"Feudalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to indicate that I don't want to cross the border-line, and that what I desire is the society of interesting and congenial people, not the society of my social superior. This is not unworldliness in the least, merely hedonism. Feudalism runs in the blood of these people, and they feel, not consciously but quite instinctively, that the confer a benefit by making my acquaintance. "No doubt but ye are the people," as Job said, but I do not want to rise in the social scale. It would be the earthen pot and the ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lord cannot be expected to have sympathized with such grand patriarchal ideas; they were much too like those of the kingdom of heaven; and feudalism itself had by this time crumbled away—not indeed into monthly, but into half yearly wages. The marquis, notwithstanding, was touched by the old man's words, matter of fact as his ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... roaring trade by defending Tory institutions. They will say that they have been obliged to shift their ground, but that they hope to work with better results from their new position. The business of the party is to prevail upon Household Suffrage to accept the survivals of feudalism, and a verdict in the new court of appeal that shall ratify the old creed. It is a creditable enterprise. Will it succeed? It seems but too likely that the efforts contemplated will only serve to weaken the institutions ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... I turn from any European precedents to that political outcome of the British mind, the Constitution of the United States. (Because we must always remember that while our political institutions in Britain are a patch-up of feudalism, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian monarchist traditions and urgent merely European necessities, a patch-up that has been made quasi-democratic in a series of after-thoughts, the American Constitution is a real, deliberate creation of the English-speaking intelligence.) The President ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... there is but little, probability of its being attempted in the New,—where the youthful nations now springing into life, will, if they are wise, make the most of the free career before them, and unencumbered with the costly trappings of feudalism, adopt, like their northern neighbors, that form of government, whose simplicity and cheapness are the best guarantees for its ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... popularly supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it has been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introduced into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar. Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being introduced from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism was introduced from England into Normandy, and thence spread throughout France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to show that feudalism was a very vague and elusive system, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... character of Otto, who holds rebellious nobles and populace in check, who teaches his master how to be a servant of the State, and who, by saving the heir to the throne and praying that he may deserve the loyalty shown his father, points forward to the better day when feudalism shall give way to unselfish ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... translator was a Castilian or a Portuguese. On these points judgment must be suspended. There can, however, be no hesitation in accepting Cervantes' verdict on Amadis de Gaula as the "best of all the books of this kind that have ever been written.'' It is the prose epic of feudalism, and its romantic spirit, its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its flowing style have entranced readers of such various types as Francis I. and Charles V., Ariosto and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... bronzed beneath the suns of the West, the blue-eyed Minerva and the yellow-haired Achilles (physical characteristics of the North); which introduce, amongst a pastoral people, warlike aristocracies and limited monarchies, the feudalism of the classic time,—even these might serve you to trace back the primeval settlements of the Hellenes to the same region whence, in later times, the Norman warriors broke on the dull and savage hordes of the Celt, and became the Greeks of the Christian ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Feudalism was, yet the coming of it was inevitable. What else than Feudalism could have followed upon the breakdown of that great centralized governmental machine known as the Roman Empire? Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly procedure ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... its History III. Roman Britain; A Civilization which did not civilize IV. The Coming of the Saxons[1]; the Coming of the Normans V. The Norman Sovereigns[1] VI. The Angevins, or Plantagenets; Rise of the English Nation[1] VII. The Self-Destruction of Feudalism VIII. Absolutism of the Crown; the Reformation; the New Learning[1] IX. The Stuart Period; the Divine Right of Kings versus the Divine Right of the People X. India gained; America lost—Parliamentary Reform—Government by the People A ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... in the art of statesmanship, and after a long session, that lasted until September 14, 1791, the constitution then proposed was still incomplete; and had to be submitted to another assembly to be completed. They however accomplish some things worthy of note. In 1789 they abolish feudalism, root and branch; and the payment of tithes. The latter meant the separation of church and state, in matters of support and government; and this event seemed to the deists, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... some far off and veiled, others near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;—and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... instincts and sentiments were comparatively weak, for they were not creative. He has exercised his genius in the creation of no character in which religious sentiment or religious passion is dominant. He could not, of course,—he, the poet of feudalism,—overlook religion as an element of the social organization of Europe, but he did not seize Christian ideas in their essence, or look at the human soul in its direct relations with God. And just think of the field of humanity closed to him! For sixteen hundred years, remarkable men and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... surprise the astute Patrick Henry Hanway; it had been foreseen, and he met it with prompt money. He had made his alliances with divers railway corporations and other big companies, and set in to overturn that feudalism in politics which had theretofore been dominant. The aristocrats felt the attack upon their caste; they came forth for that issue and ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... teeming millions with all its wealth and might, they seem to me to typify human freedom and the struggle for it. Thence came the vikings that roved the seas, serving no man as master; and through the dark ages of feudalism no lord long bent the neck of those stout yeomen to the yoke. Germany, forgetting honor, treaties, and history, is trying to do it now in Slesvig, south of the Nibs, and she will as surely fail. The day of long-delayed justice, when dynasties by the grace ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... cage of a staircase. The huge bracketed cor- nice (one of the features of Langeais) which is merely ornamental, as it is not machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on the rains of feudalism. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old—a thin veneer over a century of feudalism—and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent injury and injustice. His own people ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... together, not by voluntary cooperation, but by strong compulsion. Down to the period of Meiji, and even for some time afterward, it was liable to split and fall asunder at any moment that the central coercive power showed signs of weakness. We may call it a feudalism; but it resembled European feudalism only as ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... about Henry was doubtless the same. They were as willing to swear fealty to him as to Roderick O'Connor, more so in fact, seeing that he was stronger than Roderick, but that was all. To Henry and to his successors this recognition carried with it all the complicated dependence of feudalism, which in England meant that his land and everything else which a man possessed was his only so long as he did service for it to the king. To these new Irish subjects, who had never heard of feudalism, it entailed nothing of the sort. They regarded it as a mere vague promise of adhesion, binding ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... peculiar business or family relations require their services at home, Congress wisely inserted 'the $300 clause.' In this they but followed the established custom in most nations since the days of feudalism. No part of the act has been more violently assailed than this, none more unjustly. It is asserted that this clause discriminates against the poor, in favor of the rich; that it recognizes unjust distinctions between ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... imagination quite overlooked the fact that they were ideas long since dead, beyond hope of resurrection. And it is but the statement of palpable truth to declare that whatever ideas the South is fighting for now, are of a like obsolete character. The glory of feudalism, as a system of society, is departed; and its attendant glories of knight-errantry and human slavery are departed with it. Don Quixote thought to reestablish the one, and the South deludes itself with the hope of reestablishing the other. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for legal coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were released from liability to punishment ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... and think of it sentimentally, as it's pictured in the stories and songs—a sort of Christmas-tree Germany. They don't know about the Germany that's grown up—the Germany of iron and coal kings, that combines all the cruelty of feudalism with modern efficiency and science—the Beast with the ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... is, as it were, held in from delirium and the Inane by his Formulas! They are withal the most beneficent, indispensable of human equipments: blessed he who has a skin and tissues, so it be a living one, and the heart-pulse everywhere discernible through it. Monachism, Feudalism, with a real King Plantagenet, with real Abbots Samson, and their other living realities, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the revival of classical learning. The history of free thought in it is complicated, by being to some extent the struggle of deeds as well as of ideas, a social as well as a religious struggle. It was the period which witnessed both the dissolution of feudalism and the theocratic centralization in the popedom; and while reason struggled on the one side against the dogmatic system, it struggled on the other to assert the rights of the state against the church, and to put restraints upon the privileges, dominion, and wealth, of the pope and clergy. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... my boy—free because she has learned to help herself, and will remain the plaything or the slave of others no longer. France is free; she has learned to help herself. We in Ireland have our Bastille to storm and our feudalism to destroy." ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... baldachino-like porch as airily graceful and delicately florid as the body to which it is so lightly attached is majestically stern and scornful of ornament. The meeting here of those two great forces, the Renaissance and feudalism, is like that of Psyche and Mars. But in expression the porch is Gothic, for although the arches are round-headed, they are surmounted by an embroidery of foliated gables and soaring pinnacles. It can scarcely be said that the style has been broken, but ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... nation in Europe. Poetry, philosophy, and art thence found their way to France, England, and Germany, being greatly assisted by the invention of printing, which just then was beginning to make books cheaper than they ever had been. At the same time feudalism was ruined, because the invention of gunpowder had previously been changing the art of war. For example, the King of France, Louis XI, as well as the King of England, Henry VII, had entire disposal of the national artillery; and therefore overawed the barons and armored knights. ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... ascertain their exact condition. So long as he has money enough in his pocket to pay his labourers and buy a little stock, my father, like every British farmer, is content. The fact is, he is a serf as much as his men, and until we get rid of feudalism ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... employ,—what is thought in thy clear light of those who expect in exchange for a few shillings spent in presents or medicines, a few kind words, a little casual thought or care, such a mighty payment of gratitude? Gratitude! Under the weight of old feudalism their minds were padlocked by habit against the light; they might be grateful then, for they thought their lords were as gods, of another frame and spirit than theirs, and that they had no right to have the same hopes and wants, scarcely to suffer from the same ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... and inheritance through females is felt first in connection with situations of honor and profit. At the time of the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands the government was a brutal despotism, presenting many of the features of feudalism; the people prostrated themselves before the king and before objects which he had touched, and a man suffered death whose shadow fell upon the king, or who went uncovered within the shadow of the king's house, or even looked upon the king by day.[152] But descent was in the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... altogether to bring tranquillity. After 1381 a full century of social chaos supervened, merging at times into actual civil war, until, in 1485, Henry Tudor came in after his victory at Bosworth, pledged to destroy the whole reactionary class which incarnated feudalism. For the feudal soldier was neither flexible nor astute, and allowed himself to be caught between the upper and the nether millstone. While industrial and commercial capital had been increasing in the towns, capitalistic methods of farming had invaded the country, and, as police ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... for the land and the struggle for the control of industry will be, in Spain, as I think everywhere, parallel rather than unified. One thing is certain, however long the fire smoulders before it flares high to make a clean sweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudalism together, Cordova, hoary city of the caliphs, where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about the zigzag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment comes, be the center of organization of the agrarian revolution. When I was leaving Spain I rode with some young men who ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... instance, in which the horrible truth is frequently too evident, and only equalled by the fact that after lust had played out its passion, unfortunate women, taken in captivity, could, by divine command, be turned adrift to rot or starve. In Christian Feudalism we find nothing much better. If I have read history correctly, and I may be wrong—the upper-grade women in mediaeval Europe, who were adored, not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again. While Richard ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying below me, and I tried to imagine that I saw coming ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... no longer supreme. Money ranks with it. Everyone has a chance of obtaining money. Ergo, we are a democratic nation."[626] "With the change in economic conditions, with the growth of manufacture, the rise of the bourgeoisie meant the downfall of feudalism. The plutocrat supplanted the baron, capitalism became king. The 'old nobility' of England to-day are successful brewers, bankers, and traders, and the Nonconformist Conscience dominates in the place of Holy Mother Church."[627] "The representatives of this class in Parliament repealed ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... lord's name, these small-holders defended themselves better against fiscal tyranny, or were included in the immunities of their patrons. So was formed, under the cover of patronage, a sort of African feudalism. Augustin's father, who owned vineyards, was ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... an era of change in all departments of life. Chivalry, the great "poetic lie," died with feudalism, and the relations between men and women became more natural and reasonable than in the preceding centuries. Women were liberated from the narrow sphere to which they had been relegated in the minstrel's song and poet's rhapsody, but as ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... days, barbarous though they undoubtedly were, law and justice were more respected and more frequently appealed to in Norway than in almost any other country. Liberty, crushed elsewhere under the deadweight of feudalism, found a home in the bleak North, and a rough but loving welcome from the piratical, sea-roving! She did not, indeed, dwell altogether scathless among her demi-savage guardians, who, if their perceptions of right and wrong were somewhat confused, might have urged ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... restricted; but also without result. Indeed thirteen years before the Revolution, in 1776, a minister of the Reformed party in France, the famous Turgot, abolished the guilds, but the privileged world of medieval feudalism considered itself, and with perfect justice, in mortal danger if its vital principle of privilege did not extend to all classes of society; and so, six months after the abolition of the guilds, the king was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... to show Xenophon struggling with the hard parts of the later Persian system. The theory of Persian feudalism is too high-strung for these grand satraps, rulers of provinces as big as ordinary kingdoms. It tends to snap, and from the beginning did. The archic man has no charm to compel his followers to archic virtue. It is a negative {episteme} after all. Does Xenophon realise this, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... state. The power which is left to a member of the ruling class is also part of his dignity. Thus we have an amalgamation between the conceptions of private property and public trust. 'In so far as the ideal of feudalism is perfectly realised,' it has been said,[27] 'all that we can call public law is merged in private law; jurisdiction is property; office is property; the kingship itself is property.' This feudal ideal was still preserved with many of the institutions descended from feudalism. The king's ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... great drama occupied a period of four Hundred years, during which all the resources of the Irish clans were arrayed against Anglo-Norman feudalism, which had finally to succumb; so that Erin remained the only spot in Europe where feudal ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... occasionally the thrill of coming activities which were struggling for birth in that pregnant mother-night which seemed to be shrouding the sunset of the century—and they were saved from the immediate horrors of a revolution. Feudalism and the Pope had left our fathers obedience, en masse, and Luther had planted hope through the reformation of the individual. So the great wave of aspiration after a patent scheme of universal brotherhood passed over the people of these realms ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... despotism and our legislation; for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... to me. Caligula was worried in a like manner, I believe. We had near us there a little section of the old world which was trying, in a half-hearted fashion, to maintain itself in the midst of a democracy. It was the manorial life of the patroons—a relic of ancient feudalism which had its beginning in 1629, when The West Indies Company issued its charter of Privileges and Exemptions. That charter offered to any member of the company who should, within four years, bring fifty adults to the New Netherlands ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... Empire fell civilization in western Europe was not on a high plane; indeed, the feudalism that followed was not much above barbarism. The people were living in a manner that was not very much unlike the communal system under which the serfs of Russia lived only a few years ago. Each centre of population was a sort of military ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... a worldly triumph, and crowning themselves kings. And over the entire body of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and sobriety and industry, its ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... fountain-head, to the archives, in order to gain some idea of the sanguinary anarchy that desolated South Italy in those days. The horrors of feudalism, aided by the earthquake of 1784 and by the effects of Cardinal Ruffo's Holy Crusade, had converted the country into a pandemonium. In a single year (1809) thirty-three thousand crimes were recorded against the brigands of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... may be asserted that the social concept of feudalism lent itself to the teaching of the same lesson. For by it society was organised upon a system of land tenure whereby each held what was his of one higher than he, and was himself responsible for those beneath ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... Langeais), which is merely ornamental, as it is not machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on the ruins of feudalism. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... was one of my religions. To this day I can never climb the staircase of some old manor-house but my foolish imagination must needs picture Mlle. Armande standing there, like the spirit of feudalism. I can never read old chronicles but she appears before my eyes in the shape of some famous woman of old times; she is Agnes Sorel, Marie Touchet, Gabrielle; and I lend her all the love that was lost in her heart, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... the population of Gaul were slaves. Charlemagne made Alcuin the present of an estate on which there were twenty thousand slaves. Especially in times of scarcity, as in 805 and 806, their lot was a miserable one. At such times, they fled in crowds to the monasteries. The social state was that of feudalism "in all but the development of that independence in the greater lords, which was delayed by the strength of Karl, but fostered, at the same time, by his wars and his policy towards the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... no maiden's idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all this hollow ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... purely economic point of view. It quickened the growth of the world's wealth by putting men of enterprise in places where their work was most handsomely rewarded, and their lives were unhampered by the many bars to success that remnants of feudalism and social restrictions put in their way in old countries; and it cleared the home labour market and so helped the workers in their uphill struggle for better conditions and a chance of a real life. But when the guns begin to shoot, the question must arise whether we ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... second Mahomet arising in the nineteenth century may excite a smile, but when we consider the steps now taken by the Mormons to concentrate their numbers, and their ultimate design to unite themselves with the Indians, it will not be at all surprising, if scenes unheard of since the days of feudalism should soon ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... feudalism into Canada about the year 1527. He had two objects in view: (a) to create a Canadian aristocracy, (b) to establish an easy system of dividing land among settlers. This system of holding land came to be known as Seigniorial Tenure. The seignior received vast tracts of land from the King, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... at the expense of another class. The industrial revolution followed, as he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method. But it is taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new mind. Feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for they transferred power from the landed nobility to the manufacturing centers. But capitalism rather than a social humanism took its place. Production and commerce were carried on as if the new science ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... this reposed, however, on a very incongruous foundation. Feudalism, mediaevalism, autocracy, had built up a structure of caste distinction and class privilege to which custom, age, stagnation and ignorance, lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The Church, most privileged of all corporations, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... themselves at the head of it—late in the afternoon, it is true, when the mob, disappointed in their hopes of loot, made a stand in the narrow streets to the cries of 'Viva la Libertad! Down with Feudalism!' (I wonder what they imagine feudalism to be?) 'Down with the Goths and Paralytics.' I suppose the Senores Gamacho and Fuentes knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the Assembly they called themselves ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and other sources, and, finally, we present a selection from his poems, containing, it is hoped, everything of high and permanent value which he wrote in that medium. The "Address to the Historical Society" and the essay on "Udalism and Feudalism," which were reprinted in the edition of Davis's Prose Writings published by Walter Scott in 1890, are here omitted—the former because it seemed possible to fill with more valuable and mature work the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Wellington! Napoleon was not of the wood of which kings are made, but of the marble of the gods. Let me tell you the "code Napoleon" carried light not only into the Ghettos, but into many another noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The world wants earthquakes and thunderstorms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant. This Paris needs a scourge of God, and the moment France gives Germany a pretext, there will be sackcloth and ashes, or prophecy has ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was the supreme type of that sheer individualism which had burst forth from the restraints of feudalism. He stood alone fighting his commercial contests with persistent personal doggedness. Beneath his occasional benevolence and his religious professions was a wild ardor in the checkmating or bankruptcy of his competitors. These were his enemies; he fought them with every mercantile weapon, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... period. The rural population, no longer existing as a rural community, sank into stagnation. There was no longer a common interest, a social order turning their minds to larger than individual ends. Where feudalism was preserved, the feudal chief, if the feeling of noblesse oblige was strong, might act as a centre of progress, but where this was lacking social decay set in. The difficulty of moving the countryman, which has become traditional, is not due to the fact that ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... almost mysterious; towers were at that time to be found in the mouldering lines of its earliest defences, which belonged to the age of Charlemagne, or one still earlier; battlements adapted to a mode of warfare anterior even to that of feudalism or romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges of Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of a corresponding character. Festivals were annually celebrated at a short distance from the walls, which had descended from a dateless antiquity. Every thing which met the eye spoke ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... labor in the cattle zones is, therefore, very slight, except in the case of a few populations subsisting largely upon agriculture. The ruling classes, therefore, instead of owning many personal slaves, make a practice of subjugating the agricultural groups in such a way as to constitute a kind of feudalism. As land is free the enslaved groups can be made to serve the free ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of the law, which they have never understood, and of which even to this day they have but a scanty knowledge. No province of France has preserved more old traditions or longer endured the abuses of feudalism. Nowhere else, perhaps, has the title of the lord of the manor been handed down, as hitherto with us, to the owners of certain estates; and nowhere is it so easy to frighten the people with reports of some absurd and impossible political event. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... the ancient spirit of the South which had risen before in the cause of liberty. Feudalism and the oppression of the peasants would return under the rule of the Bourbons, he assured them. They began to look upon the abdicated Emperor as the Angel of Deliverance. The people of Lyons were equally enthusiastic, winning warmer words ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... in manifold gradations to the magnates, of whom sometimes a single individual is appropriately designated as the "king" of a branch of industry. By a sort of combination of the two ways in which graded superiority and inferiority of the group come into being the feudalism of the Middle Ages arose. So long as the full citizen—either Greek, Roman, or Teutonic—knew no subordination under an individual, there existed for him on the one hand complete equality with those of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... foundations, was formerly the imperial palace from which issued all power and law. Here the French kings reveled in voluptuousness, with their prisoners groaning beneath their feet. This strong-hold of feudalism had now become the tomb of the monarchy. In one of the most loathsome of these cells, Maria Antoinette, the daughter of the Caesars, had languished in misery as profound as mortals can suffer, till, in the endurance of every conceivable ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... eastern counties'; and therefore, when two years later it was reported he had said, 'Knaves rule about the King. I trust to give them a buffet one day,' Cromwell was glad to seize the opportunity of simultaneously striking at feudalism in the West, and of dealing a blow at the inflexible Cardinal Pole, the Courtenays' kinsman. The Marquis was at once arrested on the charge of being an accomplice of the Cardinal, and ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... opinion, and is thus the prime source of much that appears in consciousness to have no connection with them. He applies his doctrine in particular to two revolutions, one in the past, the other in the future. The revolution in the past is that of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, which finds its expression, according to him, particularly in the French Revolution. The one in the future is the revolution of the wage- earners, or proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, which is to establish the Socialist ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any more a system under which their energies could have scope to move. Thenceforward not the Catholic Church, but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... with his lawyer-like qualities. He was, perhaps, the man of all men who represented most completely the finished feudal system, and who took it most to heart. His law, his romance, and his religion, his self-command, and his terrible fury were all a part of this innate feudalism, and exercised within its limits; and we must suppose that he thoroughly felt his responsibility as the chief of his feudatories, while at the same time he had no idea of his having any responsibilities towards the lower part of his subjects. ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... factor that makes one sure that this trend toward local autonomy is a reality and not merely one of those meaningless shiftings of power which confuse the observer, is that it is in accord with Chinese temperament, tradition and circumstance. Feudalism is past and gone two thousand years ago, and at no period since has China possessed a working centralized government. The absolute empires which have come and gone in the last two millenniums existed by virtue of non-interference ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... grew at the expense of empire and papacy above, so they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and baronies below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the headsman's axe. This was a conspicuous feature of the feuds of the Trastamare in Spain, of the English invasions ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... of the world, where an hereditary, or at least traditional, despotism has never ceased since the earliest social records, and where a mode of thought infinitely more degrading than any feudalism has become ingrained in the blood and soul of the chief races, presents far more favourable conditions to the growth and development of the true adventurer than are offered in any free country. For in a free country the majority can rise and overthrow the favourite of fortune, whereas ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the problem, their efforts were unavailing. At the Convention of Balta-Liman between Russia and Turkey, where 'coercion' was coupled with 'remedial measures,' an ineffectual attempt was made to ameliorate the wretched condition of the peasantry on the old lines of feudalism; but it was not until the country became autonomous and the legitimate representatives of the people took the matter in hand, that an efficient remedy was applied. Then, as the reader will find detailed in the following pages,[1] more than four hundred ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... these personal punishments is no doubt one of the last remains of feudalism. In not very remote times, serfdom which bordered on slavery was still in existence in Cho-sen. Men and women became private property either by the acquiring of the land on which they lived, or, by purchase, or by way of execution for non-payment of debts, for under this convenient law creditors ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... announced a new and anarchic doctrine hostile to all standing treaties: 'Our reasons are that the river takes its rise in France and that a nation which has obtained its liberty cannot recognize a system of feudalism, much less adhere to it'.[1] The answer of William Pitt, which in effect declared war upon the Revolution, contains a memorable statement of the attitude towards public law which England held then, as she holds it to-day: ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... say women ought not to vote," said Lincoln. "That's another relic of feudalism. I think that the women you and I know are as well qualified ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... were rapidly reducing the poorer freemen—many of whom were the descendants of an earlier race or of conquered tribes—to a state of serfdom. The system (if such a word can be applied at all) was in fact a bad form of feudalism without its advantages. There was no central overlord (like those in other countries who gradually developed into the sovereigns of mediaeval kingdoms and thus became able to enforce peace and progress), each petty chief being ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... evil plight which is most detested and feared by peoples; they have more than once borne, faced, and almost wooed it, and there are woful epochs, the memory of which has remained dear. It is in the political character of feudalism, in the nature and shape of its power, that we find lurking that element of popular aversion which, in France at least, it has never ceased ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of feudalism that helped to make this common subject and spirit of mediaeval literature was the minstrel, who was attached to every well-appointed castle. This picturesque poet—gleeman, trouvere or troubadour sang heroic ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, of Old Japan, of the Japan that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did, in the south, avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It is still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh, unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to thank us for, and we should soon hear the last of these noisy, ranting idiots who are eternally waving flags like lunatics and mouthing absurd phrases about imperialism and patriotism, national destiny, and rubbish of that sort. Our duty is to humanity, and not to any decayed symbols of feudalism. The talk of patriotism and imperialism is a gigantic fraud, and the tyranny of it makes our names hated throughout the world. We have no right to enforce our sway upon the peace-loving farmers and the ignorant blacks of South Africa. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers beyond the ordinary and usual limits of wages and profits. In reality, it was one of the forerunners of an incoming feudalistic sway, without the advantages to the wage worker that the lowly possessed under medieval feudalism. It was also an apparent polished improvement, but nothing more, over the processes at the coal mines in Pennsylvania, Illinois and other States where the miners were paid the most meager wages, and were compelled to return those wages to the coal companies and bear ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... modified perhaps) could be so administered and enforced upon the blacks in South Carolina as to keep them in practical slavery. They could, while bearing the name of freeman, be legally subjected to all the oppressive features of serfdom, peonage, and feudalism combined, without possessing the right to claim, much less the power to exact, any of the prerogatives and amenities belonging to either of those systems of human bondage. All this could be done without violating ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... hundred years ago? What if there be such a thing as cumulative acquirement for the race of men, so that a new generation starts with an available capital of associations and ideas of which the generation last preceding it owned but a part? Take such words as "feudalism," "the Crusades," "the Renaissance," "the printing press," consider how much they mean to us, and then remember that to a man of the third century they would have been empty sounds conveying absolutely no meaning. What all this goes to show is that human nature is a map which is continually ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a masterless man" (p. 83). As Mr. Wells has evidently read a good deal about Japan, he no doubt takes this expression from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct class of the "ronin" or masterless man, who had, by death or otherwise, lost his feudal superior. But is it really, to our Western sense, a misfortune to be a masterless man? Does the healthy human spirit suffer ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... not a mere form of speech, a fashion, nor yet party tactics. The bourgeoisie perceives correctly that all the weapons, which it forged against feudalism, turn their edges against itself; that all the means of education, which it brought forth, rebel against its own civilization; that all the gods, which it made, have fallen away from it. It understands that all its so-called ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... system was based on property. Chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism. In ancient Athens, for example, those Athenians who owned the property of the City-State, and the slaves with which to work it, also governed the nation. Under feudalism, the nobility owned the country and governed it. The more land a noble owned, the larger his voice in government. ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of his discourse, and by adroit digressions he applied the doctrine of his system to feudalism. The poetry—religious and profane—and the abrupt eloquence of that period had a grand opening in this vast theory, wherein the Doctor had amalgamated all the philosophical systems of the ancients, and from which he brought them out again classified, ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... possessed by English women were also bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended from Feudalism, in which social order the person did not exist. The social order consisted of property alone, and the claims of property, that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual. Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown, chamberlains, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... been a fossil—it should be a plant; statute law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy, and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it would put everything in the market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself. By this means it has done its work; it has ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... furnished the instance of a community composed of men of small estates who very rarely had to use a mark for their name, and imbued by the spirit of individual independence toned into a respect for law, which, on the decline of feudalism, began to play a part on the national stage. Thus the political character of Boston was sharply defined and firmly fixed. It started in the republican way, went on for over a century in republican habits, and had the priceless heirloom of principles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... the slow formation of small states, the era of slavery, then feudalism and serfdom, and at last the birth of modern nations, the development of machinery, and the vast nexus of exploitation known as capitalism—the stage which at one blow had been utterly destroyed just as it had been ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... curtseyed to their beaux, Who smartly raised their gay chapeaux. The Jews The Jews he introduced from Spain Bringing much knowledge in their train Of Arts and Science; but 'Longshanks' Expelled them with no word of thanks. Feudalism These were the well known Feudal days, Tenants were slaves in many ways To mighty Lords who owned the land And ruled them with an iron hand. Not free from duties were the Lords, The King could call ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... quasi-federal empire. For, in nearly all the mountainous parts of Turkey, the power of the government is almost nominal, and even up to a very recent period the position of the Dere Beys savoured strongly of feudalism. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... four leagues from Mexico, belonging to the Dowager Marquesa de Vivanco, where we breakfasted with a large party. It is a fine solid mass of building, and as you enter the courtyard, through a deep archway, the great outhouses, stables, and especially the granary, look like remains of feudalism, they are on so large and magnificent a scale. It is an immense and valuable property, producing both maize and maguey, and the hospitality of the family, who are amongst our earliest friends here, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... amalgamation of the small German States in the great empire of Germany. The second law of political motion is the doctrine of the independence of all true States, and the equality of all States to each other. This had its growth in feudalism; and all the chief wars of modern times have been the result of the efforts of nature to establish this law of independence. The doctrine of intervention is a modification of the preceding law, and is applicable when the law of necessity demands its use, ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... the religious, as well as of the political, life of the country were relaxed. In both one and the other the high feeling of faith was enervated; and this deficiency was sensibly felt in a lowering of general tone, both in the domain of intellect and in that of practice. The spirit of feudalism and of the old chivalry had all but departed, but had left a vacuum which was not yet supplied. As for loyalty, the half-hearted feeling of necessity or expedience, which for more than half the century was the main support of the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... manifestations, so pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate between advance and retrogression—this Goliardic poetry stands alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited, interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and, finally, because it ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... to preserve property in their families, the right of women to inherit became slowly established as civilization advanced. In Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a woman to hold property were clearly settled. In the reversion to force under feudalism, woman's rights to outside property suffered; but they have been gradually restored during the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized lands, a woman's rights to property, inherited or definitely given her or purchased by her, ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... Ages when armour-clad knights found their chief recreation in running lances through one another; when the overworked, underfed labourers of the field cringed and cowered before every lordly whim. Most readers seem to get their notions of chivalry from Scott's Talisman, and their ideas on feudalism from the same author's immortal Ivanhoe. While scholars keep up a merry disputation as to the historical origin of the feudal system, the public imagination goes steadily on with its own curious picture of ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... banniere, banner, elliptical for seigneur or chevalier banneret, Med. Lat. banneretus), in feudalism, the name given to those nobles who had the right to lead their vassals to battle under their own banner. Ultimately bannerets obtained a place in the feudal hierarchy between [v.03 p.0354] barons and knights bachelors, which has given rise to the idea that they are the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... certainly equal to those of our own in the same class of society. No sooner have they been fairly introduced to American and European civilization than they have taken a stride, of four or five centuries at a single leap, from feudalism in its most ultra form to constitutional government. When an American squadron opened the port of Yokohama, in 1853, to the commerce of the world, it also opened that hermetically sealed land to the introduction of progressive ideas; and though, unfortunately, the elements of civilization ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... a notion that the fittest engine to redeem England from the mischiefs and mistakes of oligarchical feudalism was to be found in the imposing machinery and deception of the Roman Church; overlooking the great truth that it was not the Romish Church, but the genius of Christianity, working its vast but silent change, which was really guiding on the chariot of civilization; but in this broad ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... here...." They do not archaise as to the details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and consistently archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental Greece," in the Achaean times. They give "in all probability a pretty accurate description" of the loose feudalism of Mycenaean Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... wisest monarchs of his age, and was surnamed by his people John 'the Perfect.' By his internal policy he, like his contemporaries Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England, broke the power of his nobility. His people aided him, for they were wearied of the pressure of feudalism, and he concentrated the whole power of the realm in his own hands. He took up the projects which had been left untouched since the death of his great-uncle, Prince Henry the Navigator. The dream of his life was ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... read the best of his novels we feel ourselves transported to the 'distant Cheviot's blue;' mixing with the sturdy dalesmen, and the tough indomitable puritans of his native land; for their sakes we can forgive the exploded feudalism and the faded romance which he attempted with less success to galvanise into life. The pleasure of that healthy open-air life, with that manly companion, is not likely to diminish; and Scott as its exponent may still retain a hold upon our affections ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... physically and morally, in these old free towns; there is intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty gabled houses; the mediaeval spirit blights what revival of healthiness may exist in these commonwealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as unhuman as possible, standing grimacing at the blood spurting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... action which we to-day describe as 'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in 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 ...
— Progress and History • Various
... period that England was under the dominion of the Saxons, the single name was prevalent. But that was changed later when feudalism was established and the different lords began to gather their vassals, and to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... results of the clash of antagonistic principles which had been working for centuries, so the uprising and war in Japan in 1868-70, which resulted in national unity, one government, one ruler, one flag, the overthrow of feudalism, the abolition of ancient abuses, and the making of new Japan, resulted from agencies set in motion over a century before. Foreign intercourse and the presence of aliens on the soil gave the occasion, but not the ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... II. or Edward I.; but his work was the indispensable preliminary to theirs, for a strong monarchy was the first requisite of the state. To establish the power of the crown was William's principal care. The disintegrating tendencies of feudalism had already been visible under the Anglo-Saxon kings. William, while he established fully developed feudalism as a social, territorial, and military system in his new dominions, took measures to prevent it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... inflict, either on the countries through which they passed, or those in which they settled. About the sixth century, Europe obtained some degree of tranquillity, in consequence of the introduction of feudalism; the most singular event in the annals of history. At first, it produced a general anarchy; but the system of subordination upon which it was grounded, contained in it the germ of regular government, and even, of jurisprudence. Its effects were first visible in the various codes of ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... himself later of having been not quite free from the prevalent peccadillo of rather deep drinking); and still and always read. He joined the 'Speculative Society' in January 1791, and, besides taking part in the debates on general subjects, read papers on Feudalism, Ossian, and Northern Mythology, in what were to ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... company with the American missionary (once a marine in Perry's squadron, who later invented the jin-riki-sha), to see a hill-temple and to study the wayside shrines around Yokohama. Seven weeks' stay in the city of Yedo—then rising out of the debris of feudalism to become the Imperial capital, T[o]ki[o], enabled me to see some things now so utterly vanished, that by some persons their previous existence is questioned. One of the most interesting characters I met personally was Fukuzawa, the reformer, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... our criticisms while we read. Caleb Williams is a capital story; it is also a living and humane book, which conveys with rare power and reasoned emotion the revolt of a generous mind against the oppressions of feudalism and the stupidities of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... a sorrowful thing to Alister to seem for a moment to follow the example of the recreant chiefs whose defection to feudalism was the prelude to their treachery toward their people, and whose faithlessness had ruined the highlands. But unlike Glengarry or "Esau" Reay, he desired to sell his land that he might keep his people, care for them, and ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... thankfulness, since the added myriads have been happy, and the wealth has flowed not to a few, but to all. But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy, and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy, primogeniture in the inheritance of land. You had established, though under the semblance of dependence on the English crown, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... A great lady, of a type we're not familiar with, that's all. A relic of feudalism. I give you fair ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... clang and throbbing hum of the bells and in the direction of the old cemetery. Passing through the clumsy tower-gate that lifts its grimy bulk sullenly, like a huge head-stone over the grave of a dead time of feudalism, he reached the burial-ground and entered the quiet enclosure. The usual touching reverence of the Germans for their dead was strikingly manifest around him. The humbler mounds, walled up with rough stones ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... Northmen Normandy Given to Invaders Feudalism Decline of Kingship Ascendancy of the Church Hugh Capet "Truce of God" William ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the aristocratic and oligarchical government of the Hanoverian period, just as that system had been a step from the kingly power of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which, in turn, had arisen upon the ruins of feudalism and military monarchical power. It is this gradual growth, this "gently broadening down from precedent to precedent," which makes the British constitution of to-day the more or less perfected result of centuries of experience and struggle. ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... all England, whose soever men they were, and all bowed down before him and became his men, and swore oaths of fealty to him, that they would be faithful to him against all other men." It was this oath which marked the difference between English and Continental feudalism, though they were now in other respects alike. On the Continent each tenant swore to be faithful to his lord, but only the lords who held directly from the crown swore to be faithful to the king. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... arch-plotter at work. His name is Hunger. Let us be glad that Italy can't enrich herself by manufactures. Who knows? The revolution against militarism may begin there, as that against feudalism did in France. Talk of enthusiasm! How should we feel if we read in the paper some morning that the Italian people had formed into an army of peace—refusing to pay ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... sales of cattle in the history of the ranch. A chapel and three new cottages had been built without loss of time and at very little expense. A number of children had been born to the soil, while the natives were as loyal to their master as subjects in the days of feudalism. There was but one thing lacking to fill the cup to overflowing—the ranchero was childless. Possessed with a love of the land so deep as to be almost his religion, he felt the need ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... difficulty in carrying out his plans at Stamboul, how much more hard must they have been to accomplish in the provinces; and of these, as I have before said, Bosnia was the most strongly imbued with a spirit of independent feudalism. ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... a convenient place he observed its final course: from the poles amid the trees it leaped across the moat, over the girdling wall, and thence by a tremendous stretch towards the keep where, to judge by sound, it vanished through an arrow-slit into the interior. This fossil of feudalism, then, was the journey's-end of the wire, and not the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... is the development of the "Roland Saga" in French literature; for, even setting aside much legendary lore and accumulated tradition, the Roland of the old epic is a perfect hero of the early days of feudalism, when chivalry was in its very beginnings, before the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary added the grace of courtesy to its heroism. Evidently Roland had grown in importance before the "Chanson de Roland" took its present form, for we find the rearguard skirmish magnified ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... of isolation succeed. In the Netherlands, as throughout Europe, a thousand obscure and slender rills are slowly preparing the great stream of universal culture. Five dismal centuries of feudalism: during which period there is little talk of human right, little obedience to divine reason. Rights there are none, only forces; and, in brief, three great forces, gradually arising, developing themselves, acting upon each other, and upon the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... has worked in your favour, Sir Cyril," the lawyer went on. "It may perhaps be a relic of feudalism, but there can be no doubt that there exists, in the minds of English country folks, a feeling of respect and of something like affection for their landlords when men of old family, and that feeling is never transferred to new men who may take their place. Mr. Harvey ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... sects, which, in the middle ages, had been fostered by the municipal liberties of the south of France, were the harbingers of modern freedom, and had therefore been sacrificed to the inexorable feudalism of the north. After a bloody conflict, the plebeian reformers, crushed by the merciless leaders of the military aristocracy, escaped to the highlands that divide France and Italy. Preserving the discipline of a benevolent, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench and lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture, persecution, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... enterprises which rendered the age of feudalism and chain-armour memorable in history, none were more remarkable or important than the 'armed pilgrimages' popularly known as the Crusades; and, among the expeditions which the warriors of mediaeval Europe ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... the 7th and the 8th of Elizabeth, there are indications of the truck system; and towards her later years, the multiplying statutes and growing complaints and difficulties show plainly that the companies had lost their healthy vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were fast taking themselves away. There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient numbers who were possessed of the necessary probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with the deep ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... to which the proposed series will be devoted is that of "France in the New World,"—the attempt of Feudalism, Monarchy, and Rome to master a continent where, at this hour, half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendency of a regulated freedom;—Feudalism still strong in life, though enveloped and overborne by new-born Centralization; Monarchy in the flush of triumphant power; ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... leadership of the insurgent rabble he thinks to restrain their ferocity and thus earn the thanks of the supreme authority.—It remained for Schiller to convert this rude self-helper in the age of expiring feudalism into a savage anarchist in the boastful ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and in France; Victor Emmanuel was the first democratic sovereign in Europe in the nineteenth century; Cavour, beyond all other statesmen of his age, believed in Liberty, religious, social and political and applied it to his vast work of transforming thirty million Italians out of Feudalism, and the stunting effects of autocracy into a nation ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... gleam of sense, political or other, had the blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by such men is absurd. If it had existed when they met, it would have very soon sent them about their business. But it did not exist when they met. The author of the curious Precis d'une Histoire Generale de la Vie Privee ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert |
