazed, and there were what are called storm-windows in the roof, giving symptoms of the magnificence of a second story. The scene around was very interesting; for the cottages, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation; they are the only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent society, and the country is inhabited almost entirely by boorish peasantry. In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere gathering-place, or general rendezvous, of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety and dissipation, and, having indulged ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving |
