"Peasantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... failure; the peasantry did not join as was expected, and on the 8th of September General Humbert surrendered at Ballinamuck ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... in the neighbouring village church; her husband and daughter attended her to the grave, followed by a long train of the peasantry, who were sincere ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... discent, To undertake this homelie millers trade: Thus must we mask to save our wretched lives, Threatned by Conquest of this hapless Yle, Whose sad invasions by the Conqueror Have made a number such as we subject Their gentle necks unto their stubborn yoke Of drudging labour and base peasantry. Sir Thomas Godard now old Goddard is, Goddard the miller of fair Manchester. Why should not I content me with this state, As good Sir Edmund Trofferd did the flaile? And thou, sweet Em, must stoop to high estate To join with mine that thus we may protect Our harmless lives, which, led in ...
— Fair Em - A Pleasant Commodie Of Faire Em The Millers Daughter Of - Manchester With The Love Of William The Conquerour • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... Gretchen? He was a thorough man of the world; he knew innocence at first glance, and Gretchen was both innocent and unworldly. To the right man she might be easy prey. Never to a man like Colonel von Wallenstein, whose power and high office were alike sinister to any girl of the peasantry; but a man in the guise of her own class, of her own world and people, here was a snare Gretchen might not be able to foresee. He would watch this fellow, and at the first sign of an evil—Carmichael's muscular brown hands opened and shut ominously. The vintner ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... never once thought of disguising the truth. He had been too well taught for that. At the time when John's father was living, there was no race of men, of any rank or country, that took more pains, (if indeed so much,) as the Scottish peasantry did in instructing their children, both in their moral and religious duties; and John had been taught early, that the shadow of a lie was contrary to the duty of a Christian, and that a child who, in the slightest ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... sheer top-heaviness. They were the eyes and ears of the monarchy; they provided the monarch with fourscore eager hands to work his sovereign will. The intendants, in turn, had their underlings, known as the sub-delegates, who held the peasantry in leash. Thus it was that the administration, like a pyramid, broadened towards its base, and the whole structure rested upon the third estate, or rank and file of the people. Such was the position, the power, and administrative framework of France when her kings and people turned ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... settler and aborigine, and it would delight me to see the settlers engaged in the great work of their amelioration; and though on the part of the settlers, a large majority would readily engage, I nevertheless feel persuaded that, until a better class of peasantry be introduced, and a code of judicature suited to the condition of the natives, its practicability, as ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life. But it could not suffice to disclose ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... the requirements of the service. Wellington had not yet begun that career of victory which created a national enthusiasm for war, and filled our ranks with willing soldiers. And another clause of the same bill was framed in the hope of making the service more acceptable to the peasantry, by limiting the time for which recruits were to be enlisted, and entering men, at first, in the infantry for seven years, or in the cavalry (as that branch of the service required a longer apprenticeship) for ten; then allowing them the option of renewing their engagement ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... numerous, and are attributed by the peasantry to different saints. Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall, in their account of Ireland, refer to several curious examples which are regarded by the people with superstitious reverence, and are the occasions of religious pilgrimage. Near the chapel of Glenfinlough, in King's County, there ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... are from ten to twenty feet in height, are now supposed to have been the burial places of the ancient Celts. The peasantry can with difficulty be persuaded to open any of them, on account of a prevalent superstition that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... that murmur, because there was a hint of taxation in the business, a promise of levies to be extracted from an unwilling peasantry; a suggestion of lazy men leaving the comfortable shade of their huts to hurry perspiring in the forest that gum and rubber and similar offerings should be laid at the complacent feet ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... peasantry, Jeff says, whereever they goes; an' then clods pursoocs Jeff an' the others, from start to finish, with hoes an' rakes an' mattocks an' clothes-poles an' puddin'- sticks an' other barbarous an' obsolete arms, an' never lets up ontil Jeff an' Morgan all' their gallant comrades is ag'in safe in ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the revolt of Africa, which led to the downfall of the tyrant Maximin and the exaltation of the Gordians, when the native landlords armed their peasantry, killed the imperial officer, and raised the standard of rebellion in the neighbouring town from impatience of exactions under which ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... identify it with the grona fina. At all events, this is the same species as the gronilla found on the hairs of the green oaks in Andalusia; and in some years large and valuable crops of the gronilla are gathered in that part of Spain by the peasantry, and sold to the Moors ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... mounted grenadiers, chasseurs, hussars and dragoons, had easily attained a position in front of the van of the army commanded by Marmont, which had rested a few hours at St. Prix, where the road crossed the Petit Morin on a bridge. His requisition on the peasantry had been honored, and great numbers of fresh, vigorous draft horses had been brought in from all sides. There was not much speed to be got out of these farm animals, to be sure, but they were of prodigious strength. The ordinary gun teams ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to wage a sort of guerilla warfare, lying in ambush behind hedges, harassing the enemy, picking off his sentinels, holding the woods, from which not a Prussian was to emerge alive; while the truth of the matter was that they had made themselves the terror of the peasantry, whom they failed utterly to protect and whose fields they devastated. Every ne'er-do-well who hated the restraints of the regular service made haste to join their ranks, well pleased with the chance that exempted him from discipline and enabled him to lead the life of a tramp, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... was current among the Cretan peasantry in 1820. Two thousand years before, Apollodorus had told much the same story of Peleus and Thetis (Bibliotheca, iii. 13). The chief difference is that it was Thetis who placed her son on the fire, to make him immortal, and Peleus who cried out. The Tayl of the yong Tamlene is ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... in the little independent republic of Cracow. As such it had little importance; though, owing to the incompetence of the Austrian commander, the Poles gained some initial successes. More fateful was the attitude of the Orthodox Ruthenian peasantry, who were divided from their Catholic Polish over-lords by centuries of religious and feudal oppression. The Poles had sought, by lavish promises, to draw them into their ranks; their reply was to rise in support of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... mixed with earth, which made the floor of the granary. The count bought what was needed for the household; the farmers and tenants, indeed, every one around Clochegourde, sent buyers to the Mignonne, a pet name which the peasantry give even to strangers, but which in this ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the "finest pisintry in the world" are better located now than they were a quarter of a century ago, for they are, or were, a fine peasantry, as far as physical organisation can make them, and deserve at least to be housed like human beings; but what I saw, when on that night I entered the mud edifice of my conductors, made me start with astonishment. In the first place, the walls were mud all through, and as rough on the inside ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... They must then have noticed, as I have more than once, a large stone cylinder in one corner. In Greece and Asia Minor, it will be in most cases a "drum" from some antique column, or a funerary cippus, abstracted by the peasantry from some neighbouring ruin. This morsel of Paros or Pentelic has to perform the office of a roller. When some heavy fall of rain by wetting and softening the upper surface of the terrace, gives an opportunity for repairing the ravages of a long ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... imagination; it is that we Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East Slavonic peasantry. At best we know—and even that not always—what oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions are to blame, the Prussians ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... ignorant peasantry. The agricultural class constituting our rural population represents a high grade of natural intelligence and integrity. Great political and moral reforms find more favorable soil in the rural regions ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... flourish or may fade,— A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride When once destroyed, can ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... luxuriance of water-lilies. 'Is it not pitiable to think of the years he spent in this monotonous place, without any society worth speaking of, with only the shabbiest collection of books, with hardly any interest in life except the sky, and the hills, and the peasantry?' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... repeated the same story; and what with the Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary soldiers, who had previously been ravaging ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Marradi would render the passage easy. Marradi is a castle situated at the foot of the mountains which separate Tuscany from Romagna; and, though destitute of walls, the river, the mountains, and the inhabitants, make it a place of great strength; for the peasantry are warlike and faithful, and the rapid current undermining the banks has left them of such tremendous height that it is impossible to approach it from the valley if a small bridge over the stream be defended; while ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... and plastered over all the palaces: ours has plenty. There is 'Down with the Nobility,' too; they are down enough already, for that matter. A very heavy rain and wind having come on, I did not go out and 'skirr the country;' but I shall mount to-morrow, and take a canter among the peasantry, who are a savage, resolute race, always riding with guns in their hands. I wonder they don't suspect the serenaders, for they play on the guitar here all night, as in Spain, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ordinary family, but he didn't think of criticizing that, since his own parents were of the German peasantry. (91-4.) ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... indeed little, one imagines, remains the same. But within the new church one may still overhaul the registers, and find, with but little trouble, a record of the baptism of the Bronte children. There, amid the names of the rough and rude peasantry of the neighbourhood, we find the accompanying entries, {56b} differing from their neighbours only by the fact that Mr. Morgan or Mr. Fennell came to the help of their relatives and officiated in place of Mr. Bronte. Mr. Bronte, it will be observed, had already received his appointment to Haworth ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... St. Charles, and gathering in heavy masses under the western ramparts of the town. Could numbers give assurance of success, their triumph would have been secure, for five French battalions and the armed colonial peasantry amounted in all to more than seven thousand five hundred men. Full in sight before stretched the long, thin lines of the British forces—the Highlanders, the steady soldiery of England, and the hardy levies of the provinces—less than five thousand in number, but all inured to ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... hands touched me and caressed me—lad, I feel them now. I put her on the boat, and the money he sent relieved the suffering around me, and I gave thanks with a sore heart. It was for them, our own peasantry, and for her, I parted with her then, but as soon as I could I sold my little holding near my grandfather's house to an Englishman who had long wanted it, and when it was parted with, I took the money and delayed not a day to ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the country, but all these will do the President good, and strengthen his hands, for even the people who have been treated with indignity will pardon him if their chateaux are saved from an infuriated and brutal peasantry. The President told Normanby last night that the accounts of the cruelties and attacks in parts of the country were very serious, but he hoped they would soon ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... as well as wrestling, the people of Somersetshire have for ages been renowned. In Scotland they excel at the backsword—the Irish too are admirable hands—but neither have the temper of the English; "Oppression makes a wise man mad;" what should it do then with a poor peasantry? The tempers of the English have not had that to irritate them. We will close this subject with a letter from an intelligent Londoner, who was travelling ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... and flocks. In the management of these Gregory's care did not disdain the minutest supervision. His strong sense of justice did not prevent his being a merciful landlord, and especially he cared for the peasantry and ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... answer: "We want neither salt nor herrings under the reign of the King of Denmark, and another King could not give us more: besides, if we take arms against so great a Prince, we shall unavoidably perish." The Swedish peasantry, however, soon felt that the cruelty and tyranny of Christiern were something more ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... gentleman, no one doubts. Of his ideas of true constitutional freedom, or the zeal with which that or Hungarian independence has been maintained first through Turkish, and then German domination for some hundred years past, doubts may be entertained. Neither do the Hungarian peasantry or people reflect high credit on their "natural superiors." Something should be deducted for the forced vivacity and straining after effect of the litterateur; but this sketch of a large class of peasantry from Max Schlesinger's "War in Hungary," ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... could not be carried out in fact, since the Ukrainian Government declared that it would itself set up this organisation, and maintained this intention with the greatest stubbornness. But the authority in the country had been destroyed by the Revolution, and then by the Bolshevist invasion; the peasantry turned Radical, and the estates were occupied by revolutionaries and cut up. The power of the Government, then, in respect of collecting supplies of grain, was altogether inadequate; on the other hand, however, it was still sufficient (as some actual instances proved) to place ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... already hinted, of the ballad poetry of the Border district; but to obtain this vernacular literature was not the work of mere compilation. The editor's task was not performed in the closet, but in a sort of literary pilgrimage through a land of song, story, and romance. The farmers and peasantry from whose recitation the ballads were to be set down, were a primitive race; and the country among which oral traditions, anecdotes, and legends were to be collected for notes illustrative of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... wonder of Egypt was the annual rising of the Nile. About midsummer, the peasantry who lived along the banks would find the river gradually beginning to rise. The stream became more turbid, too, as the bosom of the waters swelled. No cause for this mysterious increase appeared, as the sky remained as blue and serene as before, ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... was founded by military process for military purposes, and, with the passing of war, loses its warrant for existence. On the other hand, it is claimed that the under classes may come into the enjoyment of their inalienable rights, common to all humanity, only by means of the sword. Witness the peasantry of Russia! Even in America so great a prophet as Henry Ward Beecher foresaw a tragic day when the bivouac of capital would be set against the camp of labor. And lesser seers are not lacking who freely predict, even for ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a collaboration; and ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the configuration of a national life? The diffusion of material comfort among masses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantry forever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life to the mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, but through the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the development of human capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under the stimulus ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... which you would not like any better. One of these is to make them into oil, as the people do in the South of Europe; this oil is used to burn in their lamps and as an article of food. 'In Piedmont, among the light-hearted peasantry, cracking the walnuts and taking them from the shell is a holiday proceeding. The peasants, with their wives and children, assemble in the evening, after their day's work is over, in the kitchen of some chateau where ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... "idolatrous" figure and dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church. But one must have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble, unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years in the mind of that poor old woman ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of the leaders of that despondent party which will always have its antitype in England. Have we, too, not heard within the last seven years similar prophecies of desolation, mourning, and woe—of the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the peasantry starving under the horrors of free trade, noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax? Even such a prophet seems Warham to have been—of all people in that day, one of the last whom one would have asked ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... them wait till they have ten million vermin overrunning their country—we shall see how long they will be sentimental. Think of it! A burrowing swarm creeping and crawling everywhere, ugh! They ruin our peasantry with their loans and their drink shops, ruin our army with their revolutionary propaganda, ruin our professional classes by snatching all the prizes and professorships, ruin our commercial classes by monopolising ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... ancient provinces rose to arms again, helped to drive out the Swedes, and bravely defended Colberg and Berlin, he accepted their assistance without objection; but he took pains not to encourage a guerilla war; and when his East Frisian peasantry revolted independently against the French and were severely punished by them for it, he told them with brutal frankness that it was their own fault, for war was a matter for soldiers; the business of the peasants and citizens should be uninterrupted industry, the payment ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Isolde if he wished some fleshly music, some sensualistic caterwauling, as Huxley phrased it? But a melodious violin and piano sonata!) Tolstoy may go barefoot, dig for potatoes, wear his blouse hanging outside, but the peasantry will never accept him as one of their own. He has written volumes about "going to the people," and the people do not want him, do not comprehend him. And that is Tolstoy's tragedy, as it was the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... New England hay-fields! And herein is one of the first surprises that await one on visiting the Old World countries,—the absence of graceful, girlish figures, and bright girlish faces, among the peasantry or rural population. In France I certainly expected to see female beauty everywhere, but did not get one gleam all that sunny day till I got to Paris. Is it a plant that flourishes only in cities on this side of the Atlantic, or do all the ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... bearing-reins, in the "Bubbles of the Brunnen," are quite philosophical. They should only be used for purposes of parade, or to acquire greater power over a difficult team, or loosely to keep cart-horses "out of mischief." Sir Francis's observations are also true of the harness used by the peasantry of Nassau which he describes, but this arises from the poverty, not the philosophy of the peasants; those among them, who have money enough to buy smart harness have the most elaborate bearing-reins that I have ever seen. One, a chain, from the lower part of the collar, which binds ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... that way at all. You see, before the first marriage, each couple, from the humblest peasantry to the highest royalty, must submit to a mental examination. If they are marrying for any reason at all other than love, such as any thought of trifling in the mind of the man, or if the woman is marrying him for his wealth ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... by the mouth To imitate the liquid notes of birds Was earlier far 'mongst men than power to make, By measured song, melodious verse and give Delight to ears. And whistlings of the wind Athrough the hollows of the reeds first taught The peasantry to blow into the stalks Of hollow hemlock-herb. Then bit by bit They learned sweet plainings, such as pipe out-pours, Beaten by finger-tips of singing men, When heard through unpathed groves and forest deeps And woodsy meadows, through the untrod haunts Of shepherd folk and spots divinely still. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... stand out in wonderful relief upon the scene around them. The whiteness of the linen worn by the paludiers (the name given to men who gather salt in the salt-marshes) contrasts vigorously with the blues and browns of the peasantry and the original and sacredly preserved jewelry of the women. These two classes, and that of the sailors in their jerkins and varnished leather caps are as distinct from one another as the castes of India, and still recognize the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... rose into prominence as a predatory power, which depended for its stability upon those productive countries which it was able to conquer and hold in sway. It never had a numerous peasantry, and such as it had ultimately vanished, for the kings pursued the short-sighted policy of colonizing districts on the borders of their empire with their loyal subjects, and settling aliens in the heart of the homeland, where they were controlled ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... coiled upon the nape of her neck, was nearly black; not of that soft, cloudy dark which made Aurelia's so glorious, but as if burnt, with a hot, rusty tinge here and there about it. Though not now in the rags in which I saw her first, she was still poorly dressed, in the habit of the peasantry of that country, in a green petticoat and red bodice, which, like that of all unmarried girls here, was cut to display the bosom. Her feet were bare, and her ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... however, every commonplace motive pointed so directly towards a career of subserviency to the ruling class among the laity, it could not be expected that they should take a lofty view of their profession. The Anglican clergy were not like the Irish priesthood, in close sympathy with the peasantry, or like the Scottish ministers, the organs of strong convictions spreading through the great mass of the middle and lower classes. A man of energy, who took his faith seriously, was, like the Evangelical ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the early history of the Rumanians of Transylvania, the cradle of the Rumanian nation. As already mentioned, part of the Rumanian nobility of Hungary went over to the Magyars, the remainder migrating over the mountains. Debarred from the support of the noble class, the Rumanian peasantry lost its state of autonomy, which changed into one of serfdom to the soil upon which they toiled. Desperate risings in 1324, 1437, 1514, 1600, and 1784 tended to case the Hungarian oppression, which up ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... of the historic ballads is that which describes Bernardo's march to Roncesvalles. He sallies forth 'with three thousand Leonese and more,' to protect the glory and freedom of his native land. From all sides, the peasantry of the land flock to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... were chosen. Dick found, indeed, that at distances up to a hundred yards, they were quite equal to the English rifle he had brought out. The silver mountings were taken off, and then the pieces differed in no way, in appearance, from those in general use among the peasantry. ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... said that so long as any of these three are alive, a faint flicker of living Cornish remains, even if there is no verity in the weird legends of the survival of more as an esoteric language among the peasantry and the mining and fishing folk of the West. But even if the spoken Cornish be dead, its ghost still haunts its old dwelling, for the modern English speech of West Cornwall is full of Celtic words, and nine-tenths ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... situated, with a statue of the Virgin standing on it. A devout country. All down this river, wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the Virgin on it. I believe I have seen a hundred of them. And yet, in many respects, the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any considerable degree ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... monkey, which escaped from his chain, and was abroad in Morayshire for some eight or ten days. Wherever he appeared he spread terror among the peasantry. A poor fisherman on the banks of the Findhorn was sitting with his wife and family at their frugal meal, when a hairy little man, as they in their ignorance conceived him to be, appeared on the window sill and grinned, and chattered through the casement what ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... to sell themselves to those who could bid highest for their voices. Excuses could be found, no doubt, for this miserable expedient, in the state of parties, in the unscrupulous violence of the aristocracy, in the general impoverishment of the peasantry through the land monopoly, and in the intrusion upon Italy of a gigantic system of slave labor. But none the less it was the deadliest blow which had yet been dealt to the constitution. Party government turns on the majorities at the polling places, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... bettered for those who stay; in connection with which a noteworthy fact may be mentioned, which is, that in the southern, western, and midland counties, scarcely an Irish labourer is to be seen; and who is there that does not remember what troops of the ragged peasantry used to come over ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... slaves are treated with more consideration, and, in return, have warmer feelings of attachment towards their owners than are to be found in colonies belonging to other nations. Newton perceived and acknowledged this, and, comparing the condition of the people at Lieu Desire with that of most of the peasantry of Europe, was unwillingly obliged to confess that the former were in every respect the more fortunate and the more happy of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton's rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr Arnold's own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French towns with the commis voyageur have not found his manners so greatly superior to those of the English bagman. But just at this moment, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... any one of them is arrayed against us to-day is not to be laid entirely or chiefly at its own door. They are all fine peoples who have not obtained their proper places in the sun. The best of the Osmanli nation, the Anatolian peasantry, has yet to make its physical and moral qualities felt under civilized conditions. As for the rest—the Serbs and the Bulgars, who have enjoyed brief moments of barbaric glory in their past, have still to find themselves in that future which shall be to ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... architecturally different from those of the country-folk of the north-east; their high thatched roofs are curiously decorated with bundles of straw fastened to a pole of bamboo parallel with the roof-ridge, and elevated about a foot above it. The complexion of the peasantry is darker than in the north-east; and I see no more of those charming rosy faces one observes among the women of the Tokyo districts. And the peasants wear different hats, hats pointed like the straw roofs of those little wayside temples curiously ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... nothing but a bridle. The transformation brought about by crossing the mountain ridge is novel and complete; the fez, so omnipresent throughout the Ottoman dominions, has disappeared, as if by magic; the better class Persians wear tall, brimless black hats of Astrakan lamb's wool; some of the peasantry wear an unlovely, close- fitting skullcap of thick gray felt, that looks wonderfully like a bowl clapped on top of their heads, others sport a huge woolly head-dress like the Roumanians; this latter imparts to them a fierce, war-like appearance, that the meek-eyed Persian ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... retreating enemy; the march on Berlin; then the armistice, during which we were encamped in the little towns; then the arrival of the veterans of Spain—men accustomed to pillaging and living on the peasantry. ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... deleterious practice of some of the Irish peasantry connected with their belief in fairies, which consists of giving a cachetic or rachitic child large doses of a preparation of fox-glove (Irish—luss-more, or great herb), to drive out or kill the fairy in the child. It was supposed ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... other countries, the taste of the performance varied according to the rank of the person by whom they were employed, or their own skill; and the dance at the house of a priest differed from that among the uncouth peasantry, or the lower classes ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... himself to law was the same that had led him to the ministry,—his desire to be a blessing to his fellow-beings. He saw the peasantry cheated and imposed upon because of their ignorance, and determined to become their champion. Kruesi thinks that his study of the law must "have produced negative results by showing him the insufficiency of human ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Burke, with the other strangers, sat in a knot by the window. Uncle Ulick with Colonel Sullivan formed a third group. The courtyard, visible through the windows, seethed with an ever-increasing crew of peasantry, frieze-coated or half bare, who whooped and jabbered, now about one of their number, now about another. Among them moved some ten or twelve men of another kidney—seamen with ear-rings and pigtails, bronzed faces and gaudy kerchiefs, who ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. I have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls and faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine. The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... century the French peasantry could no longer be preyed upon by petty feudal despots. They were seldom the object of violence on the part of the government; they enjoyed civil liberty, and were owners of a portion of the soil. But all the other classes of society stood aloof from this class, and perhaps in no ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... Emile Jealousies of a Country Town Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon Another Study of Woman The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of Eve The Firm of Nucingen The Peasantry ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... too far removed in the feudal scale to injure the commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly, governing itself, taxing itself, defending itself against encroaching neighbours; it gradually extends beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its suzerain or buys privileges from him; in short, lives the vigorous young life of the early Italian commonwealths. But now the danger begins. The original system of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let those who are interested in the history of Religion consider what a treasure we should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and castles; and if every building destroyed in the French ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of character that were rare amongst the peasantry. He baffled the cleverest police-spies employed against him, without knowing their real character. To the leading minds of the magistracy his guilt seemed caused by the influence of passion, and not by necessity or greed, as in the case of ordinary murderers, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... impressive as without, but it has monuments appertaining probably to the Culpepers, once a far-reaching aristocratic Sussex family, which we met first at Ardingly, and which is now extinct or existent only among the peasantry. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... as A.D. 1430 the houses of the peasantry were "constructed of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were of turf—a stiffened bull's-hide served for a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... mark the local patois; and as a number of the fugitives were captured and reduced to slavery, intermarrying in the course of time with the native population, the Moorish type is still very noticeable amongst the peasantry. Freed from the Saracenic yoke, the Nicois lived in peace for nearly two centuries, being only disturbed from time to time by the unwelcome visitations of pirates. Later on, toward the middle of the thirteenth century, like most other Southern and Italian cities, Nice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... scene, the gaiety, the oddity of the various characters, which campaigning developes more than any mode of existence. The simple meal, the noon-rest under a tree, the songs of our troopers, the dance in the villages, as soon as the peasantry had discovered that we did not eat women and children—even the consciousness of a life wholly without care, formed a delicious state of being. "If this is the life of the Arab," I often was ready to exclaim, "what folly would it be in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... all that is pretentious, glaring, and assuming; and Rhythm stoops to rock the cradle of the newborn infant; to soothe the negro in the rice swamp or cotton field; to shape into beauty the national and patriotic songs of a laborious but contented peasantry, as among the Sclaves—but what cares the age for the happiness of the race? 'Put money in thy purse,' is its consolation and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... achieved a desirable result. The Polish army, in its equipment, in its armament, and in its battle-field efficiency, as then understood, became, by the end of the year 1830, a first-rate tactical instrument. Polish peasantry (not serfs) served in the ranks by enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly to the smaller nobility. Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had no difficulty in obtaining a lieutenancy, but the promotion in ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... had written at least "Childe Harold." There is the case of a living publisher (not either of the brothers Murray) whose presence at his country chateau is indicated to the surrounding nobility, gentry, and peasantry by the unfurling of the Royal standard over ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... "but" and a "ben" and a "mid room," or chamber, called the "closet." The one end was my mother's domain, and served all the purposes of dining-room and kitchen and parlor, besides containing two large wooden erections, called by our Scotch peasantry "box beds"; not holes in the wall, as in cities, but grand, big, airy beds, adorned with many-colored counterpanes, and hung with natty curtains, showing the skill of the mistress of the house. The other end was my father's ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... was employed observing the make of our clothes. My hands, I found, had first led her to discover that I was the lady. I had, of course, my quantum of reverences; for the politeness of the north seems to partake of the coldness of the climate and the rigidity of its iron-sinewed rocks. Amongst the peasantry there is, however, so much of the simplicity of the golden age in this land of flint—so much overflowing of heart and fellow-feeling, that only benevolence and the honest sympathy of nature diffused ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Comte de Domestic Peace Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Peasantry ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were allowed to live in idleness. Every man was regimented somewhere; and although the peasantry, when at full age, were allowed, under restrictions, their own choice of masters, yet the restrictions both on masters and servants were so severe as to prevent either from taking advantage of the necessities of the other, or from terminating through caprice or levity, or for any insufficient ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... seems open to distress from every clime. In 1877, when word reached England of the suffering through war of the Bulgarian and Turkish peasantry, she instituted the "Compassion Fund," by which one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in money and stores were sent, and thousands of lives saved from starvation and death. For this generosity the Sultan conferred upon ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... relation between our ancestors and ourselves. If we happen to be irreligious, we do not believe in ghosts. If we are profoundly religious, we think of the dead as removed from us by judgment,—as absolutely separated from us during the period of our lives. It is true that among the peasantry of Roman Catholic countries there still exists a belief that the dead are permitted to return to earth once a year,—on the night of All Souls. But even according to this belief they are not considered as related to the living by any stronger bond than memory; and they are thought ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... productivity of the soil are supported by the overwhelming evidence of the poverty of the fourteenth century peasantry—poverty which can be explained only by the barrenness of their land. Many of the features of the agrarian changes of this period are familiar—the substitution of money payments for villain services, the frequency of desertion, ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... knew how to read and write; they were ignorant of the first elements of geography and history." Still, dull and devoid of intellectual life as was the life of the Canadian, he had his place of worship where he received a moral training which elevated him immeasurably above the peasantry of England as well as of his old home. The clergy of Lower Canada confessedly did their best to relieve the ignorance of the people, but they were naturally unable to accomplish, by themselves, a task which properly devolved on the governing class. Under ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... that while France weaves silks and satins to deck the wives of German financiers, the Empress of Russia, and the Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and while Paris fashions wonderful trinkets and playthings for rich folk all the world over, two-thirds of the French peasantry have not proper lamps to give them light, or the implements necessary for modern agriculture. Lastly, unproductive land, of which there is plenty, would have to be turned to the best advantage, poor soils enriched, and rich soils, which yet, under the present system, do not yield ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... liberality was greatly aggravated by the condition of the times. The war which was ravaging Vervignole also ruined the Church in Trinqueballe. The soldiery who were fighting in the country-side about the town pillaged the farms, levied contributions on the peasantry, drove out the religious orders, and burned the ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... 2d edition, 8vo. 1832. It again appeared (not from either of Sir Harris Nicolas's copies) in the Rev. J.C. Tyler's Henry of Monmouth, 8vo. vol. ii. p. 197. And, lastly, in Mr. Dixon's Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, printed by the Percy Society in 1846. These copies vary considerably from each other, which cannot be wondered at, when we find that they were obtained from independent sources. Mr. Tyler does not allude ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... German element in St. Louis be ignored. The part played by this people in the Civil War is a matter of history. The scope of this book has not permitted the author to introduce the peasantry and trading classes which formed the mass in this movement. But Richter, the type of the university-bred revolutionist which emigrated after '48, is drawn more or less from life. And the duel described ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... they serve for both dams and bounds to the elaborately partitioned fields. Adjacent mud is therefore carefully plastered over the remains of the old dyke, which, to the credit of the former builders, is no small fraction of it, and the work then finished off with a sculptor's care. An easier-going peasantry might often forego renewal. Indeed, I cannot but think the farmers take a natural delight in this exalted form of mud pies; they work away on already passable specimens with such a will. But who does quite outgrow his childish delights? ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... that it would not be well they should replace, no interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately bloom under their supervision. The excuse of their folly is in two words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry. The measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral practice. To the world their serious faces were never deformed by the suspicion ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... counsel. We desired to preserve the old division of the land, but Rameses introduced the new to the disadvantage of the priests; we warned him against fresh wars, and the king again and again has taken the field; we had the ancient sacred documents which exempted our peasantry from military service, and, as you know, he outrageously defies them. From the most ancient times no one has been permitted to raise temples in this land to strange Gods, and Rameses favors the son of the stranger, and, not only in the north ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... opportunity of observing, and from the information I have been able to procure, I cannot help supposing that this gentleman has drawn his inference partially, and that he has often compared some particular case of distress, with the general situation of the peasantry in the rich counties, which are the scene of his experiments. The peasantry of many distant parts of England fare as coarsely, and labour harder, than was common in France; and taking their habits ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... days in saying, like Melisande, "I am not happy." She would have been an instrument of pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving drudge, while he went triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among the scattered Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a whole-hearted detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that the death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that it ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... woman, take her place and often her husband's place, as he has a right to delegate his vote to her at elections, and she may also take it at county meetings and assemblies of every kind. Lately the government of the peasantry have made an effort to deprive the women of the right to hold office but the Senate has prevented them on the ground that if women share the hard struggle for existence with the men, as they do in our remote rural districts, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Athlone, runs right through the Bog of Allen. It is available for through passengers for Connemara. For miles, the undulating bog land, green and brown. The King's County still remains out of the primeval forests, and its great peat fields are the only source of wealth to the surrounding peasantry. Athlone, some two miles below Lough Ree, on the Shannon, is the military key to the Province of Connaught. The keep of the old Castle, dating from King John's reign, remains, but the bridge and salmon weir are of more interest. In 1691 Ginckle ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... Before he married, he ate very irregularly, and often completely forgot his meals. When he could not get meat and wine, he contented himself with bread and water. . . . Melanchthon tells us that Luther loved the coarse food as he did the coarse speech of the peasantry, and even of that food ate little, so little that Melanchthon marveled how Luther could maintain strength upon such a diet.—It is further a noteworthy fact that, when we read the sermons of the day, we find nobody who so frequently and so earnestly attacks the prevailing ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... fun than as a native language; it was so strange to find another language the people's actual and earnest medium of thought within so short a distance of England. But English is scarcely more known to the body of the Welsh people than to the peasantry of France. However, they sometimes pretend to ignorance, when they might speak it ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... relatives of stockholders in the London Company, attracted to Virginia because of the newness of the adventure and the spice of danger; sons of professional men and men of business, intrigued by a new business life and opportunity; men from the laboring classes and the peasantry of rural sections. But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the families of today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia descend from ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... five-and-twenty years ago, have vanished, simply from the spread (by the grace of God, as I hold) of an inductive habit of mind; of the habit of looking coolly, boldly, carefully, at facts; till now, even among the most ignorant peasantry, the woman who says that she has seen a ghost is likely not to be complimented on her assertion. But it does not follow that that woman's grandmother, when she said that she saw a ghost, was a consciously dishonest person; on the contrary, so complex and contradictory is human ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... once so devoted and high-minded in all the concerns the home life of their people, as in French Canada. A land without poverty and yet without riches, French Canada stands alone, too well educated to have a peasantry, too poor to have an aristocracy; as though in her the ancient prayer had been answered "Give me neither poverty nor riches, but feed me with food convenient for me." And it is of the habitant of Quebec, before a men else, I should say, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the production of rice and indigo. Her peculiarities under the trustee regime were gone but not forgotten. The rigidity of paternalism, well meant though it had been, was a lesson against future submission to outward control in any form; and their failure as a peasantry in competition with planters across the river persuaded the Georgians and their neighbors that slave labor was essential ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... night, one of those foggy nights when the air seems thick with humidity. A vague odor of apples floated through the farm-yard, for it was the season when the earliest apples were gathered, the "soon ripe" ones, as they are called in the language of the peasantry. As Cesaire passed along by the cattle-sheds, the warm smell of living beasts sleeping on manure was exhaled through the narrow windows; and he heard near the stables the stamping of horses who remained standing, and the sound of their jaws tearing and bruising ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... retreat. In other words, it had become a pied-a-terre. Where the country folk for whom all these and smaller cottages were built now live, who shall say? Probably in mean streets; anyway, not here. The exterior remains often the same, but inside, instead of the plain furniture of the peasantry, one finds wicker arm-chairs and sofa-chairs, all the right books and ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of Sports, for allowing the peasantry of England to divert themselves with certain games in the open air, on Sundays, after evening service, was published by Charles the First, it is needless to say the English people were comparatively rude and uncivilised. And yet it is extraordinary to how ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... is a favourite spot for an afternoon siesta, for there is a bit of green sward under the tree, and all along the side of the road. But as the shades of evening gather in, the lane is usually deserted, shunned by the neighbouring peasantry on account of its eerie loneliness, so different to the former bustle which used to reign around the park gates when M. le Marquis and his family were still in residence. Nor does the lane lead anywhere, for it is a mere loop which gives on the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... unmerited fate of Strafford. They execrate the lawless violence of the army. They laugh at the Scriptural names of the preachers. Major-generals fleecing their districts; soldiers revelling on the spoils of a ruined peasantry; upstarts, enriched by the public plunder, taking possession of the hospitable firesides and hereditary trees of the old gentry; boys smashing the beautiful windows of cathedrals; Quakers riding naked through ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vine and other fruits, none flourish in the neighborhood of Munich. The whole country suffers from deficiency of nourishing and stimulating food. They may not themselves know it, but this is true of the peasants who are best to do in the world. Of the peasantry of Upper Bavaria, some have meat five times in the year, on their chief holidays,—namely, Shrove Tuesday, Easter, Whitsuntide, Church-Consecration, and Christmas; some have it on but two of these days, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... through the whole city, that all might have an opportunity to see the saint's remains and implore the assistance of God in the sore distress which bad befallen the Tyrol again. Therefore, since early this morning the peasantry had been flocking from all sides toward the gates of Brixen. Women and children, young and old men, came from all parts of the country to take part in the solemn procession and the devout prayers for the ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... existed, held to the enforcement of Marquette. The lord deemed this right as fully his as he did the claim to half the crops of the land, or to half the wool of the sheep. More than one reign of terror arose in France from the enforcement of this law, and the uprisings of the peasantry over Europe during the twelfth century, and the fierce Jacquerie, or Peasant Wars, of the fourteenth century in France owed their origin, among other causes, to the enforcement of these claims by the lords upon the newly-married wife. The edicts of Marly transplanted that ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... practised warrior and carefully noting its military points and capabilities. He saw that the Moor was well prepared for possible hostilities. Every town was strongly fortified. The Vega was studded with towers of refuge for the peasantry: every pass of the mountain had its castle of defence, every lofty height its watch-tower. As the Christian cavaliers passed under the walls of the fortresses, lances and scimetars flashed from their battlements, and the Moorish sentinels darted from their dark eyes glances of hatred and defiance. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... vanishing, no man knew whither, as he had appeared for no man knew what—fell in with the universal prostration of mind that laid France on her knees, as before the slow unweaving of some ancient prophetic doom. The famines, the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the peasantry up and down Europe—these were chords struck from the same mysterious harp; but these were transitory chords. There had been others of deeper and more ominous sound. The termination of the Crusades, the destruction of the Templars, the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... The peasantry, who had before possessed liberty of movement, were by him bound as serfs to the soil. Thousands of them fled, and an insupportable inquisition was established, as hateful to the landowners as to the serfs. All this was made worse by famine and pestilence, which ravaged Russia ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Diest and Thionville the rebellious Spaniards and Italians were numbered by thousands, all veterans, well armed, fortified in strong cities; and supplying themselves with perfect regularity by contributions levied upon the peasantry, obeying their Eletto and other officers with exemplary promptness; and paying no more heed to the edicts or the solicitations of the archduke than if he had been ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... giggle gang you call the Market Research Group have been groping around like so many blind mice. How would you like to know in advance, beyond any cavil, the exact future reaction to any product, new, old or sea-changed—or to any campaign to be inflicted on the peasantry?" ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds |
