"Feudal system" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Legislation of Solon and Lycurgus. 3rd. State of Greece, from the Persian War to the Dissolution of the Achaian League. 4th. Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire. 5th. Progress of Christianity. 6th. Manners and Irruptions of the Northern Nations. Growth of the European States. Feudal System. 7th. State of the Eastern Empire, to the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks; including the Rise and Progress of the Mahommedan Religion, and the Crusades. 8th. History of Europe, to the Abdication of the Empire by Charles the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... was administered, and in which, at a later period, under Bigot, it was purchasable. Our illustrious ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (corvees) and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (lettres de cachet). What did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna Charta ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the only place where he could be wealthy. Money confounds subordination, by overpowering the distinctions of rank and birth, and weakens authority by supplying power of resistance, or expedients for escape. The feudal system is formed for a nation employed in agriculture, and has never long kept its hold where gold and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... stone fortresses, with moats and drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly defenceless against this perennial destroyer. The result was a compact between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the feudal system. It was in effect an exchange of ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... fellow when the men's forty days of service were ended. A more disciplined military force was provided by subjecting all owners of five hides of land to thegn-service, a step which recognized the change that had now substituted the thegn for the eorl and in which we see the beginning of a feudal system. How effective these measures were was seen when the new resistance they met on the Continent drove the northmen to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893 a large fleet steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king Hasting entered the Thames. AElfred held ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... secundum quod debent feodis et tenementis suis de jure nobis facere." This personal service in process of time degenerated into pecuniary commutations or aids, and at last the military part of the feudal system was abolished ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... provinces. In those days these functionaries were greatly looked down upon by the Court nobles, and this became one of the causes of the feudal system.] ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... actual throne by the shadow of rebellion. Does he really think of making us enamoured of the "good old times" by the faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to a larger universitas. This appears not so much from the fact that the rules of descent governing different parcels might be different, /3/ so that the same person would not be heir to both, as from the very nature of feudal property. Under the feudal system in its vigor, the holding of land was only one [351] incident of a complex personal relation. The land was forfeited for a failure to render the services for which it was granted; the service could be renounced for a breach of correlative duties on the part of the lord. /1/ It rather seems ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... obedience, however, having dawned and become penetrated with the light of Christianity, formed the first element of the feudal system. No prescribed series of duties within the cold enclosure of legal forms bound mutually to each other the lord and his vassal. They were bound by the all-embracing feeling of fidelity. Hence the Lombard law of feuds compares the relation to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... our State, passed for the sole purpose of extending the rights of married women, and forever removing from our law, relating to their power to contract in regard to their earnings and property, the fossil foot-prints of the feudal system, and following the strictest rules of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that wondering voter on to the grass and seated himself on a rug. And for long the voter talked of those imperial traditions that our forefathers had made for us and which he should uphold with his vote, or else it was of a people oppressed by a feudal system that was out of date and effete, and that should be ended or mended. But the poet pointed out to him small, distant, wandering ships on the sunlit strip of sea, and the birds far down below them, and the houses below the birds, with the little columns of smoke ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... is a dominant idea in the whole nation. This is probably due to the very permanent impress given to English civilization by the feudal system, to the demand made for the permanence of the family, and for the production of warrior barons and warrior retainers. The physical condition, that was formerly a necessity, is now maintained as a matter of aristocratic ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Out of this feudal system, which has itself many of the important features of a confederacy, has grown the federal system which constitutes the Germanic empire. Its powers are vested in a diet representing the component members of the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... characteristic. The desire to imitate foreign nations was not a real reason for the overthrow of feudalism, but there was, rather, a more or less conscious feeling, rapidly pervading the whole people, that the feudal system would be unable to maintain the national integrity. As intimated, the matter was not so much reasoned out as felt. But such a vast illustration is more difficult to appreciate than some individual instances, of which I ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... face of Mr. Horace Pendyce's coachman monopolised the light of the solitary station lantern. Rosy-gilled, with fat close-clipped grey whiskers and inscrutably pursed lips, it presided high up in the easterly air like an emblem of the feudal system. On the platform within, Mr. Horace Pendyce's first footman and second groom in long livery coats with silver buttons, their appearance slightly relieved by the rakish cock of their top-hats, awaited the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... one of very respectable antiquity and antecedents. By a certain provision of the Feudal System a freeman who had committed a felony, or become hopelessly involved in debt, might purge himself of either by becoming a serf. So, at a later date, persons in the like predicament were permitted to exchange their fetters, whether of debt or iron, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... The feudal system gave scope for much magnificence at Yule-tide. At a time when several thousand retainers[4] were fed daily at a single castle or on a baron's estate, preparations for the Yule feast—the great feast of the year—were necessarily on a large ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... enduring polity now saw a National Army constituted in complete independence of the Crown; a Representative Body assuming absolute power and denying the King's right to dissolve; the summary abrogation of the whole feudal system, which a year before had seemed endowed with perpetual vigour; an insurrection of the peasantry against their territorial tyrants, accompanied by every horror of pillage, arson, and bloodshed; the beautiful and stately Queen flying, half naked, for her life, amid the slaughter of her sentinels ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... turbaries were open. They are less religious than in the days of the Romish faith; and if we consider them in relation to their immediate superiors, we shall find reason to confess that the independence which has been gained since the total decay of the feudal system, has been dearly purchased by the loss of kindly feelings and ennobling attachments. They are less contented, and in no respect more happy—that look implies hesitation of judgment, and an unwillingness to be convinced. Consider the point; go to your books and your ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... I; "it is time that we Republicans should agree upon some feudal system. My dear, I drink to the king!" and I raised my wine glass and ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... (Detail de la France, 7. Dissertation sur la Nature des Richesses etc.) More recently this darker side has been dwelt upon by F. Moeser, Patriot. Phant., I, 28; Ortes, Economia nazionale, II, 17, and the would-be restorer of the middle ages, Ad. Mueller. While the latter writer lauds the feudal system as a "sublime fusion of person and thing" (Elemente I, 221), the present system of wages, because it is a system of compensation, he blames, and prefers the feudal for the opposite reason (?). "The only merit which the state recognizes in ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... outset, this assignment of whole regions to the control of officials whose responsibility was limited to the collection of taxes for the uses of the Court, could not but tend to create a provincial nobility and thus lay the foundations of a feudal system. The mythological accounts of meetings of the Kami for purposes of consultation suggest a kind of commonwealth, and recall "the village assemblies of primitive times in many parts of the world, where the cleverness of one and the general willingness to follow his suggestions fill the place of the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... representative, duly elected by the free suffrage of his tribesmen; he was not owner of the tribal land, as the duke of the Normans was; he was rather the leader of the tribe, chosen to guard their common possessions. The communal system of Ireland stands here face to face with the feudal system of ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... nation; and it is otherwise inconceivable, that a plant, set by so inauspicious a hand, could have attained to so vigorous a growth, and have flourished in the midst of such tempests and convulsions. The feudal system, with which the liberty, much more the power of the commons, was totally incompatible, began gradually to decline; and both the king and the commonalty, who felt its inconveniencies, contributed to favor this new power, which was more submissive than the barons to the regular authority of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... permitted those of us who look at the system from underneath, to sympathise with our fellows who struggled to free themselves from bondage under Tyler and John Ball at least as much as with their splendid oppressors, and to recognise that the feudal system, however necessary in the thirteenth century, lost its value when its lords had ceased to be such good lords ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... influence of Norman civilisation, however, had its effect, though the unsettled state of the country prevented any rapid development of industrial arts. The feudal system by which every powerful baron became a petty sovereign, often at war with his neighbour, rendered it necessary that household treasures should be few and easily transported or hidden, and the earliest ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... dominant class, the same thing holds, though not so manifestly. For the very existence of a class monopolizing all power, is due to certain sentiments in the commonalty. Without the feeling of loyalty on the part of retainers, a feudal system could not exist. We see in the protest of the Highlanders against the abolition of heritable jurisdictions, that they preferred that kind of local rule. And if to the popular nature must be ascribed the growth of an irresponsible ruling class; then to the popular ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Tryon county, about thirty miles from Albany, then called Kingsborough, where now is the thriving town of Gloversville. To certain families tracts were allotted varying from one hundred to five hundred acres, all subjected to the feudal system. ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... have existed only on the high mountains of the western world. In Mexico we see a vast monarchy enclosing small republics; at Cundinamarca and Peru we find pure theocracies. Fortified towns, highways and large edifices of stone, an extraordinary development of the feudal system, the separation of castes, convents of men and women, religious congregations regulated by discipline more or less severe, complicated divisions of time connected with the calendars, the zodiacs, and the astrology of the enlightened nations of Asia—all these ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... of greater service to the missionary cause. The German crowd, and the English crowd, and all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at Isaac Ford as a commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different. When the natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac Ford who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and taken possession of fat, vast holdings. Small wonder the trading crowd did not like ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... theory or wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience which Germany went through under ...
— Progress and History • Various
... mountains and intersected the roads. I shall never forget the singular scene[126] on entering Tepaleen at five in the afternoon, as the sun was going down. It brought to my mind (with some change of dress, however) Scott's description of Branksome Castle in his Lay, and the feudal system. The Albanians, in their dresses, (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waistcoat, silver mounted pistols and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... ridicule and contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, "Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a "remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in the books of modern knight-errantry." ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fine clothes, and living on good fare at their expense. And I am sorry to say, the people are quite right in this opinion also. If you inquire into the vital fact of the matter, this you will find to be the constant structure of European society for the thousand years of the feudal system; it was divided into peasants who lived by working; priests who lived by begging; and knights who lived by pillaging; and as the luminous public mind becomes gradually cognizant of these facts, it will assuredly not suffer things to be altogether arranged that way any more; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a political condition which differed essentially from that of other countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal system was so organized that, at the close of its existence, it was naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth century, even in the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... machine together is a system of privileges. These may vary according to the opportunities and the tastes of those who seek them, from nepotism and patronage in all their aspects to clannishness, hero-worship or a fixed idea. They vary from military rank in armies, through land and services in a feudal system, to jobs and publicity in a modern democracy. That is why you can breakup a particular machine by abolishing its privileges. But the machine in every coherent group is, I believe, certain to reappear. For privilege is entirely relative, and uniformity is impossible. Imagine the most ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... effort, considered as part of the dominions of the reviving western empire. But it does not appear that those monarchs ever made any other use of their supremacy in these parts than, agreeably to the feudal system which they introduced, to constitute dukes, earls, presidents, and bailiffs, over Rhaetia; to grant out tenures upon the usual feudal terms; and consequently to levy forces in ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... by all those causes which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to increase information, and to secure the liberty of the mass of the people. The invention of printing; the reformation; the destruction of the feudal system, at least in its most objectionable, degrading, and paralizing features; the contentions between the nobility and the sovereigns, and between the latter and the people; gave a stimulus to the human mind, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... empire inaugurated liberty in this respect; it extinguished the despotic sovereignty of the family, the town, and the tribe, and replaced or tempered it by that of the state. But despotic power is the more vexatious the narrower its sphere of action. The old republics and the feudal system opprest individuals much more than did the state. The empire at times persecuted Christianity most severely, but at least it did not arrest its progress. Republics, however, would have overcome the new faith. Even Judaism would have smothered it but for the pressure ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... between the Rajput policy and the feudal system of Europe, Tod's Rajasthan may be consulted. The parallel is not really so close as it appears to be at first sight. In some respects the organization of the Highland clans is more similar to that of the Rajputs than the feudal system ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... own mind Goetz never really burns the bridge behind him. He is at heart a loyalist who recognizes the emperor's claim to his allegiance. As a free imperial knight he feels himself within his right under the feudal system. In resisting his enemies he does not set himself in opposition to governmental authority per se, but only to the abuse of authority by subordinates who disgrace their master and his. And in assuming the leadership ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... political system of that country. In Germany the royal power was less imposing, its prerogatives being divided between the Emperor and a number of small but almost independent vassals, remnants of that feudal system of the Middle Ages which in France and England had been absorbed by the rise of national monarchies. These small principalities explain the weakness of Germany in her relation with foreign powers, and the instability of her political constitution. Continental ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Apply a similar theory to any other human institution, and how patent is its absurdity! Let a republican contend that all other forms of government—the patriarchal system, government by castes, the feudal system, absolute and limited monarchies, oligarchies, and aristocracies—are wholly useless and evil, and were the result of statecraft alone, with no root in human nature or the needs of man. Let one maintain that every system of law (except our own) was an invention of lawyers for private ends. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Emperors. The SHIH CHI (ch. 1 ad init.) speaks only of his victories over Yen Ti and Ch'ih Yu. In the LIU T'AO it is mentioned that he "fought seventy battles and pacified the Empire." Ts'ao Kung's explanation is, that the Yellow Emperor was the first to institute the feudal system of vassals princes, each of whom (to the number of four) originally bore the title of Emperor. Li Ch'uan tells us that the art of war originated under Huang Ti, who received it from his Minister ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... bound to fish for the landlord from whom they hold their ground?-Along certain estates on the Moray coast there are certain villages to which a great many fishermen belong, and I think there is sort of feudal system of the same kind there. There are villages on the estate of Sarklet, near Wick, and at Clyth, and other places, where many of the fishermen have had it in their option to leave the place altogether, and they have usually come down to Wick and been dealt with there ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... of your king! You remember how the King of Poland succumbed to dictation! I am another and a different man, and I care neither for your approbation nor for your blame. It is my purpose to make Hungary prosperous, and therefore I have abolished the feudal system which is unfavorable to the development of the resources of the country. You Magyars would interfere with me. You have a constitution at variance with my laws, and for the sake of a piece of rotten parchment three ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Mercy, has obtained a new meaning of romance through its appropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose Quadrilogue Invectif, in which suffering France implores the nobles, the clergy, the people to show some pity for her miserable state. If Froissart had not discerned the evils of the feudal system, they were patent to the eyes of Alain Chartier. His Livre de l'Esperance, where the oratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares neither the clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry, who forget their duty to their country in wanton self-indulgence; yet his last word, written ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Europe lay further south. But as our Tudor sovereigns were making secure dominion in "these isles," the Byzantine Empire was moving slowly to its end, and favouring circumstances were already making Italy the centre of the world's commerce and culture. There the feudal system, never deeply rooted, was declining slowly, and Italian energy and enterprise now having larger opportunity, seized the commerce of the East as it received vast impulse from the Crusades, and this trade became the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... clan to the clans of Satsuma and Choshu, who have governed Japan ever since. It is impossible to understand Japan or its politics and possibilities without realizing the nature of the governing forces and their roots in the feudal system of the former age. I will therefore first outline these internal movements, before coming to the part which Japan has played in ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... 715 years, from 1278 to 1993, Andorrans lived under a unique co-principality, ruled by French and Spanish leaders (from 1607 onward, the French chief of state and the Spanish bishop of Urgel). In 1993, this feudal system was modified with the titular heads of state retained, but the government transformed into a parliamentary democracy. Long isolated and impoverished, mountainous Andorra achieved considerable prosperity since World War II through its tourist industry. Many immigrants (legal ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... grave. All the antiquarian in him deplored the sudden rupture of a fine old Oxford tradition. All the chivalrous American in him resented the slight on that fair victim of the feudal system, Miss O'Mora. And, at the same time, all the Abimelech V. in him rejoiced at having honoured by word and act the one woman ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... their social conditions. Out of the larger towns, there could scarcely be said to be a gentry at all, in the former; while the latter, a conquered province, had received the frame-work of the English system, possessing Lords of the Manor, and divers other of the fragments of the feudal system. So great was the social equality throughout the interior of the New England provinces, indeed, as almost to remove the commoner distinctions of civilised associations, bringing all classes surprisingly near the same level, with the exceptions of the very low, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... exactions they steadily improved their methods of culture. But as the value of land was increasing, in consequence of the growth of industries, and the nobility had acquired, under the State organization, a power which it never had had under the feudal system, it took possession of the best parts of the communal lands, and did its best to destroy ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the close of the twelfth century this now inconsiderable town was the residence of Joritomo, the founder of the Shogun power, and the arranger of the Japanese feudal system. ] ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Pirates, and became the mightiest and noblest fief of the French crown, its most loyal and most daring vassal. In the years of Duke Richard too, Normandy was completed internally. Her army and her fleet were organised. Her frontiers, her laws, her feudal system came to perfection. Her national character crystallised. Already in the Norman Baronage we can find English names like that of the Harcourts, descended from Bernard the Dane, on a castle-wall we can read the name of Bruce, in a tiny village trace the name of Percy. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... diversity of religions; now there was religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political bodies. Men were brothers from the religious point of view and, only too frequently, deadly enemies from the political point of view. The discord was made worse by the feudal system which was adopted. Even within the same race there was no brotherhood. In effect the clergy as a body did not insist that the noble was a brother of the serf, and did not exact fraternal treatment of the serf. Thus the phrase, "the brotherhood of man," which had ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... on a more satisfactory footing. In the same year he succeeded in passing the Writs Registration Bill, which has affected beneficially the whole of the land system of Scotland. A bill for the purpose of amending the Feudal System of Scotland was introduced during the session of 1870, by Mr. Gordon, but although it was hailed with every symptom of approbation and encouragement by the leading men of the country, it had ultimately to be withdrawn. The same fate ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... on the subject of the present inquiry to notice the quarrels, the feuds, and revolutions, that took place during the dark ages, and the reign of the feudal system, previously to the time of the crusades; when a wild romantic spirit extended civilization a little more widely than before, and laid the foundation for a new order of things, and a new species of wealth and power, different ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... patents from the East India Company, took possession of tracts sixteen miles long, settled colonies upon them, and lived in great state on their "manors," ruling the colonies, working their lands with slaves, and assuming the aristocratic title of "Patroon." Thus a sort of feudal system grew up, in which the "Patroons" exercised an authority well nigh as absolute as that of the mediaeval barons on the Rhine; and this system long flourished side by side with the democratic simplicity of ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... Feudal Ages. The Middle Ages in Europe during which the feudal system prevailed. According to this, land was held by its owners on condition of certain duties, especially military service, performed ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the projection of an ample rock. It is a large edifice, but not a handsome one—the monks reserving their magnificence for their churches—but was surrounded by a circuit of fortifications, which, when there was need, were manned by the vassals of the convent in the style of the Feudal system. This was in some degree the case at the present day. The Abbot, a gentlemanlike and respectable-looking man, attended by several of his monks, received us with the greatest politeness, and conducted us to the building, where we saw two great sculptured vases, or more ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... lessons he left them wrought well for the casting out of all with which the feudal system had debased the patriarchal; and the poverty shared with the clan had powerfully helped: it was spoken against the growing talionic regard of human relations—that, namely, the conditions of a bargain fulfilled on both sides, all is fulfilled ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... chain armour and tournaments—of iron barons and barons' wars—of pilgrims and armed pilgrimages—of forests and forest outlaws—when Henry III. reigned as King of England, and the feudal system, though no longer rampant, was still full of life and energy; when Louis King of France, afterwards canonised as St. Louis, undertook one of the last and most celebrated of those expeditions known as the Crusades, and described as 'feudalism's great ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... first established in England, there was no distinction of freehold and copyhold; the latter, according to Blackstone, was a possession acquired by a vassal subsequent to the Norman feudal system. Copyholders being thus considered as slaves, were, notwithstanding their possessions, deemed unworthy of the franchise; and from this refinement, on the arbitrary principles of the Normans, every copyholder was deprived of a vote, unless he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... of the Virgin Mary became widely popular; the reverence bestowed upon the Virgin was extended to the female sex in general, and as a vassal owed obedience to his feudal overlord, so did he owe service and devotion to his lady. Moreover, under the feudal system, the lady might often be called upon to represent her husband's suzerainty to his vassals, when she was left in charge of affairs during his absence in time of war. Unmarried women were inconspicuous figures in ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor |
