"Black death" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... serfs that Edward III recruited the infantry who formed his line at Crecy in 1346, and the archers of Crecy were not exactly the sort of men who take kindly to eviction, to say nothing of slavery. As no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349, all went well until after Crecy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged England, and so many laborers died that the cost of farming property by hired hands exceeded the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then the landlords, under the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice, tried coercion. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... DEATH."—In the midst of these calamities, the fearful pestilence swept over France, called the "Black Death." It came from Egypt, possibly from farther east. In Florence three-fifths of the inhabitants perished by it. From Italy it passed over to Provence, and thence moved northward to Paris, spreading destruction in its path. It reached England, and there it is thought by some ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... contribution, being in kind, namely, walrus teeth, was sold in 1386 by the Pope's agent to a merchant in Flanders for twelve livres, fourteen sous. They kept up communication with their kin across the seas until the Black Death swept through the Old World in the Fourteenth Century; Norway, when it was gone, was like a vast tomb. Two-thirds of its people lay dead. Those who were left had enough to do at home; and Greenland ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... hundred years hence will be able to write a book on economic changes brought about by pestilence. There is a very interesting study somewhere of the social and commercial effects of the Black Death ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... because it is not yet above the juvenile age of its growth, which is the age of feebleness and folly, disease and crime. The imperfect organism of childhood is incapable of resisting either temptation or disease. The twenty-five millions destroyed by the black death, in the fourteenth century, and the countless millions destroyed by war in all centuries, including the present, show how little we have advanced beyond the spirit of savage life. The ferocity of nations is as much the product of their cerebral organization, as the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... have changed in these parts since the days when the priors and monks raised these churches, and since the countryside was thickly populated. Silk and wool were staple industries here then. Many and various causes have brought about the change. First they say that the Black Death raged more violently here than in any other part of England, and second—— Excuse me!" Major Heathcote broke off suddenly as the butler handed him a telegram. "How did this come at ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, and ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... wheeled again unto your west, where it heard the Pompeian trumpet. Of what it did with the next standard-bearer,[7] Bruttis and Cassius are barking in Hell; and it made Modena and Perugia woful. Still does the sad Cleopatra weep therefor, who, fleeing before it, took from the asp sudden and black death. With him it ran far as the Red Sea shore; with him it set the world in peace so great that on Janus his temple was locked up. But what the ensign which makes me speak had done before, and after was to do, through the mortal realm ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... In the year 1348, Venice was visited by an earthquake, and this was followed by the plague (the Black Death). In order to complete the roll of the republic's misfortunes in this gloomy year, it may be added that she also lost almost the whole of her Black Sea fleet to ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... could not desire it to do better. As soon as it is fairly healed I ought to join Prince Rupert again; but in truth I do not wish to go, for I would fain see this terrible Plague come to an end before I leave; for never since the days of the Black Death, hundreds of years ago, was there so strange and terrible a ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... like a plague, walking with democratic tread through all walks and stations in life, laying out alike royalty or the vagrant, the curled-haired and slashed-doubleted knight, or the tonsured monk, we must conclude that syphilis has caused more families to become extinct than any ordinary plague, black death, or cholera epidemic. Without wishing to enter into a history of syphilis, it is not outside of the province of this book to allude to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the results of the Black Death, Matteo notices not only the diminution of the population, but the alteration in public morality, the displacement of property, the increase in prices, the diminution of labor, and the multiplication of lawsuits, which were the consequences direct or indirect of the frightful mortality. Among ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... that shore, As the fierce whirl of some dread maelstrom's power! Above the cavern's arch! see! Ninip[10] stands! He points within the cave with beckoning hands! Ur-Hea cries: "My lord! the tablets[11] say, That we should not attempt that furious way! Those waters of black death will smite us down! Within that cavern's depths we will but drown." "We cannot go but once, my friend, that road," The hero said, "'Tis only ghosts' abode!" "We go, then, Izdubar, its depths will sound, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... Black Death and its Effects.*—During the earlier mediaeval centuries the most marked characteristic of society was its stability. Institutions continued with but slight changes during a long period. With the middle of the fourteenth century changes ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... them, and once slackened could never be enforced again. The laborer would be a slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his shackles. There was much to do and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later which left the English peasant the freest of his class ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a prison floor! To him existence was such a game—red life or black death, as the fates ordained. His spirit was contagious, and I found myself smiling through my tears. When he saw his task accomplished, gathering in ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... killed each other for a look or a thought; in war whole cities were put to the sword and fire, as the Black Prince put Limoges. Timor mortis conturbat me! So men shuddered and wailed, but took not the smallest trouble to keep each other alive. The Black Death swept off at least a third of the population of Europe; yet after it things went on exactly as before. If nations had then possessed the technical skill which they have to-day, it is quite on the cards that France in ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... fuller's wife I would teach him better than to give his clothes to the first knave who asks for them. But he was always a poor, fond, silly creature, was Peter, though we are beholden to him for helping to bury our second son Wat, who was a 'prentice to him at Lymington in the year of the Black Death. But ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... light surrounds this place," said Arden. "It comes from the fires which they burn as though the black death were upon us. Do you hear that groaning?—and there they carry out a weighted ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... the plague of Athens given by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by Lucretius, exemplify their severity. In the Middle Ages they raged from time to time throughout Europe: such plagues as the Black Death and the sweating sickness swept off vast multitudes, the best authorities estimating that of the former, at the middle of the fourteenth century, more than half the population of England died, and that twenty-five millions ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the neck, when a turn of the chopper left that untouched. White robes denoted peace and mercy as well as joy. The "white" hand and "black" hand have been explained. A "white death" is quiet and natural, with forgiveness of sins. A "black death" is violent and dreadful, as by strangulation; a "green death" is robing in rags and patches like a dervish, and a "red death" is by war or bloodshed (A. P. ii. 670). Among the mystics it is the resistance of man to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... heart in my mouth at the narrowness of my own escape from the rushing black death. Pursuit was impossible. My car was capable of no such burst of speed as his. And then, too, there was a groaning man down in the ravine below. I got out, clambered over the fence, and down in the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... flood of Asiaticism, with its weak womanhood, its men of scant chivalry, its polluting vices and its brothel slavery. Bubonic plague in San Francisco and Seattle was alarming. Mongolian brothel slavery, the Black Death in morals, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not, and it served me right, one split straw for my craft or my greatness. What a murrain call had I, they said, to mell with old St. Barnabas's? Ruinous the church had been since the Black Death, and ruinous she should remain; and I could hang myself in my new scaffold-ropes! Gentle and simple, high and low—the Hayes, the Fowles, the Fanners, the Collinses—they were all in a tale against me. Only Sir John Pelham up yonder to Brightling bade me heart-up and go on. Yet how ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... perhaps, by the English victories in the wars of Edward III. against the French. It was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church was corrupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. The social ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... difficulty the ground-plan of many houses under the short turf. The early writers do not mention Cottam, and so far I have come upon no explanation for the wiping out of this village. Possibly its extinction was due to the Black Death in 1349. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... appropriation for sundry civil expenses of the Government for the fiscal year ending June 30th, 1900, and for other purposes" that "The President of the United States is hereby authorized in case of threatened or actual epidemic of cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, bubonic plague or Chinese plague or black death to use the unexpended balance of the sums appropriated and reappropriated by the Sundry Civil Appropriation Act, approved July 1st, 1898, and the act making appropriation to supply discrepancies in the appropriations approved July 7th, 1898, and one hundred thousand ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... to be your companion. But I have less courage than you and even thus accompanied I dare not die. Listen to me, and then reflect if you ought to win me to your project, even if with the over-bearing eloquence of despair you could make black death so inviting that the fair heaven should appear darkness. Listen I entreat you to the words of one who has himself nurtured desperate thoughts, and longed with impatient desire for death, but who has at length trampled the phantom under foot, and crushed his sting. Come, ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... progress which bade men advance to different developments of organic living forms in every single branch of life, except in the greatest art of all. The Middle Ages had inherited a direct succession of harmonious forms, one rising out of another until the perfection was attained. Then came the Black Death, and the no less fatal scourges of Commercialism and Bureaucracy. Men's thoughts apparently became so riveted upon the grave that they must go back to the art of the dead Romans and the formalism ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... revolution which tended as strongly as the outrages of the baronage to the profit of the crown. The rise in the price of wool was giving a fresh impulse to the changes in agriculture which had begun with the Black Death and were to go steadily on for a hundred years to come. These changes were the throwing together of the smaller holdings, and the introduction of sheep-farming on an enormous scale. The new wealth of the merchant classes helped on the change. They began to invest largely ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... of catastrophes ... especially in the earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell |
