"Feudalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Instead, it put at the disposal of a class the means to secure their old ends of aggrandizement 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
... curious state of morals and politics in Europe; a queer consequence of the triumph of the monarchical principle. Feudalism was beaten down. The nobility, in its quarrels with the crown, had pretty well succumbed, and the monarch was all in all. He became almost divine: the proudest and most ancient gentry of the land ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appealed to 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 ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Mikado was both the civil ruler and the military leader of his people. Under him there were exercising authority throughout the land about 150 feudal lords. Feudalism of one kind or another prevailed in Japan until 1868. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the feudal principle was apparently on the decline. In the year 1600, however, Tokagawa Iyoyasu, with an army composed of the clans of the east and north defeated the combined ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... of August the 4th, and on the motion of the Viscount de Noailles, brother-in-law of La Fayette, the Assembly abolished all titles of rank, all the abusive privileges of feudalism, the tythes and casuals of the clergy, all provincial privileges, and, in fine, the feudal regimen generally. To the suppression of tythes, the Abbe Sieyes was vehemently opposed; but his learned and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his legs and freed ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... governed. 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 ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... subsequently stormed. Barrah was an outlaw and an especial offender in the eyes of an African, though his faults were hardly greater than the deeds that bestowed honor and knighthood in the palmy days of our ancestral feudalism. Barrah was the discarded son of a chief in the interior, and had presumed to blockade the public path towards the beach, and collect duties from transient passengers or caravans. This interfered with Freeman and his revenues; but, in addition to the pecuniary damage, the alleged robber ventured ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... 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 was in his cradle ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Pharisees—forgive me—do not understand great men, you and your 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... prefer and try to impose on all. They rejoice to see the restrictions trampled upon which they hear preached as the rules of life. In opera bouffe classical heroes, gods of the classical mythology, royalty, nobles of the mediaeval type, feudalism, dominies, are turned to ridicule. The crowd worships its heroes fanatically while they are in fashion, but it likes to turn about and roll them in the mud of satire, in order to teach them who made them and how easily it can unmake them. Aristophanes derided all which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... 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 along the paths, given over ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... execution of its chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of feudalism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... secular side of things bore a rude resemblance to feudalism, so on the religious there was a similar anticipation of the mediaeval Catholic Church. The Druids were not a special family, like the Levites, or in any way born into the priesthood. They were an order composed of persons selected, when young, out of the higher ranks of the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... respect of the world. The unavoidable detachment from the mob was mitigated by simple pleasures. My estate was a constant delight; the quaint survivals of feudalism among the tenantry amused me; and though I could not bring myself to pretend an interest in the absurd affectation of foxhunting, I was well received by the county people, whose insularity and aloofness I found greatly exaggerated, perhaps by outsiders ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Socialists, Dissenters, or Tones—at the moment of passing the threshold they were transformed into Trojans. Other things fell from them like a mantle, and in their serious devotion to traditional Conservatism they were examples of the true spirit of Feudalism. Beldam, the butler, had long ago graduated as Professor in the system. Coming as page-boy in earlier years, he had acquired the by no means easy art of Trojan diplomacy. It was now his duty to overhaul, as it ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... 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 ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... ambition of the burghers. In this way Italy came to be divided into the two world-famous factions known as Guelf and Ghibelline. The struggle between Guelf and Ghibelline was the struggle of the Papacy for the depression of the Empire, the struggle of the great burghs face to face with feudalism, the struggle of the old Italie stock enclosed in cities with the foreign nobles established in fortresses. When the Church had finally triumphed by the extirpation of the House of Hohenstaufen, this ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... of the Vinland colonists next day a number of able speeches were made by various individuals; for the Norsemen of old were accustomed to the free discussion of public affairs, at a time when nearly all Europe was crushed under the yoke of feudalism. Some of the speeches were humorous, and some had a good deal of sound about them without much weight of matter—a peculiarity, by the way, which marks many of the speeches made in the national and general assemblies of mankind in ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... new duties that were given it. The other nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other scorned ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... every other country revolution by the bourgeoisie itself had been the main factor in the overthrow of autocracy. Feudalism and monarchical autocracy fell in western Europe before the might of a powerful rising class. That this class in every case drew to its side the masses and benefited by their co-operation must not be allowed to obscure the fact that in these other countries of all the classes in society ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... bourgeoisie by according privileges and titles of nobility. The Comte de Montbeliard passed as a dowry to the house of Wuertemberg in 1397, and remained an appanage of that kingdom till the French Revolution. The power of the aristocracy was considerably diminished at this time, and feudalism broken down by the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... machine optimism. Under this socialism the number and efficiency of machines would increase more rapidly than they have under capitalism and feudalism, because its aim will be the production of commodities for use within the shortest time by the least exertion at ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... more than probable that the British, under their gallant Queen Boadicea, fought the Romans more than once in the near vicinity of this district, and very possibly in those happy days of feudalism, which followed the invasion of the Normans, when every knight and squire surrounded himself with his armed retainers, sundry skirmishes may have taken place hereabouts, but history is silent. Even of the battle of Barnet (April 14, 1471), when the Earl ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... 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 undertook with the view ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... nevertheless still subject to pay fines or obligations to their lords of such a nature that they must be considered to have been practically in the same position as mortmains. In fact, this custom had been so deeply rooted into social habits by feudalism, that to make it disappear totally at the end of the eighteenth century, it required three decrees of the National Convention (July 17 and October 2, 1793; and 8 Ventose, year ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... AND ARCHITECTURE. The twelfth century was an era of transition in society, as in architecture. The ideas of Church and State were becoming more clearly defined in the common mind. In the conflict between feudalism and royalty the monarchy was steadily gaining ground. The problem of human right was beginning to present itself alongside of the problem of human might. The relations between the crown, the feudal barons, the pope, bishops, and abbots, differed widely ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in, with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion, but now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the monarchical to the constitutional epoch: ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... 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 of social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It must always ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... a sort of family to her. That was a remnant of feudalism in her character, perhaps, which had suddenly developed during the months she had spent in Muro. But that, too, was natural, as it was natural that they should love her and almost worship the ground she trod. For the poorer classes ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Christianity with the new races, then lying in wait along the skirts of the Roman Empire, and biding their time. From a necessity already demonstrated in the ancient world, he would have foreseen the necessity of Feudalism for the modern, as following inevitably in the train of barbarian conquest, the recurrence of which had been distinctly foreshadowed. In connection with the Protestantism of intellect in religious matters, he would have anticipated a similar movement in politics; he would have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time—must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself—a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and America, has succeeded the prevalence of those ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the circumstances which the feudalism of ages had created. These assembled nobles yielded without a murmur to this insolence from a boy of eighteen. Parliament had ventured to try its strength against Cardinal Mazarin, but did not dare to disobey ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... castle among the heathery Highlands. There he proclaims the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that grows more broadly Scotch with every week of his emancipation from the influence of the clipped, commercial accent of New York, and casts contempt on feudalism by playing the part of lord of the manor to such a perfection of high-handed beneficence that the people of the glen are all become his clansmen, and his gentle lady would be the patron saint of the district—if the republican ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... adaptations, of the land's growth into human imagination as well as economic institutions. Webb uses facts to get at meanings. He fulfils Emerson's definition of Scholar: "Man Thinking." In Divided We Stand he goes into machinery, the feudalism of corporation-dominated economy, the economic supremacy of the North over the South and the West. In The Great Frontier (Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe—a ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Eastern portion 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. ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... twenty-two in number, who rendered service to him; one of them being de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who held 17 acres under Martin. To such a position had the abler of the small holders of a century or so before already pushed their way, in spite of the heavy hand of feudalism, which did much to hinder individual initiative. At this period and until Tudor times England, as regards the cultivated land, was essentially a corn-growing country; the greater part of the lord's demesne was arable, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... the civilization of Poland was entirely peculiar and aboriginal; it did not resemble that of any other country; and, indeed, it seems destined to remain forever unique in its kind. As different from the German feudalism which neighboured it upon the West, as from the conquering spirit of the Turks which disquieted it on the East, it resembled Europe in its chivalric Christianity, in its eagerness to attack the infidel, even while receiving instruction ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... there—great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes. Now they were round boulders raised one above another, apparently susceptible to every breath of wind; anon, they towered like blunt-pointed obelisks, taller than the tallest ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... American land—began with the discovery of the continent. Even a momentary consideration of the subject, however, is sufficient to indicate how important was the desire for land as a motive of colonization. The foundation of European governmental and social organizations had been laid in feudalism—a system of landholding and service. And although European states might have lost their original feudal character, and although new classes had arisen, land-holding still remained the basis of ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... founder of modern Sweden, was marked by three parallel conflicts of equal intensity and interest: between Swedish and Danish nationalism; between Catholicism and Protestantism; and, finally, between feudalism and a monarchism based more or less on the consent of the governed. Its background was the long struggle for independent national existence in which the country had become involved by its voluntary federation with Denmark and Norway about the end ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... learnt to feel that they were one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... 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 ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... court itself. Like the whole ancient regime the court is the empty form, the surviving adornment of a military institution, the causes of which have disappeared while the effects remain, custom surviving utility. Formerly, in the early times of feudalism, in the companionship and simplicity of the camp and the castle, the nobles served the king with their own hands. One providing for his house, another bringing a dish to his table, another disrobing him ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... prosperous politicians of our own generation introduce 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 trying ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... forgetting that he was a Tancred, with a pedigree dating from the days of feudalism. And after all he looked such a gentle little fellow that Durant could almost have forgiven him. He was so beautifully finished off. You could only say of him that he was fastidious, he had the prejudices of his class. He scorned to make conversation ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... 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 ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... 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, like a time ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... France, though by widely differing chances, the kingly power had triumphed over feudalism. Monarchs began to come into direct contact, not always pleasant, with the entire mass of their subjects, the "third estate," ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... "Industry has fallen into feudalism, but I am the suzerain. The lords shall pay me tribute, and they shall keep the profit ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... of the Reformation period or of the Thirty Years. They were so many confessions that an efficient international code is one of the inventions for which we must look to the future. It is something, meanwhile, that, with the extinction of feudalism and the concretion of the detached provinces with which it had macadamized Christendom, the ceaseless fusillade of little wars, which played like a lambent flame of mephitic gas over the surface of each country, has come to an end. The petty sovereignties which made up Germany, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... Provincial Assembly, Senores Gamacho and Fuentes, both from Bolson, putting 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 Moderates, and opposed every energetic measure with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... furious. One of the red-hot demagogues got up in the assembly, and advised "mangling, maiming, or burning the books: they were only fit for cartridges, wadding, or fuel: they were replete with marks of feudalism and royalty—for they had arms or embellishments on them, which denoted them to belong to Aristocrats." This speech made some impression: his comrades were for carrying the motion immediately into execution, by sword and faggot.... But M. Langles rose ... ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... as I studied it. Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen, these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the feudalism of their native lands and were here because they had no share in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of unbroken descent from the gods, and accorded a veneration semi-divine, but living in seclusion at the city of Kyoto, with such powers of administration as he still retained confined to matters of religion and education. On the other hand, was the Shogun, or Tycoon, the acknowledged head of a feudalism, which, while nominally recognizing the Mikado's authority, had usurped the sovereign power, and really governed the country. But in 1868, the altered circumstances in which Japan found herself brought about a revolution. The ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... world. We cannot make America an island in either a military or an economic sense. Hitlerism, like any other form of crime or disease, can grow from the evil seeds of economic as well as military feudalism. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... awaiting the white man's plow, it was impossible to introduce in its entirety and over the whole area the system of lords and tenants that existed across the sea. So it happened that almost every kind of experiment in land tenure, from communism to feudalism, was tried. In the early days of the Jamestown colony, the land, though owned by the London Company, was tilled in common by the settlers. No man had a separate plot of his own. The motto of the community was: "Labor and share alike." ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... development will apply, it is to human progress. There are certain stages through which society must pass in its onward march from barbarism to civilization. Now one of these stages has always been some form or other of despotism, such as feudalism or servitude, or a despotic paternal government; and we have every reason to believe that it is not possible for humanity to leap over this transition epoch, and pass at once from pure savagery to free civilization. The Dutch system ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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 he ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... prepared and fought out by the working-class alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition—though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth—soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the "impartiality" ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... 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 they are meant to defend, and that whatever is practicable ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Northmen submitted to the French Normans. The English Northmen, nevertheless, were of real use to the Normans, by what they had effected long before the expedition of William was thought of, and when the Normans had not become the chief champions of feudalism. The immediate effect of Danish action on William's fortunes, too, was very great. The Saxon Harold was compelled to fight a battle with the Scandinavian invaders of England but twenty days before Hastings; and these invaders sought to place a Danish or Norwegian dynasty on the English throne. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... pictured lips were silently arguing for the life he had 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 had cast him out. They had branded him as ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... a very uncentralized state and that the sway of the Yamato was still far from receiving general recognition. A great Japanese scholar** has contended that the centralization which prevailed in later ages was wholly an imitation of Chinese bureaucracy, and that organized feudalism was the original form of government in Japan. The annals appear to support that view to a limited extent, but the subject will presently ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... never understood, how exceptional has been the path pursued by English civilization; they do not realise to themselves that the gradual transformation of an aristocratic and feudal society into a modern industrial State which still retains the forms, and in many points of view the spirit of feudalism is a process which, although owing to the most special circumstances it has been accomplished with success in England, has hardly a parallel in any other European country. Ireland on the other hand ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... foundation of a new dynasty. A system developed itself over the whole realm, in which, both in the provincial authorities and in the lower degrees of rank, the possession of land and share in public office, feudalism and freedom, interpenetrated each other, and made a common-weal which yet harmonised with all the inclinations that lend charm and colouring to individual life. The old migratory impulse and spirit of warlike enterprise set before itself religious aims also, which lent ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Europe in the eighteenth century, which were still tainted with feudalism, were changed into the socio-political conditions of the modern world, partly by a slow and continuous evolution, but much more by three revolutionary movements. First there was the great upheaval at the end of the eighteenth century, the tremors of which were ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... holiness and crime, have dominated this fair region; and with these shivered fortalices and ancient cloisters actually before us, their past seems nearer to possibility. Their relics, attesting the days of feudalism, seem to mourn its departure; the old order has indeed changed and yielded place to new. "It was sweet here to be a monk!" writes Taine, in his warm sympathy with the spirit of this valley; "it is in such places that the Imitation should be read; in such places ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Feudalism had been gradually stifling old English freedom, and the King saw himself confronted with a feudal baronage, nobles claiming hereditary, military, and judicial power independent of the King, such as degraded the Monarchy and riveted down the people in France for centuries. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... self-government. The occasion of the French Revolution was the purchase of a diamond necklace for Queen Marie Antoinette at a time when the treasury was exhausted; the cause of the revolution was feudalism. Not otherwise, the occasion of the great conflict that is now shaking our earth was the assassination of an Austrian boy and girl, but the cause is embedded in racial ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... monarch. Want of work had driven the weavers of Silesia to a state of frenzy and tumult almost resembling a Jacquerie; and there and elsewhere serfs and peasants talked openly of casting off the restraints and burdens of Feudalism. In such a case the veriest autocrat must pause before he commits his country to the risks of a loan (that of 1792 had exhausted Prussia's credit), or to a campaign where the losses were certain and the gains doubtful. On this last topic various schemes had been bandied to and fro between ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... inseparable from the moral and political constitution of a half civilized and 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
... first, slavery middle, and slavery last. Accursed slavery! firstborn of the evil one—the lust of dominion over others for one's own selfish purposes, in its naked, most shameless, and undisguised form. Dominion of man over man in other modes, such as absolute monarchy, aristocracy, feudalism, ecclesiastical rule—all these justify their exactions under the plea of the welfare of the subject, or the salvation of souls. Slavery has nothing of the kind behind which to hide its monstrosity; nor does it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me 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} ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... from her father. 'The relations of the sexes should be as free as friendship,' he had taught. 'If a man and a woman love each other, it is nobody's business but their own. Neither the Law nor Society can, with any show of justice, interfere. That they do interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights. If a man and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for themselves the character, extent, and duration of their intercourse, as two friends should be. If ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... 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 ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... profusion at this castle, a heartiness of welcome, a patriarchal attitude toward the countless servants and satellites, an acreage of roaming space in the buildings, that smacked of the feudalism back to which both the castle and the family dated. How many Englishmen or Americans who sniff at German civilization ever see anything of the inside of German homes? Very few, I should judge, from ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... loyalty. They took all the rank, glory, power, and prestige of the great civil organization, and they took all the rights. They threw on others the burdens and the duties. At one time, no doubt, feudalism was an organization which drew together again the fragments of a dissolved society; but when the lawyers had applied the Roman law to modern kings, and feudal nobles had been converted into an aristocracy of court nobles, ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a nouveau riche and a parvenu. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 cause, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... his resentment, not only as indicating an exclusiveness highly objectionable in a man who had emigrated from a free State, but because he, Ezekiel Corwin, had difficulty in discovering the entrance. When he succeeded, he found himself before an iron gate, happily open, but savoring offensively of feudalism and tyrannical proprietorship, and passed through and entered an avenue of trees scarcely distinguishable in the darkness, whose mysterious shapes and feathery plumes were unknown to him. Numberless odors ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... in The French Revolution, where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides, of Tacitus, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... 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 ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... country because it offered good hunting and fishing, fertile land with plenty of wood, little possibility of direct supervision or control by the government, refuge from political or civil punishment, few or no taxes, escape from feudalism or from hard industrial conditions, and—more recently—grants by the government of free land with forestry ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... 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 ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which on most children's minds "are only reflected as on looking-glasses but make no impression," produced an effect on him of which the influence was never effaced. The coronation of Joseph II. at Frankfort, the annual mass, and the noble old city itself, with its associations of feudalism and German art, are portrayed by him seventy years after the feelings they had excited, with all the vividness of yesterday's impressions. It is probable that no one ever possessed such acute sensibility as Goethe. He could "hang a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... opposition was naturally mitigated when the Church triumphed under Constantine and became associated with governments and armies. The hostility was still further qualified when many tribes of warlike barbarians embraced the faith, and the military obligation which was an essential element of feudalism acted in the same direction. But, above all, the rise and conquests of Mohammedanism awoke the military energies of Christendom and determined the direction it should take. In the Crusades the two great streams of military ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... irreparable loss; and when the war came to sweep away his wealth, he entered the struggle valorously, not to strive against men, but to use his science against death. After the passing of that huge shock, which left all the imposing and splendid fabric of Southern feudalism wrecked forever, his profession stood him in good stead;—he found himself not only able to supply those personal wants he cared to satisfy, but also to alleviate the misery of many whom he had known in days of opulence;—the princely misery that never doffed its smiling mask, though living in ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Background of the modern period. A. Economic and social conditions at the close of the Middle Age. B. Political nature of feudalism. The governments of the 15th century. C. The ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... their recitals, were the capitals of two powerful monarchies. The pictures they draw for us are those of cities of Oriental magnificence. The system of government they describe is that of absolute monarchy, founded on feudalism. We will briefly glance at the remains of these "imperial cities." Their location is seen on the map. The approach to Patinamit is very difficult, indeed. Situated on a high table-land, it commands an almost boundless view. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... his "Fall of Feudalism," pays a high tribute to Healy's splendid service in connection with Gladstone's Land Act. Undoubtedly his was the credit for what became known as the "Healy Clause," which provided that no rent should be payable for land on improvements ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... was exhibited in Europe during the Middle Ages. While all its governments were autocratic, while feudalism held sway, while the Church was unshorn of its power, while the criminal code was full of horrors and the hell of the popular creed full of terrors, the rules of behaviour were both more numerous and more carefully conformed to than now. Differences of dress ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... 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 ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... 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 ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... 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 ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... much more indirect even than that of the Church, this decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial chieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall speak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localism tended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kind of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The later pagan slavery, like our own industrial ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... If it were possible we might trace back from yonder robber and murderer—a human hyena—the long ancestral line of brutality, until we see it starting from some poor peasant of the Middle Ages, trampled into crime under the feet of feudalism. The little seed of weakness or wickedness has been carefully nursed by society, generation after generation, until it has blossomed at last in this destructive monster. Civilization has formulated a new variety of the genus homo—and it must ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... important point, the views I had expressed in my previous writings, especially on the distinction between civilized and barbaric nations, the real basis of civilization itself, and the value to the world of the Graeco-Roman civilization. I have ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism, rejected every species of political aristocracy, and represented the English constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not as its type. I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... 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 transmuting ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... 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
... Feudalism was dying! Divine right, monarchy, aristocracy, oppression, despotism, tyranny—these and all other devils of the old world order were bound for the limbo which awaits outworn, discredited social institutions. The Declaration of Independence officially proclaimed the new order,—challenging ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... 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 ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... maintenance of property, against those not interested. There are thousands of documents, even official documents, to prove this, if necessary. For the rest, the present system is only a continuation of the municipal system, which, in the middle ages, sprang up in connection with feudalism,—an oppressive, mischief-making system, full of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the people may still plead their own cases in lawsuits before the Sovereign Council, but now the privileges of caste and class and feudalism begin to be felt, and it is enacted that gentlemen may plead their own cases before the council only "when wearing their swords." Young men are urged to qualify as notaries. In addition to the title of "Sieur," baronies ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... our own troubles with lords, too, right here in New York State," he said confidentially. "We have our land barons, descendants of the patroons and holders of thousands of acres. And we have our bolters, too, who are making a big stand against feudalism." ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... princes, such as Armagnac, or Saint-Pol, or Brittany, remain and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard Dunois or the Constables Du Guesclin and Clisson, grow to greater prominence; it is clear that the old feudalism is giving place to a newer order, in which the aristocracy, from the King's brothers downwards, will group themselves around the throne, and begin the process which reaches its unhappy perfection under ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... "Our Benevolent Feudalism" {7} and Brooks's "The Social Unrest." {8} In these two books the opposite sides of the labor problem are expounded, each writer devoting himself with apprehension to the side he fears and views with disfavor. It would appear that they have set themselves the task of collating, ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... upon him, we would call him insane; yet, that is precisely what we do with regard to the transfer of real estate, observing still the tortuous roundabout methods of conveying, resorted to in those days for the purpose of evading the oppressions of feudalism. Nay, the analogy is so strong, that in our Law Courts, and Deeds we still use the same barbarous Norman French jargon in which the parley was in those ancient days held at the gate of the baronial residence. (Hear, and applause.) It is perhaps presumptuous ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... 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 ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... of Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again. Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living together, of these detached tribes and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... states into a compact unity was his darling scheme, as it was that of his master. "Never," he said, "can you be sure that those warring states will not reappear, so long as the books of Confucius are studied in the schools; for in them feudalism is consecrated as a divine institution." "Then let them be burned," ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... sense of responsibility; with the degree of confidence reposed in them. They recognize their obligations to their own states and their duty to the imperial throne. The British crown is no longer an impersonal abstraction, but a concrete and inspiring force. The political system of India is neither feudalism nor federation. It is embodied in no constitution; it does not rest upon treaty, and it bears no resemblance to a league. It represents a series of relationships that have grown up between the crown and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... political life both of the Romans and the Barbarians. It is true that they throw more light backwards than forwards, that they teach us far more about the constitution of the Roman Empire than they do about the Teutonic customs from whence in due time Feudalism was to be born. Still, they do often illustrate these Teutonic usages; and when we remember that the writer to whom after Tacitus we are most deeply indebted for our knowledge of Teutonic antiquity, Jordanes, professedly compiled his ill-written pamphlet from the Twelve Books of the Gothic History ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... 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 • The Militia of Mercy
... 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, all the love that she never expressed. ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... and the length of his reign, combined in enabling him to give an abiding direction to the career of his country. He made his appearance on the political stage just in the time when a new system of government, favorable to the power of the sovereigns of Europe, was rising upon the ruins of feudalism. The royal authority was gaining rapidly in England and in France. Spain, freed from the domination of the Moors, had just become a power of the first rank. The fleets of Portugal were whitening the most distant seas, conferring upon the energetic kingdom wonderful wealth ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... happened that the foreman of a jury could not give in the verdict because of his inability to read it? Was this a colony fit for independence? If it were a republic to-morrow, it would be a monster in legislation—half-jacobinism, half-feudalism. Mr. Bulwer designated Mr. Warburton and his friends, in the course of his speech, by the term "philosophical Radicals." Mr. Grote, in reply, said that the designation was quite as respectable as that of "literary Whig." The debate was closed by Lord John Russell. On ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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., pp. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... personal worth, a far more fearless assertion of equality, and a far more democratic feeling permeating society than, for instance, in the United States. Sweden, on the other hand, is essentially an aristocratic country, with a landed nobility and many other remnants of feudalism in her political and social institutions. Two countries so different in character can never be good yoke-fellows. They can never develop at an even pace, and the fact of kinship scarcely helps matters where the temperaments and the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... was veritably regal. Very slender as yet, no trace of fulness to be seen over hip or breast, the curves all low and flat, she yet carried her extreme height with tranquil confidence, the unperturbed assurance of a chatelaine of the days of feudalism. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... 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: 'With regard to the Scheldt France can have no right to annul existing ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism. ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... 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, is upon as large a scale as everything that belongs to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... interesting when we consider that the unsatisfactory conditions of both the state and society soon brought about a grievous weakening of the Imperial authority, and opened wide the gate for the ascendency of the military class. This was followed by the systematic formation of feudalism, which, for some seven centuries, totally changed the face of Japan. For from the first ascendency of this military system down to our own days everything in society—ambitions, honors, the very temperament and daily pursuits of men, and political institutes ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... used thus it may well have suggested a "pose." But however used, whatever the purpose—that the maternal instinct was strong in her there is no denying. To explain definitely her social and personal moral standards requires a biography that has not yet been written. Socially she had a hatred of feudalism, of religious and military despotism. She sympathised with and helped the aspirations towards a wider, a more humane view of a social system, and fraternal equality and social liberty were to her holy doctrines. Perhaps ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... make a mistake if you supposed that the people of the eleventh century objected to this form of government. They supported Feudalism because it was a very practical and necessary institution. Their Lord and Master usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a steep rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his subjects. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... a confederation presided over by Austria, the emperors were the chiefs only of this ancient feudalism of kings, dukes, and electors. The house of Austria was more powerful through itself and its vast possessions than through the imperial dignity. The two crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, the Tyrol, Italy, and the Low Countries, gave it an ascendency, which the genius of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... without a corresponding one of his "mood of peace." One of the greatest of modern historians, M. Guizot, has compared the glory of Charlemagne to a brilliant meteor, rising suddenly out of the darkness of barbarism to disappear no less suddenly in the darkness of feudalism. But the light of this meteor was not extinguished, and reviving civilization owed much that was permanently beneficial to the great Emperor of the Franks. His ruling hand is seen in the legislation of his time, as well as ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... neighbor with the understanding that he should defend them and permit them to continue during their lifetime to cultivate the fields, the title to which had passed to him. On their death their children became coloni. This arrangement, as we shall find, serves in a measure to explain the feudalism ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... recognition of these principles was eventually the establishment of modern constitutional law. It was not in consequence of his teaching, but merely in spite of it, that for the next two centuries (in certain instances) monarchical government became more autocratic, as feudalism was being transformed into civil government. . . . All through Luther's writings, and in his own acts as well, is to be read the right of the individual to think and believe in matters political, religious, and otherwise ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... varied in its intellectual and social 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, ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... culmination of the Merwing power. The seventh century saw its decay, and a new step towards the medieval monarchy of the Franks. Two causes effected the fall of the Merwings—their own vices and the growth of feudalism with the creation of great local lords. These threatened to break up the kingdom of Chlodowech into small states, to disintegrate and thus destroy the united nation of ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... embodiment of Benevolence—stood beside a table on which was a great heap of her own fougasso, and big baskets filled with dried figs and almonds and celery, and a genial battalion of bottles standing guard over all. One by one the vassals were called up—there was a strong flavour of feudalism in it all—and to each, while the Vidame wished him a "Boni festo!" the housekeeper gave his Christmas portion: a fougasso, a double-handful each of figs and almonds, a stalk of celery, and a bottle of vin cue[2]—the cordial that is used for the libation of the yule-log ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... recalcitrant, and even obnoxious nation within a nation did not constitute a problem for the medievals may be attributable to two reasons: (1) the medieval theory of life accentuated a hierarchical order of existence—a theory that found expression in feudalism, in Church organization, and in guild and craft life; in pursuance of this theory, the Jews were accorded a recognized and distinct status; (2) furthermore, the Jews were an economic necessity in the times when a ban was laid on money-lending, and they constituted an important economic facility at ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... for an interval of fifty years chiefly resided, abstaining from politics, so that the country enjoyed an interval of profound peace. But the old cause brought about the fall of this dynasty also. Military feudalism again developed and Egypt split up into many petty states. The sceptre at length passed to another dynasty, this time of Tanite origin. Petubastis was the first of the line, but the power was really in the hands of the priests, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... The latter is simply a progressive evolution out of 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. But that result has only been made possible ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... it, is an imperfect system. But it is the only system that has banished famine. Under communism and feudalism there was hunger. Under capitalism the world has been able to feed twice as many mouths as could be ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian eggs out of which European chivalry was hatch'd; Ticknor's chapters on the Cid, and on the Spanish poems and poets of Calderon's time. Then always, and, of course, as the superbest poetic culmination-expression of feudalism, the Shaksperean dramas, in the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c., of the princes, lords and gentlemen, the pervading atmosphere, the implied and express'd standard of manners, the high port and proud stomach, the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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 citizens' rights and progressive organs assail and menace ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... couple of days. Hostility to us and to the Government is innate in the Orbajosan's mind, and forms a part of it as much as his religious faith. Confining myself to the particular question with my aunt, I will tell you a singular thing—the poor lady, who is penetrated by the spirit of feudalism to the marrow of her bones, has taken it into her head that I am going to attack her house and carry off her daughter, as the gentlemen of the Middle Ages attacked an enemy's castle to consummate some outrage. Don't laugh, for it is the truth—such are the ideas of these people. I need ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago—the days before feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... spoken of, as cynics have spoken of them, without 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
... the country in 789 feudalism was substituted for the Roman autonomy with the co-operation of the higher clergy. The Frank duke was supreme, and his underlings had arbitrary power. Public property was confiscated for the benefit of the ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson |
