"Norman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from over the sea, Alexandra! Saxon and Norman and Dane are we, But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee, Alexandra! Welcome her, thunders of fort and of fleet! Welcome her, thundering cheer of the street! Welcome her, all things youthful and sweet, Scatter the blossom ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... from the stock of boas at "Robinson's." Lucy Hewett had been shrouded in white cotton wool, to represent the Empress Matilda escaping from Oxford, "through the lines of King Stephen's soldiers," under shelter of a snowstorm. Fanny Russell had never looked better than she looked that night as a Norman peasant girl. It was all very well for Cyril Carey to condescend to the deceit of praising Annie and Dora up to the skies, when everybody knew whom he admired most, with reason. That was Fanny Russell, with her splendid black eyes and hair, and the Norman strength ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... squalid, uncivilized, ferocious-looking people. A grin of savage curiosity, or a cannibal scowl, seems almost universally to disfigure features which are none of the best or cleanest; and their whole appearance is as direct a contrast as can well be imagined, to the hale, honest Norman, or le franc Picard, as he is proverbially styled. We turned our backs upon them with pleasure, after casting back one lingering look at the noble old Circus; and soon found ourselves in the centre of the extensive plain ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... principle common to them all is to acknowledge the freedom of the Church as a corporation and a proprietor, and in virtue of the principle of self-government to allow religion to develop her influence in the State. The great migration which terminated in the Norman conquests and in the Crusades gave the dominion of the Latin world to the Teutonic chivalry, and to the Church her proper place. All other countries sank into despotism, into schism, and at last into barbarism, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... especially interesting to us, because Rollo was the forefather of that famous Duke of Normandy who, less than a hundred and fifty years later, conquered England and brought into that country the Norman nobles with their French language ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... ill-natured thing, an Englishman. The customs, sirnames, languages, and manners, Of all these nations, are their own explainers; Whose relics are so lasting and so strong, They've left a Shiboleth upon our tongue; By which, with easy search, you may distinguish Your Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English. ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... supposed to indicate that Raxton was, in very early times, a seaside town of great importance; for the crypt is much older than the church, and of an entirely different kind of architecture. It was once a depository for the bones of Danish warriors killed before the Norman Conquest; it extends not only beneath the chancel, as in most cases, but beneath both the transepts. The vaulting (supported partly on low columns of remarkable beauty and partly on the basement wall of the church) is therefore of unusual extent. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... sun, was less intellectual than shrewd. Accustomed to weigh his words and measure his actions, he concealed a profound vigilance behind a misleading appearance of simplicity. A very slight observation of him sufficed to show that, like a Norman peasant, he invariably held the upper hand in business matters. He was an authority on wine-making, the leading science of Touraine. He had managed to extend the meadow lands of his domain by taking in a part of the alluvial soil of the Loire without getting into difficulties with ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... with me, so that I might at least have a musket and some cartridges in case of an attack. We agreed that I should send the man back with Ney's corps; and I went off, with the soldier accompanying me. He was a slow-speaking Norman, with plenty of slyness under an appearance of good nature. The Normans are for the most part brave, as I learnt when I commanded the 23rd Chasseurs, where I had five or six hundred of them. Still, in order to know how far I could rely on my follower, I chatted with him as we went along, ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... as Roman walls and Norman castles look out of place in New York and Kansas, so European laws and European remedies are too frequently misfits when tried by American schools, hospitals, or city governments. Yesterday a Canadian clergyman, after ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many comedies), the cultivated society of the day, and the rude barbarism of a Norman fore-time; his human characters have not only such depth and individuality that they do not admit of being classed under common names, and are inexhaustible even in conception: no, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dispeopled towns, The Pict, the painted Briton, treacherous Scot By hunger, theft, and rapine, hither brought Norwegian Pirates—buccaneering Danes, Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains; Who, joined with Norman French, compound the breed, From whence ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... times the relic is exhibited to a crowd of devotees, who file slowly past to kiss it. Some congealed blood of Our Lord is also said to be preserved, after remarkable vicissitudes of loss and recovery, in the Norman Abbey of Fecamp; and mediaeval Gloucestershire once boasted as big a treasure, which brought great concourse and popularity to the Cistercian house of Hayles. Pass beneath the archway of the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, cross the sluggish ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... well. Concerning it I'll narrate you a singular adventure I have read in a MS. belonging to the library of the Bishop of Seez. It was (I still have it before my eyes) a collection in folio, written in a good hand of last century. This is the singular fact reported in it. A Norman gentleman and his wife took part in a public entertainment, disguised, he as a satyr, she as a nymph. By Ovid it is known with what ardour the satyrs pursue the nymphs; that gentleman had read the 'Metamorphoses.' He ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... stubborn, he'd fire the last man on the ranch if he caught him doing things he didn't like. And if he doesn't get all the horses broken and sold that he has set his heart on selling, he says he won't be able to buy me a new car this fall. There's the dearest little sport Norman that I want—" ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... added to the existing work and carried it on. So far as we know all this was between three and four thousand years ago. In a village in England people are proud if they can point to any part of their parish church and say, "This is Norman work," and yet the Normans only came over to England less than nine hundred years ago! Go back more than three times that, and try to realise the age of this temple. And even this, as we know, is not old compared with the Pyramids! Doesn't it make us feel ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... whereso'er ye be, Who love your country, soil and sand. From Paris to the Breton sea, And back again to Norman strand, Forsooth ye seem a silly band, Sheep without shepherd, left to chance— Far otherwise our Fatherland If Villon were the King ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... being divided in the interior by rows of columns. From this division the nave and aisles of a church were derived; and in the semicircular recess at the one end for the tribune, we perceive the origin of the apsis, or semicircular east end, which one of the Anglo-Saxon, and many of our ancient Norman ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... spent, and before a fireplace in his private apartments Richard sat alone, in heavy meditation. The pale, clean-shaven, youthful face, with its beautiful mouth and straight Norman nose, and the short, slender figure in its mantle and doublet of black velvet furred with ermine, rich under tunic of white satin, tight-fitting hose of silk, and dark brown hair hanging bushy to the shoulders, would have been almost ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... Philadelphia Public Ledger, was of Scottish descent. Robert Clarke (1829-99), founded of the great Cincinnati publishing house of Robert Clarke and Co., was born in the town of Annan in Dumfriesshire. Norman Leslie Munro (1842-94), publisher of the Family Story Paper and founder of Munro's Publishing House, was born in ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... seven girls, well-rouged on the lips and cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their brilliance, displayed white arms, fingers covered with diamonds, round and shapely limbs. While they were chanting the Norman phrase "Allez, marchez! Allez, marchez!" they smiled at their different admirers in the reserved seats with such openness that Don Custodio, after looking toward Pepay's box to assure himself that she was not doing the same thing with some other admirer, set down in his note-book this ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... country seat of his friend, the architect Louis. Here he lived in tranquillity, and composed several minor pieces and a three-act opera, never produced, but afterward worked over into "Ali Baba" and "Faniska." In his Norman retreat Cherubini heard of the death of his father, and while suffering under this infliction, just before his return to Paris in 1794, he composed the opera of "Elisa." This work wras received with much favor at the Feydeau theatre, though ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... mature age? (Loud cries of hear! hear!) If this measure be right, would it have escaped the wisdom of those Saxon progenitors to whom we are indebted for so many of our best political institutions? Would the Dane have passed it over? Would the Norman have rejected it? Would such a notable discovery have been reserved for these modern and degenerate times? Besides, Sir, if the measure itself is good, I ask the Honourable Gentleman if this is the time for carrying ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... have a special place in our hearts for the families of men and women serving in the Gulf. They are represented here tonight, by Mrs. Norman Schwarzkopf, and to all those serving with him. And to the families, let me say, our forces in the gulf will not stay there one day longer than is necessary ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... my eyes brightening, my hair disporting in wavy ringlets over a majestic brow, till at the end of the second page I was Theodore Fitzhedingham, twenty-five years of age, with several grandfathers and grandmothers distinguished in history before the Norman conquest, and a clear rent-roll of forty thousand a-year. And yet, after all, it was my own individual self, Thomas Smith Sneezum—not, perhaps, exactly as I was at that moment—but as I had often and often fancied myself when I had gone through a course of Thaddeus of Warsaws, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... was the eldest of the three sisters of the baronet, a florid affable woman, with fine teeth, exceedingly fine light wavy hair, a Norman nose, and a reputation for understanding men; and that, with these practical creatures, always means the art of managing them. She had married an expectant younger son of a good family, who deceased before the fulfilment ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Sir Bruce Norman was standing by me with an elderly lady the first time I saw it," she said, as she turned a new row of the big white-wool scarf her hostess was knitting for a Deep-Sea Fisherman's Charity. "He really looked quite annoyed. I heard him say: ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the Saxon lords dispossessed of their lands and goods, which were given to the foreigner. Here the Domesday Book, with its plain bare statements, gives us a grim record of the Conquest. All, or almost all, the Saxon names of the overlords disappear, and the Norman take their place, continuing down to our own day. This same Porlock was taken from Algar, son of Leofric, and given to Baldwin Redvers. Countisbury was taken from Ailmer, and held by William himself. Lynton was taken from ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... instead of the Rhine? This might well have happened if Caesar and Crassus had changed provinces; and it is surely impossible to say that in such an event the venue (as lawyers say) of European civilization might not have been changed. The Norman Conquest in the same way was as much the act of a single man, as the writing of a newspaper article; and knowing as we do the history of that man and his family, we can retrospectively predict with all but infallible certainty, that no other person" ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... first Gordon, who helped Malcolm Canmore, and received in return a large grant of lands in Berwick, which became known as the Gordon country, was one of the many Norman knights attracted to the Court of Edward the Confessor. Accepting for the occasion the popular legendary version of Shakespeare, rather than the corrected account of modern historians, he may be supposed to have found his way north to the camp of Siward, where the youthful and exiled Scotch ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous and uneasy animation ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the suggestion that the annual inundation of the Nile provided the information for the first measurement of the year, I was not aware of the fact that Sir Norman Lockyer ("The Dawn of Astronomy," 1894, p. 209), had already made the same claim and substantiated it by much fuller evidence than I have ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... main facts of Bunyan's life. They may not know that he was of Norman descent (as Dr. Brown seems to succeed in proving), nor that the Bunyans came over with the Conqueror, nor that he was a gipsy, as others hold. On Dr. Brown's showing, Bunyan's ancestors lost their lands in process of time and change, and Bunyan's father was a tinker. He preferred to ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... known in China during the twelfth, and in Europe during the thirteenth century. Columbus also found that the variation changed its value as he sailed towards America on his memorable voyage of 1492. Moreover, in 1576, Norman, a compass maker in London, showed that the north- seeking end of the ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... that take us back to before the Norman Conquest, drawn by artists who were contemporary with Gasparo da Salo and Andreas Amati. It is quite out of the question to suppose that such bows were used at ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... to us from the Greek (ta biblia, the books; that is, emphatically, the sacred canonical books) through the Latin and Norman French. In the ancient Greek and Latin churches, its use, as a plural noun applied to the whole collection of sacred books of the Old and New Testaments, can be traced as far back as the fifth century. In the English, as in all the modern languages of Europe, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the beating of his fateful wings, flew by; the centuries rolled on; the Roman invaders came; the Norsemen and Saxons came, the Norman conquerors came, and each left their mark, deep and lasting, on the people and on the land—but they could not check by one hair's-breadth the perennial flow of the springs in the Hot Swamp, or obliterate the legend on which is founded this ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... this great geographer travelled through Spain, France, the Western Mediterranean, and North Africa before settling at the Norman Court of Palermo. Roger, the most civilised prince in Christendom, the final product of the great race of Robert Guiscard and William the Conqueror, valued Edrisi at his proper worth, refused to part with him, ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Anglo-Saxon blood; for, when William the Conqueror carried fire and sword through Northumbria, great numbers of the inhabitants moved north, and settled in the district beyond the reach of the Norman arms. ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... have been carefully preserved, and the arched ceilings of two or three apartments are interesting examples of the Gothic period. The Servants' Hall is a relic of the monastic buildings, and three other rooms adjacent are in the same style. There is a small doorway with Norman features of architecture, and some roomy vaults and parts of inner walls on which are the effigies of departed monks, indicating the original purpose of the great house ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... and sublimity of Norman architecture is due to the use of circular curves in the arches, combined with straight lines and the use of square forms in the ornaments—lines ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... Nogue is courageous, but Norman; this gives to courage a special form, which excludes neither reserve, nor prudence, ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... the body of the little Norman in the dreary room beneath, and of the mother who even now, perhaps, was anxiously looking ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... going to bring him," said Mrs. Reeves. "He says—Norman Steele says, that Mr. Somers is a first-class all-around chap, and no end of fun. Says ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... powerful curative or preventive attributes! Its seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs of the 21st dynasty. Many centuries later Pliny wrote that the best quality of seed still came to Italy from Egypt. Prior to the Norman conquest in 1066, the plant was well known in Great Britain, probably having been taken there by the early Roman conquerors. Before 1670 it was introduced into Massachusetts. During this long period of cultivation there seems to be no record or even indication ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... only to a certain limited extent been introduced into the Church of England by St. Augustine's mission, and that, as time passed on, the foreign element had become absorbed in the national one. With the Norman conquest of A.D. 1066, the {146} case was, however, altered. [Sidenote: Much increased under the Normans.] The claims of the Popes to temporal as well as to spiritual authority were by that time definite and authoritative; the Conquest itself had been undertaken by the permission of Alexander ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... shrewd comment on the above incident. But as to how far this account of the views of the Diggers is correct, we shall leave to the judgement of those who read the pages that are to follow. Though we may now believe that, save that he placed Norman in the place of the Saxon Lords, William the Conqueror introduced but few innovations into the laws and institutions of the country, the very opposite was the accepted opinion in the days of Winstanley ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Asia. Take England: its aristocracy at different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first the Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)—a pirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct; then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... you, gentlemen, that war on England, if scientifically conducted, would be a profitable thing. I've been reading a book by a man named Norman Angell, who says that war doesn't pay. Well, the reason for that is we don't conduct our wars on the proper lines. Now if ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Watford, seems to have been very unfortunate in its ancient owners. Its first Norman possessor, Geoffrey de Mandeville, having incurred the Pope's displeasure, was obliged to be suspended in lead, on a tree, in the precinct of the Temple, London, because Christian burial was not allowed to persons under such circumstances. Edmond of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... suited to form strong arms, strong hearts, chaste natures, and, with purity, strength of domestic affection. He was glad to exchange it for a sunnier dwelling-place, and thus, instead of becoming a merchant, he became the founder of Norman dynasties in Italy, France, and England. We are tempted to linger over the story of these primaeval mariners, for nothing equals it in romance. In our day Science has gone before the most adventurous barque, limiting ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... King of Norway, who made him prisoner and seized his possessions, carrying off the young Magnus to act as his personal attendant. After ravaging the Western Isles the Norwegian king encountered, off the Island of Anglesey, the forces of the Norman Earls of Chester and Shrewsbury, and defeated them with much slaughter. The young Magnus {64} refused to take any part in the unjust warfare, and remained in his ship engaged in prayer throughout the battle. He was soon after able to escape to the court of Malcolm III, where he remained ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... introduction of the feudal tenures into the kingdom of England, though ancient, is well enough understood to set this matter in a proper light. In the earlier ages of the Saxon settlement, feudal holdings were certainly altogether unknown, and very few, if any, had been introduced at the time of the Norman conquest. Our Saxon ancestors held their lands, as they did their personal property, in absolute dominion, disencumbered with any superior, answering nearly to the nature of those possessions which the Feudalists term Allodial. William the Norman first ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... headland, and erected a tabernacle for their ark from the boughs of trees while they built a stone church, within which, in the year 999, the body was enshrined. This church stood until after the Norman Conquest, when the king made its bishop the Earl of Durham, and ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... and spoke Celtic; when they were conquered by the Romans, Latin words crept into the tongue; and as Romans gave place to the Saxons, and the Saxons to the Danes, words from the German and Norse tongues were added to the language. Finally, came the Norman Conquest, and with it a flood of French words. The English we speak to-day is a mixture of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 58, December 16, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... ancient baronetcy of Tichborne, recalls to mind a legend current in the Tichborne family for many generations relative to the "Tichborne Dole." The house of Tichborne dates the possession of its right to the manor of Tichborne, near Winchester, as far back as two centuries before the Norman Conquest. ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... of improbabilities, and what is most improbable were not often that which is most certain! But if, at Mr. Wilson's summons, we reject as improbable a series of events supported by far stronger evidence than can be adduced for the conquests of Alexander, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England, what is it, we may ask, that he calls upon us to believe? His skepticism, as so often happens, affords the measure of his credulity. He contends that Cortes, the greatest Spaniard of the sixteenth century, a man little acquainted with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... personally, but a larger share than others of that corpus of tradition which has descended from our earliest unknown ancestors, and become attached to the historical hero of later times—I mean, Hereward, the last of the Saxon defenders of his land against William the Norman.[42] The analysis of the Hereward legend affords a good example of the process by which tradition is preserved by historical fact, and in its turn helps to unravel the real history which lies at the source. Instead, therefore, of attempting to travel over the voluminous literature which is the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that Queen of Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those early Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the soaring new Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older [111] manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... shall never see her face again it is with real emotion that I recur to this article and to the occasion of it. Many years ago—nearly a quarter of a century—a beloved friend whom I still mourn, Norman Maccoll, editor of the "Athenaeum," sent me a book called "Songs of the Great Dominion," selected and edited by the poet, William Douw Lighthall. Maccoll knew the deep interest I have always taken in matters relating to Greater Britain, and especially ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... in Virginia. Dr. Jenkins bought my mother from a man named Norman. Brought us here on the boat. I know I was walkin' and talkin'. I don't remember about the trip, but I remember they said they had to keep me out from fallin' in the river. I was too playified ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and a zealous member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he was called to his abundant reward on September 28, 1909. Verily the lamp of faith is not extinct in the land of the Norman. ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... caring for my own sake," said Rachel, "but for yours and Grace's, mother, I will give as much ocular demonstration as I can, that I am not pining for this hero with a Norman name. I own I should have thought none of the Dean's friends would ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they couldn't quite understand me. I have had letters from them since, but it is such broken English I can't make it out. Back of those men's time the English are just simply foreigners, nothing more, nothing less; they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and sometimes a mixture of all three; back of THEM, they talk Latin, and ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come billions and billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that Satan himself couldn't understand. The fact is, where you strike ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... before the Conquest, French was the language used, while Latin was that of the learned, and Saxon that of the country-people. Henry the First, the great patron of letters, sometimes held his Court at Caen, so that the Norman poets who were competing for his favour, were doubtless familiar with the legendary history of England. The first important works in the French language seem to have come from Normandy, and it is not improbable that some of them were written in England. They were called romances, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... was often whispered by country gossips. In infancy foundlings on the church steps of Notre Dame, then brought to this quiet Norman backwater by the Girards and raised as sisters, they had lost both their protectors by death. The same visitation of the dread plague had cost poor little ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the two next days in exploring a creek which we called CULGRUFF, and another on the opposite or eastern shore, which received the name of NORMAN'S CREEK, and returned to the Hecla on the evening ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... after the first Spanish caravel had touched the shores of North America, we find the French putting forth efforts to share in some of the results of the discovery. In the year 1504 some Basque, Breton and Norman fisher-folk had already commenced fishing along the bleak shores of Newfoundland and the contiguous banks for the cod in which this region is ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... poor men brook the wrong that ensures the rich man's right. How shall kings and lords be worshipped, if no man bow the knee? How, if no man worship these, may thy praise endure with thee? How, except thou trust in these, shall thy name not lose its might? These have had their will of thee since the Norman came to smite: Sires on grandsires, even as wave after wave along the sea, Sons on sires have followed, steadfast as clouds or hours in flight. Time alone hath power to say, time alone hath eyes to see, If your walls of rule be built but of clay-compacted ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... afford a curious parallel: I refer to the Normans of Great Britain and the Manchus of China. Both empires are under the sway of dynasties which originated in the north; for the royal house of Britain, though under another title, has always been proud of its Norman blood. ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... night of the mocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southern performer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as to render a comparison absurd; but what I love is a singer, a voice to reach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Norman school,"—so he called it,—hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I had called his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes," he said, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'." My own feeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor of what has ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... attempt was made to rebuild the monastery. But Mr Bloxam read a paper at Peterborough in 1861 in which he disputed the authenticity of this monument, which had been previously regarded as one of the most ancient monumental stones extant. He pronounced it to be Norman, and not Saxon work, and some centuries later in date than the massacre of the monks. He considered the figures did not represent the slain monks and their abbot, but Christ and eleven disciples. It has been further conjectured ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... about class rule being so fruitful a cause of war—to remember that the rule of one race by another always does mean class rule. The alien conquerors who descend upon a country become the military and landlord caste there. Thus the Norman barons in England, the English squires in Ireland, the Magyars in Hungary, the German barons in East Prussia and the Baltic provinces, and so forth. They make their profit and maintain themselves out of the labour and the taxation of ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... think he's quite right," said Dahlia. "There is an old Norman church, I believe, and we ought to go and see it. The Philistines needn't come in if ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... reign of William Rufus. This he hurriedly adapted to include the satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... some expert of "old masters." A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it as old as Venice ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... is lady paramount of all the lands in England; every estate in land being holden, immediately or mediately, of the crown. This doctrine was settled shortly after the Norman Conquest, and is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... 15th of July in the Norman, a beautiful ship, perfectly appointed. The voyage to England occupied a short fortnight, without a stop except at Madeira. A good and restful voyage for tired people, and there were several of us. I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... scholarship—Word Hoard—Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial is the view which believes that the English language was a creation of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly romantic. The English spirit emerged ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... all Le Bec's work," the Rector went on, turning back to Westray. "So sublime the simplicity of the Norman style, is it not? The nave arcades will repay your close attention; and look at these wonderful arches in the crossing. Norman, of course, but how light; and yet strong as a rock to bear the enormous weight of the tower which later builders reared ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... talking over the private theatricals with my old playfellow, whom I knew when I was no taller than this parasol. And that is a glaring impropriety, is it? 'Honi soit qui mal y pense.' You wanted an answer a minute ago—there it is for you, my dear, in the choicest Norman-French." ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the lady I should still have a deep interest in her husband's death, Mr. Cleek. He is—or was, if dead—the only son of my cousin, the Earl of Wynraven, who is now over ninety years of age. I am in the direct line, and if this Lord Norman Ulchester, whom you and the public know only as 'Zyco the Magician,' were in his grave there would only be that one feeble old man between me ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... to set off his rank," remarked a third. "If he came among us in rags, nobility would shine through a hole in his elbow. I never saw such dignity of aspect. He has the old Norman blood in his veins, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... architecture of this portion of the church corresponds in its style with the date of the foundation,—the commencement of the thirteenth century: the lancets, with their mouldings, are strictly of that date, and the capitals of the shafts, which are worked with great boldness, are of the late Norman period, rather than of that which is ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... very short mode of settling the controversy. Probably Nehemiah Coxe was his son, settled at Bedford as a shoemaker. He was a learned man, and, when tried at Bedford assizes for preaching the gospel, he was indicted in the usual Norman-French, or Latin; and pleaded first in Greek, which the prosecutors not understanding, he pleaded in Hebrew, arguing, that as his indictment was in a foreign tongue, he was entitled to plead in any of the learned languages. The counsel being ignorant of those ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... his little finger was the cause of his death. Nor of that of Q. Lecanius Bassus, who died suddenly of so small a prick with a needle on his left thumb that it could hardly be discerned. Nor of Quenelault, a Norman physician, who died suddenly at Montpellier, merely for having sideways took a worm out of his hand with a penknife. Nor of Philomenes, whose servant having got him some new figs for the first course of his dinner, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... century. In England the arrival of the Cistercians and the new style introduced or rather developed by them seems almost more than anything else to have determined the direction of the change from what is usually, perhaps wrongly,[66] called Norman to Early English, but in Portugal the great foundation of Alcobaca was apparently powerless to have any such marked effect except in the one case of cloisters. Now with the exception of the anomalous and much later Claustro Real at Batalha, ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... citizens in his attempt to enter Oxford, which effecting by force, he was so much exas- perated at their attachment to Harold, that he bestowed the government of the town on Robert de Oilgo, a Norman, with permission to build a castle to keep his Oxford subjects in awe. The disturbances during the reign of Stephen and his successor were frequent, and in the reign of John, A. D. 1209, an unfortunate ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Mr. Norman concludes his article with these pregnant words, words which will force every man of any brains ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... still with that sense of shadowiness in what he saw and in what he did, in making all the researches possible to him, about the neighborhood; visiting every little church that raised its square battlemented Norman tower of gray stone, for several miles round about; making himself acquainted with each little village and hamlet that surrounded these churches, clustering about the graves of those who had dwelt in the same cottages aforetime. He visited all the towns within a dozen miles; and probably ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Africa was known in Prince Henry's days as far as Cape Bojador. It would appear that Norman sailors had already advanced beyond Cape Non, or Nun, which was so called because it was supposed that nothing existed beyond it. Consequently the problems that Prince Henry had to solve were whether the coast of Africa ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... under the Romans Britain under the Saxons Conversion of the Saxons to Christianity Danish Invasions; The Normans The Norman Conquest Separation of England and Normandy Amalgamation of Races English Conquests on the Continent Wars of the Roses Extinction of Villenage Beneficial Operation of the Roman Catholic Religion The early English Polity often misrepresented, and why? Nature of the Limited Monarchies of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thinned in former days the families of nobles and gentleman, might as well, in the opinion of almost all, have rested beneath a quaint little image of his infant figure, in brass, in the vaults of the little Norman chapel; for he was a puny, ailing child, apt to scandalize his father and brother, and their warlike retainers, by being scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest, and preferring the seat at this mother's feet, the fairy tale of the old nurse, the ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ancient Britons, and their civilization by the Romans; the Conquest of the Romans and Britons by the Saxons; the Life and Times of Alfred the Great; the Norman Conquest; the Feudal Times; the Manners and Condition of the People of England in the Middle Ages; in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries, ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... FRENCH-LATIN element in the English language consists of French words, first largely introduced into English by the Norman-French who conquered England ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... morning; she found the little village school and attended it, and first fondled the girls and thwarted the mistress, then scolded the girls and laughed at the teacher; she was constant at church, of course. It was a pretty little church, of immense antiquity—a little Anglo-Norman bijou, built the day before yesterday, and decorated with all sorts of painted windows, carved saints' heads, gilt scripture texts, and open pews. Blanche began forthwith to work a most correct high-church altar-cover for the church. She passed ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bridges and incomparable turf. He followed the windings of a stream, till, suddenly, he came out into a straight open valley, at the end of which were the massive ruins of the old abbey, with its stern Norman tower. He came on slowly thinking how strange it was that he, who had spent years in the remotest corners of the world, having for his companions men adventurous as himself, and barbarous tribes, should be here. His life, since the day he left his home in the south, ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... where it continued to predominate until the close of the 12th century; that style, which some authors have, from one of its most striking characteristics, called the round arch style, the same which in England is denominated Saxon and sometimes Norman architecture. ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it—weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris—in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of France has so much variety in such small compass. But every province has its distinctive human qualities. And between the Norman and the Gascon, the Breton and the Provencal, the man of Picardy and the man of Languedoc, there are greater temperamental differences than one can find anywhere else on earth in an equal number of square miles—except in some of ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... silver laced all over, and with a marvelous complement of hanging buttons. He wore a stove-pipe hat with a flashing cockade, and flourished a long whip that would have answered for a Kaffir cattle-driver. The horses—large fine specimens of the Norman breed—were harnessed three abreast, and decorated with many bells, while their headstalls were heavy with scarlet woolen tassels, and ornamented with large silver-plated buckles. The vehicle was a roomy, old-fashioned barouche, comfortable, but about as ancient as the cathedral. Altogether ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... vice was at the bottom of his popularity, as I need not say. Let those who generalize upon ethnology determine whether the ancient opposition of Saxon and Norman be at an end; but it is certain, to my thinking, that when a hero of the people can be got from the common popular stock, he is doubly dear. A gentleman, however gallant and familiar, will hardly ever be as much beloved, until he dies to inform a legend ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chiefly, it would appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening; evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as he elsewhere tells ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... him for his sins, and "returned desperately to his sport again." On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed at both ends, of Norman and Early English date, which, with its detached bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so vividly depicted by Bunyan in his "Grace Abounding." On entering every object speaks of Bunyan. The pulpit—if it has survived the recent restoration—is the same ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... no end of trouble in the life of Kingdoms. A marriage between a Saxon King and a Norman Princess, in about the year 1000 A.D., has made a vast deal of history. This Princess of Normandy, was the grandmother of the man, who was to be known as "William the Conqueror." In the absence of a direct heir to the English throne, made vacant by Edward's ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... is sufficiently explained by their subjection during more than two centuries to the Persian rule. We are also distinctly told that they affected Persian habits, and desired to be looked upon as Persians. The Arian names borne by Parthians no more show them to be Arians in race than the Norman names adopted so widely by the Welsh show them to be Northmen. On the other hand, the non-Arian names in the former case are like the non-Norman names in the latter, and equally indicate a second source ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... than those here given see Brooke, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems, and Cook and Tinker, Selections ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... Lieutenant's Tower, was collected in front of the alms-knights' houses; but a wide space had been kept clear by the henchmen for the passage of the sovereign and his train, and along this Henry proceeded with Anne Boleyn, in the direction of the upper ward. Just as he reached the Norman Tower, and passed the entrance to the keep, the Duke of Shoreditch, who was standing beneath the gateway, advanced towards him and prostrated ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth |
