"Shire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... London in the year 1308, by the royal proclamation of Edward I. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the burning of coal was again prohibited in London during the sitting of parliament, lest the health of the knights of the shire should suffer injury during their abode in the metropolis. In the year 1643, the use of coal had become so general, and the price being then very high, many of the poor are said to have perished for want of fuel. At the present day, when the consumption of coal, in our iron-furnaces ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... haven, but the way into it is securely guarded by hidden rocks, of which only the Utopians have the secret. It hath fifty-four large and fair cities, all built in one fashion, and having like manners, institutions and laws. The chief and head is Amaurote, being the midmost. Every city hath an equal shire, with farms thereon; and of the husbandmen, half return each year to the city, their place being taken by a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the House of Commons. Lowther was a man of ancient descent, ample estate, and great parliamentary interest. Though not an old man, he was an old senator: for he had, before he was of age, succeeded his father as knight of the shire for Westmoreland. In truth the representation of Westmoreland was almost as much one of the hereditaments of the Lowther family as Lowther Hall. Sir John's abilities were respectable; his manners, though sarcastically noticed in contemporary lampoons as too formal, were eminently courteous; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... birth, fortune, and connection, whether with king, earl, or ceorl. For in the different districts of the old Heptarchy, the qualification varied; high in East Anglia, low in Wessex; so that what was wealth in the one shire was poverty in the other. There sate, half a yeoman, the Saxon thegn of Berkshire or Dorset, proud of his five hydes of land; there, half an ealderman, the Danish thegn of Norfolk or Ely, discontented with his forty; some were there in right of smaller ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... security he deposits in his own medicine-bag. It seems probable that many amulets have been similarly regarded as soul-boxes, that is, as safes in which the souls of the owners are kept for greater security. An old Mang'anje woman in the West Shire district of British Central Africa used to wear round her neck an ivory ornament, hollow, and about three inches long, which she called her life or soul. Naturally, she would not part with it; a planter ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Fieldhead. A genteel foraging party besieged Shirley in her castle, and compelled her to surrender at discretion. An uncle, an aunt, and two cousins from the south—a Mr., Mrs., and two Misses Sympson, of Sympson Grove, ——shire—came down upon her in state. The laws of hospitality obliged her to give in, which she did with a facility which somewhat surprised Caroline, who knew her to be prompt in action and fertile in expedient ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... mercantile positions. When my parents made a Scotch tour in 1820-21 with, I think, their four sons, the freedom of Dingwall was presented to us all,[1] with my father; and there was large visiting at the houses of the Ross-shire gentry. I think the line of my grandmother was stoutly episcopalian and Jacobite; but, coming outside the western highlands, the first at least was soon rubbed down. The provost, I think, came from a younger branch of the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... made from Clow's Cross to Gunthorpe Sluice, in place of the winding course of the old Shire Drain; besides which, a bridge was erected at Cross Keys, or Sutton Wash, and an embankment was made across the Salt Marshes, forming a high road, which, with the bridges previously erected at Fossdyke and Lynn, effectually connected the counties of Norfolk and Lincoln. The result of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... into the rude figure of a doll, tied with ribbons, by which it is hung on the wall of the farm-kitchen till the next spring. The custom of cutting the Maiden at harvest was also observed in Inverness-shire and Sutherlandshire. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... War, the doubters having been dispersed, three or four thrust themselves into Mansoul. Now, to whose house should these Diabolic doubters go, but to that of Old Evil-questioning. So he made them welcome. Well, said he, be of what shire yon will, you have the very length of my foot, are one with my heart. So they thanked him. I, said one, am an election-doubter; I, said another, am a vocation-doubter; then said the third, I am a salvation-doubter; and the fourth said, I am a grace-doubter. I am persuaded you are down boys, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... ordain, in behalf of God, and of St. Peter, and of all saints, and of every hooded head, that neither king, nor bishop, nor earl, nor any man whatever, have any claim, or gable, or gild, or levy, or take any service of any kind, from the abbey of Medhamsted. I command also, that no shire-bishop be so bold as to hold an ordination or consecration within this abbacy, except the abbot intreat him, nor have there any claim to proxies, or synodals, or anything whatever of any kind. And I will, that the abbot be holden for legate of Rome over ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... prepared for the reception of Mrs. Willoughby, upon the plain that stretches across the valley, at this point. This was on the site of the present village of Cooperstown, but just twenty years anterior to the commencement of the pretty little shire town that now exists ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay, That time of slumber was as bright and busy as the day; For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war-flame spread; High on St. Michael's Mount it shone: it shone on Beachy Head. Far on the deep the Spaniard saw, along each southern shire, Cape beyond cape, in endless range, those twinkling points of fire; The fisher left his skiff to rock on Tamar's glittering waves, The rugged miners poured to war from Mendip's sunless caves. O'er Longleat's towers, o'er Cranbourne's oaks, the fiery herald flew; ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... call it, for the sake of a name, 'The Babel and Lowriver Steam Navigation Company.' Lowriver is a pleasant, genteel little village, which has of late years sprung suddenly into existence on the coast of ——shire, and has been growing, for the last seven years, with each succeeding summer, more and more a place of favourite resort with the inhabitants of Babel. Mr Montague Whalebone took an early liking to the place, and built a row of goodly houses by the water-side, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... reads: "It is understood that there shall be freedom for the passage of the subjects and goods of both powers across the Zambesi, and through the districts adjoining the left bank of the river situated above the confluence of the Shire, and those adjoining the right bank of the Zambezi situated above the confluence of the river Luenha (Ruenga), without hindrance of any description and ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... laughed, 'I'm coming to Inverness-shire! I'll even go so far as to call on the McTaggarts if you'll undertake that she won't instruct me ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the manner of young apprentices, toiling in a watch and clock-maker's shop in the town of Devonport, heard one day the fame of great Sir Joshua's achievements in London sounding through the county—became conscious that the good folks of the shire took pride in the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, Master of Plympton Grammar School. Why should not he, the apprentice, become as great, or nearly so, a credit to Devonport, his birthplace, as was Sir Joshua to Plympton, his ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... wheat or barley in his dog-cart,—believing in the royal family like a gospel,—limiting his reading to glances at the "Times" in the tap-room,—looking with an evil eye upon railways, (which, in that day, had not intruded farther than Exeter into his shire,)—distrusting terribly the spread of "eddication": it "doan't help the work-folk any; for, d' ye see, they've to keep a mind on their pleughing and craps; and as for the b'ys, the big uns must mind the beasts, and the little uns's got enough to do a-scaring the demed rooks. Gads! what hodds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... just as I was starting with a score of others to make our way to join the Earl of Mar's army at Perth. I have seen many an army since, but never did I see sixteen thousand finer fighting men than were there assembled. The Laird of Mackintosh brought five hundred clansmen from Inverness shire, the Marquis of Huntly had five hundred horse and two thousand foot, and the Earl Marischal had a thousand men. The Laird of Glenlyon brought five hundred Campbells, and the Marquis of Tullibardine fourteen hundred, and a score of other chiefs of less power were there with their clansmen. There ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory and far from all civility:—'I remember,' says he, 'in the first year of queen Mary's reign a knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the parliament, a good gentleman and wise, in the affairs of his shire, and not unlearned in the laws of the realm; but as well for lack of some of his teeth as for want of language, nothing well spoken, which at that time and business was most behoveful for him to have been: this man, after he had made his oration to the queen; which ye know ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... without God and without hope in the world. The country on which he confessed that he now looked back with so much shame and detestation was not England or Bedfordshire, but the wicked life he had lived in that land and in that shire. And when Charity asked him as to whether he was a married man and had a family, she knew quite well that he was, only she made a pretence of asking him those domestic questions in order thereby to start the ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... a fruit much like the Medlar, and when ripe is in great esteem. The only tree in this country in a wild state, is growing in Bewdley Forest, Worcester-shire. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... notice in this paper. It is singular that the House-cricket should by some persons be considered an unlucky, by others a lucky, inmate of the mansion: those who hold the latter opinion consider its destruction the means of bringing misfortune on their habitations. "In Dumfries-shire," says Sir William Jardine, "it is a common superstition that if crickets forsake a house which they have long inhabited, some evil will befal the family; generally the death of some member is portended. In like manner the presence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... pronounce to be the jolliest house in the street. He has only of late had a rush of prosperity, and turned Parliament man; for his distant cousin, of the ancient house of Newboy of ——shire, dying, Fred—then making believe to practise at the bar, and living with the utmost modesty in Gray's Inn Road—found himself master of a fortune, and a great house in the country; of which getting tired, as in the course of nature he should, he ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... father, in my hope it will torment you, I'll briefly tell your story. Your dead father, My quondam master, was a man of worship; Old Sir John Wellborn, justice of peace, and quorum; And stood fair to be custos rotulorum: Bore the whole sway of the shire; kept a great house: Reliev'd the poor, and so forth: but he dying, And the twelve hundred a-year coming to you, Late Mr. Francis, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... or Chippewa Indians, so lately in vogue, were a pleasant instance, and we could name other more important personages who have made dukes, and lords, and knights of the shire, esquires of the body, and simple citizens pay pretty dearly for having confided their consciences or their ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... is a gentleman of Worcestershire, of ancient descent, a Baronet, his name Sir ROGER DE COVERLEY. His great- grandfather was inventor of that famous country-dance which is called after him. All who know that shire are very well acquainted with the parts and merits of Sir ROGER. He is a gentleman that is very singular in his behaviour, but his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world, only ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... national government, nation, state, country, nation-state, dominion, republic, empire, union, democratic republic; kingdom, principality. [subdivisions of nations] state government[U.S terminology], state; shire[England]; province[Canada]; county[Ireland]; canton[Switzerland]; territory [Australia]; duchy, archduchy, archdukedom[obs3]; woiwodshaft; commonwealth; region &c. 181; property &c. 780. [smaller subdivisions] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... captaines, nor anything that your Lordships spake yesterday before me; but true it is, I spake before the Earle of Essex and Sir John Norris, it was pittie that young captaines should be accepted and the old refused. True it is that I toulde them also that the lieutenants of the shire knew not those captaines so well as ourselves. On my creditt, my meaning was the deputies lieutenants, the which, as it was toulde me, had made all these captaines. My speeches are no lawe, nor scarce good judgment, for the warrs were unknowen to me 22 yeres agon. Notwithstanding, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... then to myself, as I did at Rumanika's, when I first viewed the Mfumbiro cones, and gathered all my distant geographical information there, that these highly saturated Mountains of the Moon give birth to the Congo as well as to the Nile, and also to the Shire branch of the Zambeze. ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the second in England for greatness, clear in view without measuring, as bearing a square of fifty miles. Some part thereof, as the South Hams, is so fruitful it needs no art; but generally (though not running of itself) it answers to the spur of industry. No shire showes more industrious, or so many Husbandmen, who by Marle (blew and white), Chalk, Lime, Seasand, Compost, Sopeashes, Rags and what not, make the ground both to take and keep a moderate fruitfulness; ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... by the Firth of Clyde. It includes off its coast the conspicuous rock of Ailsa Craig, 10 m. W. of Girvan, Lady Island, 3 m. S.W. of Troon, and Horse Island, off Ardrossan. Its area is 724,523 acres or 1142 sq. m., its coast-line being 70 m. long. In former times the shire was divided into the districts of Cunninghame (N. of the Irvine), Kyle (between the Irvine and the Boon), and Carrick (S. of the Doon), and these terms are still occasionally used. Kyle was further divided by the Ayr into King's Kyle on the north and Kyle Stewart. Robert ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... kingdoms of the South, East, and Middle Saxons. Surrey is the Sothe-reye, or south realm; Kent is the land of the Cantii, a Belgic tribe; Devon is the land of the Damnonii, a Celtic tribe; Cornwall, or Corn-wales, is the land of the Welsh of the Horn; Worcestershire is the shire of the Huiccii; Cumberland is the land of the Cymry; Northumberland is the land north of the Humber, and therefore, as its name implies, used to extend over all the North of England. Evidently the southern ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... 17, 1915, the Fourth Cameron Highlanders, a Territorial battalion, met with disaster. The men composing this unit were from Inverness-shire, Skye, and the Outer Islands. Many of them had been gamekeepers and hence were accustomed to outdoor life and the handling of guns, all of which aided them in saving the remnant of their command. They had been ordered to take some cottages, occupied by German soldiers ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... the remains of the old house (Gilston) in Hertfordshire, where his grandmother once lived, and the "old church where the bones of my honored granddame lie." This visit was, in later years, recorded in the charming paper entitled "Blakesmoor in H——shire." He found that the house where he had spent his pleasant holidays, when a little boy, had been demolished; it was, in fact, taken down for the purpose of reconstruction; but out of the ruins he conjures up pleasant ghosts, whom ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... doctor's talk began, at least, at a sufficient remoteness from any practical business; for he began to question about his remote ancestry, what he knew, or what record had been preserved, of the first emigrant from England; whence, from what shire or part of England, that ancestor had come; whether there were any memorial of any kind remaining of him, any letters or written documents, wills, deeds, or other legal paper; in short, all ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... saw this opening rose That holds the summer in its hand, And with its beauty overflows And sweetens half a shire of land, It was a black and cindered thing, Drearily rocking in the cold, The relic of a vanished spring, A rose ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... her notice, Mrs. Mortlock was slightly more tolerated, but Miss Slowcum never really unbent to either of these ladies. As she said to herself, she could never forget that she came of the Slowcums of ——shire that her father had been Captain Slowcum of the Royal Navy, and that, all things considered, her true position in society was with the county folk. What, therefore, could a lady of such patrician birth have in common with ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... I read your letter of May 24, I called to mind, a story which I heard long ago, concerning one of the Lord Duffus, (in the shire of Murray) his predicessors of whom it is reported, that upon a time, when he was walking abroad in the fields near to his own house, he was suddenly carried away, and found the next day at Paris in the French ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in —shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Martha's Vineyard is divided into three townships, viz. Edgar, Chilmark, and Tisbury; the number of inhabitants is computed at about 4000, 300 of which are Indians. Edgar is the best seaport, and the shire town, and as its soil is light and sandy, many of its inhabitants follow the example of the people of Nantucket. The town of Chilmark has no good harbour, but the land is excellent and no way inferior to any on the continent: it contains excellent pastures, convenient brooks for mills, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... Curl appeared in the potato in Lancashire in 1764. It was in that Shire the potato was first planted in England; and we are told the Curl appeared in those districts of it in which it was first planted. The nature of the disease is indicated by its name. The stalk became discoloured and stunted almost from the beginning of its growth; it changed ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... less provincial than that of more than one shire that was nearer to London by a thousand leagues. It dwelt upon the banks of the Chesapeake and of great rivers; ships dropped their anchors before its very doors. Now and again the planter followed his ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... superimposed upon the Gault and Upper Greensand beds, which are confined to the western portion of the county. Its upper layer passes into a sandy limestone, known as Totternhoe stone, which has furnished materials for many churches in the shire. Ashwell, Pirton and Tring may be named as neighbourhoods where ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... authority, soveriegn, sovereign authority; authority &c 737; master &c 745; direction &c 693. [nations] national government, nation, state, country, nation- state, dominion, republic, empire, union, democratic republic; kingdom, principality. [subdivisions of nations] state government [Lat.], state; shire [Brit.]; province [Can.]; county [Ire.]; canton [Switz.]; territory [Austral.]; duchy, archduchy, archdukedom^; woiwodshaft; commonwealth; region &c 181; property &c 780. [smaller subdivisions] county, parish city, domain, tract, arrondissement ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of the same kind, only two or three feet wide, may be seen in the bed of the Water of Leith, traversing the horizontal strata, the one is above St Bernard's well, the other immediately below it. But, more particularly, in the shire of Ayr, to the north of Irvine, there are to be seen upon the coast, between that and Scarmorly, in the space of about twenty miles, more than twenty or thirty such dykes (as they are called) of whin-stone. Some of them are of a great thickness; and, in some places, there is perceived a short ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... servants on board of a collier in the Thames, and arriving in two or three days at Newcastle, hired there a vessel belonging to one Spence, which set him and his company on shore in the Ely, from whence he got over to Creil[51] in the shire of Fife. Soon after his landing he was attended by Sir Alexander Areskine, Lord Lyon, and others of his friends in Fife, to whom he made known the design of his coming, and then went forward to Kinoul, where he staid on Wednesday the ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... this instance to illustrate the wider fields of statecraft, but unfortunately the present narrative is a simple record of facts, and not a philosophical treatise. The immediate consequence of the episode was that on the following morning Mrs. Dunbar set out for the west of Ross-shire to pay a long-promised visit to a third cousin who possessed several thousand acres of ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... may divert the Calumnies of an ill-natured World, from centring here. They are words of the Devout Bishop Hall, Satans prevalency in this Age, is most clear in the marvellous Number of Witches, abounding in all places. Now Hundreds are discovered in one Shire; and, if Fame Deceives us not, in a Village of Fourteen Houses in the North, are found so many of this Damned Brood. Yea, and those of both Sexes, who have Professed much Knowledge, Holiness, and Devotion, are drawn into this Damnable Practice. I suppose the Doctor ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... the words 'civil power,' an expression still used in the navy, but with a different meaning. The percentage of men thus 'raised' was small. Sometimes there is a note stating that the man had been allowed to enter from the '——shire Militia.' A rare note is 'Brought on board by soldiers,' which most likely indicated that the man had been recaptured when attempting to desert. It is sometimes asserted that many men who volunteered did so only to escape impressment. This may ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... first day permissible under the statute, the nomination of a Knight to serve in Parliament for the Shire of Barks, was held in the county town. The proceedings were marked by a pleasing unanimity, and an outburst of popular enthusiasm which seriously tried the resources of the local police. There was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... with another of these earliest settlements, which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For some years past the Dorchester adventurers—a small company of merchants in the shire town of Dorset—had been sending vessels to catch fish off the New England coast. In 1623 these men conceived the idea of planting a small village as a fishing station, and setting up a church and preacher therein, for the spiritual solace of the fishermen and sailors. ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... family. His fair face and clear blue eyes, his curly brown hair and merry look, had no likeness to them, though he was not a whit behind them in air or stature. At eighteen, there was not a finer lad in the shire; and he had a frank, kindly nature, which made the tenantry rejoice in the prospect of his being ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... converse but Gallowa' bodies, Wi' nae kenn'd face but Jenny Geddes, Jenny, my Pegasean pride! Dowie she saunters down Nithside, And aye a westlin leuk she throws, While tears hap o'er her auld brown nose! Was it for this, wi' cannie care, Thou bure the Bard through many a shire? At howes, or hillocks never stumbled, And late or early never grumbled?— O had I power like inclination, I'd heeze thee up a constellation, To canter with the Sagitarre, Or loup the ecliptic like a bar; Or turn the pole like any arrow; Or, when auld Phoebus bids good-morrow, Down ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... friendly alliance, the authorities at fort Orange sent an embassy of twenty-five of their principal inhabitants to the Indian settlement at Caughnawaga. This was about forty miles west of Albany on the north bank of the Mohawk river and near the site of the present shire town of Montgomery county. ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque villages of the South Downs ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the mire, and peers, over whose heads they were placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More, Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same dizzy path to the same fatal end; and the English people looked on powerless or unmoved. They sent their burgesses and knights of the shire to Westminster without let or hindrance, and Parliament met with a regularity that grew with the rigour of Henry's rule; but it seemed to assemble only to register the royal edicts and clothe with a ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines have been preserved to our own day. It was through his "Constitutions" and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the world the ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... the Club had its first headquarters in Shire Lane, near Temple Bar, at the establishment of Christopher Cat, a pastrycook who helped to enliven the inner man by delicious meat pies dubbed "Kit-Cats." Hence the name of that notable coterie of Whigs which included Addison and Dick ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... name of 'Coeur de Lion' was in the Saracen nursery, that this foreign adventurer who had a fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at one time on his errands—this legislator, for he sat in Parliament as representative of his native shire—this magnificent courtier, who had raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a position wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and merits, to a place in the social ranks so exalted; to a place in the state so near that—which was chief and absolute—the fact that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Miss Carnegie, that a load of Saxon theology has been landed on the Celt, and it has disfigured his religion. Sometimes I have felt that the Catholic of the west is a truer type of northern faith than the Presbyterian of Ross-shire." ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... the sad tidings reached the sorrowing parents from the Zambesi that their eldest daughter Mary, the wife of Dr. Livingstone, had been called to her rest. A white marble cross, near Shupanga House on the Shire River, marks the spot where this sainted martyr to the cause of Africa's ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... not?" She stared, and held down her face, which still was pale, even if she blushed and answered "Yes, sir." "Are you here alone?—no relation, no woman friend with you?" "Yes." "And do they treat you well?" "Yes." "From what part of England?" "From —-shire." ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... hardy Gael, still ignorant of any but the language of Ossian and his burr-tongued Lowland neighbors; the people of each of Ireland's many counties, clinging still to feud, fun, and their ancient Erse tongue, together with representatives from every English shire, and the remnants of Indian tribes and Esquimaux hordes,—offer an opportunity for study of the differences of race, full of picturesque interest, and scarcely to be met ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... maxim that "he that works hard can afford to play." He is, therefore, an attendant at all the country fairs and wakes, and has signalized himself by feats of strength and prowess on every village green in the shire. He often makes his appearance at horse-races, and sports his half guinea, and even his guinea at a time; keeps a good horse for his own riding, and to this day is fond of following the hounds, and is generally in at ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... sure, and the Elton estates run half the shire with your Gloucester property; never was there a more ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... the Jacobite forces. Seated on the river Tay, and near the sea-coast, it gave the Earl the control of the East Lowlands, of the rich counties of Angus, the Carse of Gowrie, Mearns, Murray, Aberdeen, and Banff, and also of the Shire of Fife. It also cut off the communication between the north and the south of Scotland, so that the friends of Government could neither act nor fly from the enemy. Thus all the usual posts were stopped. The revenues of the public fell into the hands ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... against the mightiest beasts that walk the earth, and takes the poor cockney journeyman out a ten miles' walk almost before daylight, on the rare summer holiday mornings, to angle with rude tackle in reservoir or canal—should be dragged through such mire as this in many an English shire in our day. If English landlords want to go on shooting game much longer, they must give up selling it. For if selling game becomes the rule, and not the exception (as it seems likely to do before long), good-bye to sport in England. Every man who loves his country more than his pleasure ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... pointing to this new father-force asserting itself and pushing aside the earlier order. Again I can give one or two examples only. Among Wayao and Mang'anja of the Shire highlands, south of Lake Nyassa, a man on marrying leaves his own village and goes to live in that of his wife; but, as an alternative, he is allowed to pay a bride-price, in which case he takes his wife away to his home.[192] Whenever ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... intelligence,' wrote the London gossiper, 'which I dare say will interest readers in certain parts of—shire. A lady of French extraction who made a name for herself at a leading metropolitan theatre last winter, and who really promises great things in the Thespian art, is back among us from a sojourn on the Continent. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... this man, hearing of my name, did ask me of my country, and told me of my cozen Roger, that he was not so wise a man as his father; for that he do not agree in Parliament with his fellow burgesses and knights of the shire, whereas I know very well the reason; for he is not so high a flyer as Mr. Chichley and others, but loves the King better than any of them, and to better purpose. But yet, he says that he is a very honest gentleman, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... deeply eroded and canyoned mountains of the older, or west, end of the island on our right. Toward the latter our guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good roads, in the fresh morning air, near the beach, to Wailuku, the shire town of the island, two or three miles distant. Here we were most hospitably entertained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director of a ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... sit during a greater number of hours in the day than appellate courts. This is particularly true when they are held for short terms in a country shire town. In the larger cities where they sit during a large part of the year they generally have established hours from which they rarely depart, such as from ten in the morning to five in the afternoon, with a ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... to that time having belonged to New South Wales. It was incorporated in the same year. South Brisbane became a separate city in 1903. The municipal government of the city, and also of South Brisbane, is in the hands of a mayor and ten alderman; the suburbs are controlled by shire councils and divisional boards. The chief suburbs are Kangaroo Point, Fortitude Valley, New Farm, Red Hill, Paddington, Milon, Toowong, Breakfast Creek, Bulimba, Woolongabba, [v.04 p.0574] Highgate and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... war between Russia and Turkey was raging, her Majesty, Princess Beatrice, the Duchess of Roxburgh, &c., spent a week at Loch Maree Hotel, enjoying the fine Ross-shire scenery, making daily peaceful excursions, to which such a telegram as told of the bombardment of Plevna must have ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... wonderful. If any creature in the world had cared a straw for the poor child, he must have been lost over and over: nobody did care for him, and he was as sure to turn up as a bad guinea. He has been cried like Found Goods in Belford Market: advertised like a strayed donkey in the H——shire Courant; put for safe keeping into compters, cages, roundhouses, and bridewells: passed, by different constables, through half the parishes in the county; and so frequently and minutely described in handbills ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... and repugnance. "Little beast!" he said to himself, passing over that part of the bulletin: for the letters were scarcely more than bulletins, without a word about the circumstances which surrounded her. A shooting lodge in Ross-shire in the middle of the winter! What a place for a delicate woman! John was well enough aware that many elements of comfort were possible even in such a place; but he shut his eyes, as was natural, to anything that went against his own point ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian, pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ran up to add their voices to the chorus. Somehow they were outside the station, gently propelled; and there was a great arch of gum leaves, with a huge WELCOME in red letters, and beneath it were the shire president and his councillors, and other weighty men, all with speeches ready. But the speeches did not come to much, for the shire president had lads himself who had gone to the war, and a lump came in his throat as ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Archie; and Tom appeared from amid a cloud of dust, riding as he had done many a day after the hounds in — shire. He was within hailing distance, when a couple of hundred yards or so behind him were seen a number of Cossacks in hot pursuit. Jack ordered his men to fix bayonets, to be prepared to receive cavalry. As Tom came galloping along, they ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... that my generous Clarinda[73] will not think my silence, for now a long week, has been in any decree owing to my forgetfulness. I have been tossed about through the country ever since I wrote you; and am here, returning from Dumfries-shire, at an inn, the post office of the place, with just so long time as my horse eats his corn, to write you. I have been hurried with business and dissipation almost equal to the insidious decree of the Persian monarch's mandate, when he forbade asking petition of God or man for forty days. Had ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... that, by his energies, his judgment, and the weight of his personal character, he had made the owner of a property which had been at his accession to it of third-rate rank in the county a personage so considerable that no knight of the shire against whom he declared could have been elected, and if he had determined to stand himself he would have been chosen free ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... your lecture (281/2. "The Scientific Evidence of Organic Evolution: a Discourse" (delivered before the Philosophical Society of Ross-shire), Inverness, 1877. It was reprinted in the "Fortnightly Review," and was afterwards worked up into a book under the above title.); it is an admirable scientific argument, and most powerful. I wish that it could be sown broadcast throughout the land. Your courage is marvellous, and I wonder that ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... very slight alterations, for more than half a century. The report of its success got abroad slowly, and Mr. Stephenson was commissioned to build a railway and a number of locomotives for a colliery in another shire. The success of this piece of engineering encouraged him in sending his son Robert, a youth of fine promise, to Edinburgh to study physical sciences in the university, where in his brief residence he took ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... treasury at the disposal of the hundred or of the county, but merely certain treasurers charged with the disbursement of this or that special collection for this or that special purpose. A collection is made by order of the justices, for instance, in certain hundreds, or throughout the shire, for the support of the prisoners in the county gaol, and a treasurer for the fund is appointed. Or it may be that this treasurer is a more or less permanent official. And so with collections for hospitals, for houses of correction, for great bridges, etc. If the constables levied more than was ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... rebel sowars swept headlong down the trunk road till Maude's guns gave them the word to halt. The pools are dry now through which, when Hamilton's voice had rung out the order—"Forward, at the double!" the light company of the Ross-shire Buffs splashed recklessly past the abandoned Sepoy guns, in their race with the grenadier company of the 64th that had for its goal the Pandy barricade outside the village. In that cluster of mud ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... There is in Ross-shire a small Island on Loch Maree, called Inch or Innis Maree, where is a famous well, bearing the name of this saint,[25] who lived at the beginning of the eighth century. This well was celebrated for its virtues in the cure of mental disorders. Pennant, the author already quoted, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... advertisements; Lectures, Sermons, Soirees, etc, 5; Tutors, Governesses, Clerks etc., 45; which may be summed up thus: Wanted, a traveller in the hardware line, cash-boys, a copper-plate engraver, canvassers, junior chemists, five drapers' salesmen, law costs clerk, an engineer and valuer for a shire council, a female competent to manage the machine-room of a clothing factory, a retoucher capable of working in mezzo crayons, junior hands for Manchester and dress departments, two first-class cutters for order trade, a good shop salesman, a junior clerk, two clerks ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... he was for Middlesex, They chose him knight of the shire: He made a fool of alderman Bull, And call'd parson ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Columba went to his reward, as we are told by that saint's biographer, St. Adamnan, Ernan was favoured with a vision in which the saint's death was revealed to him. St. Ernan died in his Irish monastery at an advanced age in the year 640. The church of Killernan, in Ross-shire, is named after him. Another dedication to this saint is thought by some to be Kilviceuen ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... completed, and dinner was announced. This meal was always celebrated at Cherbury, where new fashions stole down with a lingering pace, in the great hall itself. An ample table was placed in the centre on a mat of rushes, sheltered by a large screen covered with huge maps of the shire and the neighbouring counties. The Lady Annabel and her good pastor seated themselves at each end of the table, while Venetia, mounted on a high chair, was waited on by Mistress Pauncefort, who never condescended by any chance attention to notice the presence of any other individual but her ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... author hopes to find readers far beyond that very egregious but very limited segment of the Great Circle. Were you ever a busy man in your vestry, active in a municipal corporation, one of a committee for furthering the interests of an enlightened candidate for your native burgh, town, or shire?—in a word, did you ever resign your private comforts as men in order to share the public troubles of mankind? If ever you have so far departed from the Lucretian philosophy, just look back—was it life at all that you lived?—were you an individual distinct existence—a ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... wel imployed life, and godly end of George Gaskoigne, Esquire, who deceassed at Stalmford in Lincoln shire, the 7 of October 1577. The reporte of GEOR WHETSTONS, Gent an eye witnes of his Godly and Charitable End in ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... originated as a shire in the time of thelstan, but for long it maintained a very close connexion with Nottinghamshire, and the Domesday Survey gives a list of local customs affecting the two counties alike. The two shire-courts sat together for the Domesday Inquest, and the counties were united under one sheriff ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... sufficiently its very beautiful situation; past noble country-seats, bower and hall, we drove; and at last wound our solitary way along a cross-road, among some pastoral hills, that reminded us more of Dumfries-shire than any country we have ever seen. The road ascended gradually for many miles; and on crowning the elevation, we caught a very noble extensive view of a rich, flat, thickly-wooded plain, that bore a great resemblance to the unequalled neighbourhood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... we have harried all Bamborough shire All the wealth in the world have we; I rede we ride to Newcastle, So still ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... dry knowledge of the humanities, to fit himself for a teacher of youth. He was, in a limited sense, a classical scholar. Greek and Latin, Hebrew and the Mathematics, were at his fingers' ends. Not long after leaving college, he obtained the place of a preceptor to the children of a farmer in Angus-shire. The situation of schoolmaster of Dunino, a parish situated foury miles south of St. Andrews, in Fifeshire, and six miles north of Anstruther, the school taught by Tennant, the orientalist, professor of Hebrew ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... walled flower-garden set down in the midst of wild and stern Caledonia. The mountains are the walls; and heather flows round them and beats against them like a purple ocean. It is so foreign looking that it reminded Basil of Baden Baden. Now we are going on into Ross-shire, which Basil describes as a country of moorlands and great spaces where red deer live. But already we have seen deer walking quite calmly out of the forests on to our road, where they stop to gaze quizzically, without the least fear, at the car. It is almost ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... made, as he well remembered, by shooting the animal through and through in the region of the heart. On this proof they unanimously decided on a prosecution; and accordingly Phillips and Mark Elwood set off the next day for Lancaster, the shire-town on the Connecticut, for legal advice, warrants, and a sheriff to serve them. On reaching the place, they were told by the attorney they consulted that they could not make out larceny or theft against Gurley ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... ingredients of the pie. Not much real harm in it. There's one or two dirty literary gents who should be in a navvies' battalion, but they're about as dangerous as yellow Kaffir dogs. I've learned a lot and got all the arguments by heart, but you might plant a Biggleswick in every shire and it wouldn't help the Boche. I can see where the danger lies all the same. These fellows talked academic anarchism, but the genuine article is somewhere about and to find it you've got to look in the big industrial districts. We had faint echoes of it in Biggleswick. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... of the Brigades was trusted now; never was there spirit more dauntless and fiery in the field; never temper kindlier and more generous with friends and foes. Miles of the ridge and furrow, stiff fences of terrible blackthorn, double posts and rails, yawners and croppers both, tough as Shire and Stewards could make them, awaited him on the morrow; on his beautiful lean head capfuls of money were piled by the Service and the Talent; and in his stride all the fame of the Household would be centered on the morrow; but he took his rest like the cracker he was—standing ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... is going to the dogs! Our sentiments are not represented in parliament or out of it. The 'County Mercury' has ratted, and be hanged to it! and now we have not one newspaper in the whole shire to express the sentiments of the respectable ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had been the guests of a great marquis quite in the north, and that had been a very glorious year. To talk of Stackallan was, indeed, a thing of beauty. But in that year Mr. Hittaway had made himself very useful in London. Since that they had been at delicious shooting lodges in Ross and Inverness-shire, had visited a millionaire at his palace amidst the Argyle mountains, had been feted in a western island, had been bored by a Dundee dowager, and put up with a Lothian laird. But the thing had been almost always done, and the Hittaways were ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the country a bit. And it's not more than seven miles, you know, if it's as much. I was sure the wretch was going wrong, and if I hadn't insisted on pulling him up and asking a respectable-looking body where the house was I believe we should have been wandering about the next shire at this moment. I've no ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... commenced whispering one to another some secret charms, still keeping their gaze upon me; the hubbub then broke out again and everyone laying hands upon me, lifted me shoulder-high, like a knight of the shire, and off like the wind we go, over houses and lands, cities and realms, seas and mountains, unable to notice aught so swiftly were they flying. And to make matters worse, I began to have doubts of my companions from the way they frowned and scowled when I ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... Accounts during the reign of James the Fourth, in connexion with his visits to that celebrated shrine. I shall therefore merely notice, that the public registers furnish some evidence to shew that he made an annual pilgrimage to St. Duthack's chapel, in Ross-shire. On more than one occasion the King rode unattended from Stirling across the mountain pass of the Grampians, leading from Fettercairn to the north side of the Dee, and from thence to Elgin, Inverness, and Tain. These ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... political franchise as freeholders.[I] Amongst others, my father, who was in good odour at the castle, was deemed a likely person to be intrusted with so precious a privilege as a right to vote for any tool of the earl who might be brought forward as a candidate for representing the shire in Parliament. The factor was despatched to Bellerstown to offer this high behest to the poor parson, whose ready compliance was expected, as a matter of course. But he calmly and peremptorily refused the proffered vote, and intimated that he ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Humphrey de Coverley; he was in his dealings as punctual as a tradesman, and as generous as a gentleman. He would have thought himself as much undone by breaking his word, as if it were to be followed by bankruptcy. He served his country as a knight of the shire to his dying day. He found it no easy matter to maintain an integrity in his words and actions, even in things that regarded the offices which were incumbent upon him, in the care of his own affairs and relations of life, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... knave's a knave, to me, in every state: Alike my scorn, if he succeed or fail, Sporus at court, or Japhet in a jail, A hireling scribbler, or a hireling peer, Knight of the post corrupt, or of the shire; If on a pillory, or near a throne, He gain his prince's ear, or lose his own. Yet soft by nature, more a dupe than wit, Sappho can tell you how this man was bit; This dreaded satirist Dennis will confess ...
— English Satires • Various
... The queen to all sheriffs, mayors, etc.—For the well choosing of the knights of the shire and burgesses: ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... corresponded in many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... well accustomed to the sound of "Boot and Saddle," that they were soon mounted and in order; and in all the form, and with some of the dignity of danger, proceeded to escort the Countess of Derby through the hilly and desert tract of country which connects the frontier of the shire with the neighbouring county of Cheshire. The cavalcade moved with considerable precaution, which they had been taught by the discipline of the Civil Wars. One wary and well-mounted trooper rode about two hundred yards in advance; followed, at about half that distance, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... shire of Leicester, close by the River Weak—or at least it stood there when last I saw it. It is ten long years since I crossed its drawbridge and not twelve months of my life have been ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... warrior-king, who was called Olaf the White. He was the son of King Ingiald, Helgi's son, the son of Olaf, Gudraud's son, son of Halfdan Whiteleg, king of the Uplands-men.[14-3] Olaf engaged in a Western freebooting expedition and captured Dublin in Ireland and the Shire of Dublin, over which he became king.[14-4] He married Aud the Wealthy, daughter of Ketil Flatnose, son of Biorn Buna, a famous man of Norway. Their son was called Thorstein the Red. Olaf was killed ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... to an end by exclamations and inquiries about the other; of whom, however, she could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that Mr. Denny had brought him from London, and that he was to have a lieutenant's commission in the ——shire. She had been watching him the last hour, she said, as he walked up and down the street, and had Mr. Wickham appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly have continued the occupation, but unluckily no one passed windows now except a ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Doncaster, at York, and Leeds, And merry Carlisle had he been; And all along the Lowlands fair, All through the bonny shire of Ayr; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... gladden us like the discovery of a hidden treasure. Some such ancestral hall we have occasionally encountered, in unlooked-for quarters, in our native county of Lancaster, or in its smiling sister shire; and never without feelings of intense delight, rejoicing to behold the freshness of its antiquity, and the greenness of its old age. For, be it observed in passing, a Cheshire or Lancashire hall, time-honored though it be, with its often renovated black and white squares, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to all. In one of our northern burghs—Dingwall—a majority of the Town Council lately memorialized the Directors of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in exactly the same vein as the majority of our Edinburgh Town Council. So extreme a step seemed rather extraordinary for Ross-shire; and a gentleman of the burgh, one of the voters, convinced that the officials were far indeed from representing their constituency, shrewdly set himself to demonstrate the real state of the case. First he possessed himself of an accredited list of the voters; ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Christian and citizen not to shrink from seeing his native land laid waste by the blind savageness of a Civil War. And although, he paid Cess and Ship-money without murmuring, and, on being chosen a Knight of the Shire, did zealously speak up in the Commons House of Parliament on the King's side (refusing nevertheless to make one of the lip-serving crowd of courtiers of Whitehall), and although, when churchwarden in his parish, he ever preserved the laudable custom of Whitsun and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... 'The Parliament army, madam, includes a few of us. I know not why you should press this point: and 'faith you took me without waiting for credentials; but if it please you I am even a poor knight of the shire.' ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to the Lords of the Council a very interesting report on the defences of Cornwall and Devon, which he had reason to suppose that Spain meant to attack. He considered that three hundred soldiers successfully landed at Plymouth would be 'sufficient to endanger and destroy the whole shire,' and he discussed the possibility of levying troops from the two counties to be a mutual protection. It was doubtless his vigour and ability in performing this sort of work which led to his being selected as the chief purveyor of levies for the Cadiz ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of 'that' district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... fuller attention than they have yet received. The Saunders alias Shakespeare, already mentioned,[281] was possibly a native of another county. But we find some in the shire, contemporary with the poet. Among the "Original Wills at Somerset House there is one of Thomas Shackspeare, Innkeeper," in the suburbs of Oxford. He wished to be buried in the Church of St. Giles, Oxford, bequeathed property to his four children—Robert, Ellen, ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... in her sweetest bantering tones, "my servant, as he absurdly calls himself, is really an artist in helping people. I told him this morning that his native shire was his conjurer's hat, when he fetched ham and eggs out of it for poor hungry me. Now he observes that I am coatless and a-cold, and lo, a hat is on my head and a coat on my shoulders. It is marvellous and nothing short of it. Nay, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... their noisy efforts to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, he lapsed into an obscurity that endured until the Restoration. Then he reemerged, not as a veteran living at ease on laurels well won, but as a wandering beggar, roving from shire to shire in quest of alms, which he implored to the accompaniment of fearsome music from his ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... I told them that, although the money came in like sclate stones, it would go like the snow off the dyke. But for all I could do, the evil got in among us, and we had no less than three contested bastard bairns upon our hands at one time, which was a thing never heard of in a parish of the shire of Ayr since the Reformation. Two of the bairns, after no small sifting and searching, we got fathered at last; but the third, that was by Meg Glaiks, and given to one Rab Rickerton, was utterly refused, though the ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... hereafter you may be teaching others, the names and number of the English counties or shires. What a dull routine task for them and for you this may be, supplying no food for the intellect, no points of attachment for any of its higher powers to take hold of! And yet in these two little words, 'shire' and 'county,' if you would make them render up even a small part of their treasure, what lessons of English history are contained! One who knows the origin of these names, and how we come to possess such ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... memorandums of the principal planters and favourers of the enclosures, under a name which I took the liberty to invent from the Greek, Papadendrion. Lord Auchinleck and some few more are of the list. I am told that one gentleman in the shire of Aberdeen, viz. Sir Archibald Grant, has planted above fifty millions of trees on a piece of very wild ground at Monimusk: I must enquire if he has fenced them well, before he enters my list; for, that is the soul of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... my Lord and Sovereign," spake the Sheriff, "in Sherwood Forest in our own good shire of Nottingham, liveth a bold outlaw whose name is ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... Kent: Conteining the Description, Hystorie, and Customes of that Shire. Written in the yeere 1570 by William Lambarde of ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... my plans carefully. I would go into ——shire early on the following morning, assuming for my purpose the character of an amateur photographer. Having got all necessary particulars from Edgcombe, I made a careful mental map of my operations. First of all I would visit ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... the baronage, depended upon the 'good men and true' who were impaneled to 'pass' between the subject and the sovereign; and the thunder of the Exchequer at Westminster might be silenced by the honesty, the firmness, or the obstinacy, of one sturdy knight or yeoman in the distant shire. ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... a man be but a Mister, a may behappen to buy and sell a knight of the shire: that is under favour, and a savin and exceptin of your onnurable onnur. For why? I be as ready to a quit my hands of ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... soon after he had offered to Miss Matty; and I don't think he has been into Cranford above once or twice since—once, when I was walking with Miss Matty, in High Street, and suddenly she darted from me, and went up Shire Lane. A few minutes after I was startled by ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... son Wilfrid. First to God; then to the king; then to the atheling, the king's son, and then to father and mother; then to the shire reeve and the ealdorman, if so be that they are loyal; and then to helpless woman and friendless poor man. But to the weak first of all, against whomsoever will wrong them, whether it be ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... crowds sometimes attended, all but the great men were the merest spectators. Doubtless the folk-moot of the tribe was democratic, for all free men attended it, and the English were a nation of freeholders, and the slaves were few—except in the west—and might become free men.[1] The shire-moot, too, with its delegates from the hundred-moots, was equally democratic. But with feudalism and the welding of the nation, tribal democracies passed away, leaving, however, in many places a valuable ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... north of Caithness, and the very west of the Isle of Skye. Whoever to this day travels on the main thoroughfares in the greater Scottish Islands—in Arran, Islay, Jura, Mull; or in the wild peninsula of Morvern, and the Land of Lorne; or through the rugged regions of Inverness-shire and Ross-shire, where the railway has not yet penetrated,—travels throughout on Telford's roads. The number of large bridges and other great engineering masterpieces on this network of roads is enormous; among the most famous and the most beautiful, are the exquisite ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... than supplied by the general acceptance of the nation. "I called not myself to this place," he urged, "God and the people of these kingdoms have borne testimony to it." His rule had been accepted by London, by the army, by the solemn decision of the judges, by addresses from every shire, by the very appearance of the members of the Parliament in answer to his writ. "Why may I not balance this Providence," he asked, "with any hereditary interest?" In this national approval he saw a call from God, a Divine Right of ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... memorandums of the principal planters and favourers of the enclosures, under a name which I took the liberty to invent from the Greek, Papadendrion[299]. Lord Auchinleck and some few more are of the list. I am told that one gentleman in the shire of Aberdeen, viz. Sir Archibald Grant, has planted above fifty millions of trees on a piece of very wild ground at Monimusk: I must enquire if he has fenced them well, before he enters my list; for, that is the soul of enclosing. I began myself to plant a little, our ground being ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the Commissioners but six silver spoons and a single heart? It would seem so. Like the woman in the Gospel, Gordon gave to the Covenant all that he had. Had Robert Gordon been a Highlander instead of a Lowlander; had he been a Ross-shire crofter instead of a small laird in Wigtown, he would have been one of the foremost of the well-known 'men.' His temperament and his experiences would have made him a prince among the ministers and the men of the far north. Were it nothing else, the pains he spent on the growth of the ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... Episcopal dominion, they being no more to be reputed extrinsecal unto the particular Kirks, nor the power of a Parliament, or Convention of Estates, where the Shires and Cities have their own Delegates, is to be held extrinsecal to any particular Shire ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... employed all his efforts to persuade the old chief, but in vain, and the latter returned to his isle in a boat, while the Doutelle pursued her voyage to the mainland and entered the Bay of Lochnanuagh, in Inverness shire, and immediately sent a messenger to Clanranald, who came on board shortly with Macdonald of Kinloch Moidart, and several ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... extortionate. Redress for such evils would now naturally have been sought from Parliament; but the weakness of the Crown gave the great nobles power to rob the freeholders of their franchise and return the knights of the shire. Nor could redress be looked for from the Court. The murder of Suffolk was the act of Kentishmen, and Suffolk's friends still held control over the royal councils. The one hope of reform lay in arms; and in ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... the western coast of Scotland, from the Mull of Kintyre, to the furthest mountains of Glenmore. There the victorious Lord Ruthven had met him, having completed the recovery of the Highlands, by a range of conquests from the Spey to the Murray frith and Inverness-shire. Lord Bothwell, also, as his colleague, had brought from the shore of Ross and the hills of Caithness, every Southron banner which had disgraced their ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... life as 'Master Richard at the Hall, the baronet's brother,' in the hope that ere its conclusion he should be distinguished as Sir Richard Waverley of Waverley-Honour, successor to a princely estate, and to extended political connexions as head of the county interest in the shire where it lay. But this was a consummation of things not to be expected at Richard's outset, when Sir Everard was in the prime of life, and certain to be an acceptable suitor in almost any family, whether ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... the wars of Venus then, I suppose I know he has a fancy for astronomy, and probably he was desirous of taking a peep into Shire-lane, where he might easily find the Sun, Moon, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... father, which he wore at the time of his decease; it was afterwards worn by his affectionate steward to the close of his life. The death of Scott took place on the 21st of September 1832, and shortly thereafter Laidlaw bade adieu to Abbotsford. He was appointed factor on the Ross-shire property of Mrs Stewart Mackenzie of Seaforth,—a situation which he subsequently exchanged for the factorship of Sir Charles Lockhart Ross of Balnagowan, in the same county. Compelled to resign the latter appointment from impaired health, he ultimately took up ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... have got to do with that bag," he said, a moment afterwards, "is to take it to Ralph Danvers, the second son of Sir George Danvers, of Stoke Moreton, in D——shire. Sir George has got two sons. I have never seen him or his sons, but I don't mean the eldest to have them. He is a spendthrift. They are all for Ralph, who is a steady fellow, and going to marry a nice girl—at least, I suppose she is a nice girl. Girls who are going to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... monarchy felt the shock."—Frelinghuysen cor. "These principles ought to be deeply impressed upon the mind of every American."—Dr. N. Webster cor. "The words CHURCH and SHIRE are radically the same."—Id. "They may not, in their present form, be readily accommodated to every circumstance belonging to the possessive case of nouns."—L. Murray cor. "Will, in the second and third persons, only foretells."—Id.; Lowth's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the frontier line? Thou Africander, say! Is it shown by Zulu kraal, By Drakensberg or winding Vaal, Or where the Shire waters seek Their outlet east at Mozambique? 'Not that! Not that! There is a surer way To mark the ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mission failed in that quarter. Among other misfortunes disease attacked and carried off several of the chief Europeans of the party. The earnest enthusiastic Bishop himself died there in his Master's cause, and left his bones in the swamps of the Shire River. ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... entered England with William the Norman. Ralph d'Armyn was standard-bearer of the Conqueror, and shared prodigally in the plunder, as appears by Doomsday Book. At the time of the general survey the family of Ermyn, or Armyn, possessed numerous manors in Nottinghamshire, and several in the shire of Lincoln. William D'Armyn, lord of the honour of Armyn, was one of the subscribing Barons to the Great Charter. His predecessor died in the Holy Land before Ascalon. A succession of stout barons and ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... of "a thoroughbred imported Percheron, or a thoroughbred imported French coacher, or a thoroughbred imported Scotch Clyde, or a thoroughbred imported English coacher, or a thoroughbred imported English Shire, or a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... made her the more Inquisitive; and being Jealous that it was from a Mistress, employ'd her Maid to steal it, and if she found it such, to bring it her: accordingly it succeeded, for Frankwit having drank hard with some of the Gentlemen of that Shire, found himself indisposed, and soon went to Bed, having put the Letter in his Pocket: The Maid therefore to Moorea contrived that all the other Servants should be out of the Way, that she might plausibly officiate in the Warming the Bed of the indisposed Lover, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... also as a "local institution." In a recent review of Professor Howard's admirable "Local Constitutional History of the United States," we read, the first volume, which is all that is yet published, treats of the development of the township, hundred, and shire; the second volume, we suppose, being designed to treat of the State Constitutions. The reviewer forgets that there is such a subject as the "development of the city and local magistracies" (which is to be the subject of ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... suggested, the speech of Monkbarns at the Kaim of Kinprunes. The great question was, Where is the Mons Grampius of Tacitus? Dismissing Camden's Grantsbain, because he does not know where it is, Gordon says, "As for our Scotch Antiquaries, they are so divided that some will have it to be in the shire of Angus, or in the Mearns, some at the Blair of Athol in Perthshire, or Ardoch in Strathallan, and others at Inverpeffery." Gordon votes for Strathern, "half a mile short of the Kirk of Comrie." This spot is both at the foot of the Montes Grampii, "and boasts ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Charles Grant were the sons of a farmer in Inverness-shire, whom a sudden flood stript of every thing, even to the very soil which he tilled. The farmer and his son William made their way southward, until they arrived in the neighborhood of Bury, in Lancashire, and there found employment in a print work, in which William served ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... which had ever been summoned since the foundation of the monarchy. Besides the barons of his own party, and several ecclesiastics who were not immediate tenants of the crown, he ordered returns to be made of two knights from each shire, and what is more remarkable, of deputies from the boroughs, an order of men which, in former ages, had always been regarded as too mean to enjoy a place in the national councils [z]. [MN House of Commons.] This period is commonly esteemed the epoch of the House of Commons in ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... of France, or, may be, not so big. And the main part of it, and the most lawful and learned, is by itself, in a sort, a separate kingdom, namely Fife, whence I come myself. The Lothians, too, and the shire of Ayr, if you except Carrick, are well known for the lands of peaceful and ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... in 1386, the poet Chaucer was elected a knight of the shire for Kent, and in 1392-3 he was residing at Greenwich. He evidently knew something of the Kentish dialect; and he took advantage of the circumstance, precisely as Gower did, for varying his rimes. The earliest example of this is in his Book of the Duchess, l. 438, where he uses ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... owned all the city on the right bank of the Ouse. In the fifteenth century they still retained many of their privileges and possessions in this quarter, as, for example, the right of holding a fair here in what was formerly their shire. These archiepiscopal rights have not all lapsed, for in 1807 the Archbishop of the time, successfully asserting his legal rights, saved from demolition the city walls on the west ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... a blacker pit, for whom Grimy nakedness, dragging his trucks And laying his trams, in a poisoned gloom Wrought, till he crept from a gutted mine Master of half a servile shire, And left his coal all turned into gold To a grandson, first of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... years' course of study, he returned to his native town, Braintree, and in 1758 commenced practice in Suffolk county, of which Boston was the shire town. By hard study and hard work he gradually introduced himself into practice, and in 1764 married a young lady far above his station in life. In our perusal and study of eminent men who have risen by their own exertions to a higher sphere ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... In Ross-shire, Scotland, there is an immense mountain gorge. The rocks have been rent in twain, and set apart twenty feet, forming two perpendicular walls two hundred feet in height. On either side of these natural walls, in ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson |
