"Feudal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the feudal system, by which the public defense was provided for chiefly at the expense of individuals, the system of loans has been introduced, and as no nation can raise within the year by taxes sufficient sums for its ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... later, Prefect of Rome, to the displacement of an Orsini from that office. Calixtus invested this nephew with all temporal power that it was in the Church's privilege to bestow, to the end that he might use it as a basis to overset the petty tyrannies of Romagna, and to establish a feudal claim on the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... is something in blood. The Marquette family had been illustrious in France from time immemorial. Generation after generation, many of its members had obtained renown, not only for chivalric courage, but for every virtue which can adorn humanity. Their ancestral home was a massive feudal castle on an eminence near the stately city of Leon. The armorial bearing of the family commemorates deeds of heroic enterprise five hundred years ago. They ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... Courts were not much burdened with etiquette. No feudal monarch was more than the first gentleman, and there was no rigid line of separation of ranks, especially where, as among the kings of the Red Rose, the boundaries were so faint between the princes ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... materials for the reception hall, the office building, and resting cottages were brought from Japan. The reception hall was built entirely by native carpenters, after the style of a daimyo's goten (palace of feudal lord) of some six hundred years ago. The architectural style of the building was what is termed Heike, a style prevailing at the time when a military family called Heike held a paramount power. The artistically ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... House of Edinburgh, a score of dusty gowns, accustomed to sweep the lobbies of the Courts of Session, gathered the sand of the burgh street, and in their midst walked the representatives of that old feudal law at long-last ostensibly abandoned, and of the common law of the land. Argyll was in a demure equivalent for some Court costume, with a dark velvet coat, a ribbon of the Thistle upon his shoulder, a sword upon his haunch, and for all his sixty-six ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midway between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical period is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is termination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There are times when his art appears entirely bowed over the past; the confluence of a dozen ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... no feudal castles grim, No ruined monasteries, no abbeys ghostly dim; Our ancient history is new, our future's all ahead, And we've got a tariff bill that's made all Europe sick abed— But what is best, though short on tombs and academic ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... not yet past when Thurston stood leaning on the back of a stone seat outside a quaint old hall, which had once been a feudal fortalice and was now attached to an unprofitable farm. Because the impoverished gentleman, who held a long lease on the ancient building, had let one wing to certain sportsmen, several of Geoffrey's neighbors had gathered on the indifferently-kept ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Homer in the Odysseus of Sophocles. The kings are regarded by the tragedians with some of the distrust and hatred which the unconstitutional tyrants of Athens had aroused. Just as the later chansons de geste of France, the poems written in an age of feudal opposition to central authority, degraded heroes like Charles, so rhetorical, republican, and sophistical Greece put its quibbles into the lips of Agamemnon and Helen, and slandered the stainless and fearless Patroclus ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... chamber in which I had been permitted to establish my unsocial study, heralding the advent of majestic folios, and heaping libraries round the unworthy work. Again, pausing from my labour, I look through that castle casement, and beyond that feudal moat, over the broad landscapes which, if I err not, took their name from the proud brother of the Conqueror himself; or when, in those winter nights, the grim old tapestry waved in the dim recesses, I hear again the Saxon thegn ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... type of woman who enjoys seeing such things as these; and though she would not have tortured herself had she lived in feudal days, I am sure she would have dined calmly over an underground dungeon where an enemy—an inconvenient wretch like me, for instance—suffered ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and carriages, with a piano and a cow. There was a farmer's lodge at the landing, and over the rocks and amid the trees the picturesque roof of the villa of the sole proprietor of the island appeared, and gave a feudal aspect to the domain. The sweet grass affords good picking for sheep, and besides the sheep the owner raises deer, which are destined to be chased and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... stately, toward the Institution that he was rearing. Truly, the annual feeding of Stuffy Pete was nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Charta or jam for breakfast was in England. But it was a step. It was almost feudal. It showed, at least, that a Custom was not impossible ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Louis of France, and Simon of Leicester; and of the impression both had left, that judgment, mercy, faith, and the subject's welfare, were the primary duties of a sovereign—an idea only now and then glimpsed by the feudal sovereigns, who thought that the people lived for them rather than they for the people. And when, as in England, the King's good-nature had been abused by swarms of foreign-born relations, who had not even his claims on the people, no wonder ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the sick and aged whenever they repaired for relief to the Doric portico; and, with the usual convenient memory of the vulgar, the Lexleyans soon began to remember of the Altham family only their recent backslidings and ancient feudal oppressions: while of the Sparkses they chose to know only what was evident to all eyes—viz., that their hands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... patroons were members of the Dutch West India Company, who purchased land in New Netherlands of the Indians, and after fulfilling certain conditions imposed with a view to colonizing their territory, enjoyed feudal rights similar to those of the barons of ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... whom England had hired of a German prince, arrived, intelligent men in this country pitied rather than blamed those simple hearted peasants, who had no animosity whatever, against the Americans. They had been compelled, by their feudal lord, who was really their slave master, to leave their lowly homes on the Rhine, to unite with English regulars and painted savages, in burning the homes and butchering the people struggling for existence in the wilderness ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... the parasite that soon or late must sap Kentucky of its vigor, even while it fills her coffers with gold; but these were few. The greater part of the land in sight was Kildare land. Storms, like some feudal keep of the Old World, brooded its chickens under its ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... no answer, but Godfrey replied for him. "No doubt you will in time, Petroff; but you see liberties like these do not grow up in a day. We had serfs and vassals in England at one time, and feudal barons who could do pretty much what they chose, and it was only in the course of centuries that these things got done away with." At this moment there was a knock at ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... bell and the bugle resounded: Lord Douglas, like a true feudal lord, travelled with the retinue of a prince. One saw nothing but new soldiers and servants passing and repassing beneath the queen's windows: the footmen and horsemen were wearing, moreover, a livery similar to that which the queen and ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the other great adversary of Middleton, he who so long affected to be the lord paramount, the Suzerain in the feudal empire, rather than the republic of letters—Warburton himself—less easily led on to these murderous acts of personal rancour. A pamphlet of the day has preserved an anecdote of this kind. Dr. Taylor, the Chancellor of Lincoln, once threw out in company an opinion ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Bourbons, this former officer of the armies of Louis XVI., the former second-lieutenant of artillery, who had suddenly become a Caesar, a Charlemagne, could make this sudden and strange transformation comprehensible only through unprecedented fame and splendor. He desired to have a feudal, majestic court, surrounded by all the pomp and ceremony of the Middle Ages. He saw how hard was the part he had to play, and he knew very well how much a nation needs glory to make it forget liberty. Hence a perpetual effort to make every day outshine the one before, and first ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle, confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux de fantaisie that make life ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... and that the Americans would, if John Bull did not. The proclamation of General Nelson or Brown, or some such patriot, set the affair in its true point of view. No longer any religion was to be predominant; the feudal laws were to be abolished; and the celebrated ninety-two resolutions, which had cost Papineau and his legion so much care and anxiety, were swept away as if they were dust. A Jack Cade had started up, whose laws were to be administered at the point ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... inches in length, and weigh anywhere from thirty to sixty pounds. The beaver's home is usually in the form of an island house, built in the waters of a small lake or slowly running stream, to afford protection from prowling enemies, much in the same way that the old feudal lords surrounded the ramparts of their castles with broad moats and flooded the intervening space with a deep canal of water, in order to check the advance of enemy raiders. The surrounding shores of the beaver's castle are nearly ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... and English colonies. All their proceedings were conducted with great deliberation, and were distinguished for order, decorum, and solemnity. In eloquence, in dignity, and in all the characteristics of profound policy, they surpassed the assembly of feudal barons, and perhaps were not inferior to the great Amphictyonic ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... tenants, the latter, who often themselves were landlords over whole townships or other great tracts of land with their population, held toward their tenants. Sometimes these subtenants granted land to others below them, and over these the last landlord also exercised feudal rights, and so on till the actual occupants and cultivators of the soil were reached. The great nobles had thus come to stand in a middle position. Above them was the king, below them these successive stages of tenants and subtenants. Their tenants owed to them the same financial ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... that set a blue jay adrift. Large, loose structures, like the nests of the osprey and certain of the herons, have been found with half a dozen nests of the blackbirds set in the outer edges, like so many parasites, or, as Audubon says, like the retainers about the rude court of a feudal baron. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... powers, it has not intended, and does not intend, to confer the right of proposing the re-establishment of the Bourbons, or of any prince belonging to that family, on the throne, even in case of the extinction of the imperial dynasty; or the right of re-establishing either the ancient feudal nobility, or feudal and seigniorial rights, or tithes, or any privileged and predominant form of worship; or the power of making any infringement of the irrevocability of the sale of national domains: it formally prohibits the government, the chambers, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Perrot, who had married his niece, came with him. Perrot, anxious to turn to account the influence of his wife's relative, looked about him for some post of honor and profit, and quickly discovered that the government of Montreal was vacant. The priests of St. Sulpice, feudal owners of the place, had the right of appointing their own governor. Talon advised them to choose Perrot, who thereupon received the desired commission, which, however, was revocable at the will of those who had granted ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... pigeonholing my specimens, I chanced to look through the open window, and suddenly saw pass by, as in the shifting background of some scenic play, the lichenveiled stone walls and lotus-mantled moats of the old feudal castle of Uyeda. Poor, neglected, despised bit of days gone by!—days that are but yesterdays, aeons since as measured here. Already it was disappearing down the long perspective of the past; and yet only twenty years before it had stood ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... group of men bound to each other by solidarity of functions in society," such as the Brahmins of India and the feudal nobility, Prof. Millioud says that he will use the terms as equivalent or nearly equivalent to a "directing class." Quoting the article from Vorwaerts which led to the suspension of that Socialist ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the best side of feudal sentiment, that the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart himself did. But such things will happen ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... instinctively that a new era had begun for them, that there would be life in the old place again, and that the young lord would build up Sigmundskron to be what it had been before. Though not a foot of land remained to the name outside the ramparts, the feudal tradition had not disappeared. Old men were alive whose fathers had told them of the good old Sigmundskrons, how they had been brave in war and kind in peace, and generous till all was gone, and the voices of these drowned ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... people; the laity were not permitted to examine for themselves; education was held to be unfit for the masses, while the tenure of their landed property was such as kept them in a continual state of dependence on their feudal lords. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the Roman empire in the fifth century A.D., when the western world sank into barbarism, and the inhabitants, ever menaced by famine or the sword, found full occupation in struggling against civil wars, feudal tyranny, and the invasion of barbarians; when poetry was unknown, philosophy was proscribed as rebellion against religion, and barbarous dialects had usurped the place of that beautiful Latin language which had so long ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... strange scene—the grand, calm, patriarchal old man, so peaceful on his dark-haired daughter's lap in the midst of the shattered home in the old feudal stable. All were silent a while in awe, but the Dean was the first to move and speak, calling Lucas forward to ask sundry questions ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... increased reverence for secular rank, which grew out of the feudal system, when a great hereditary aristocracy arose and all European society was moulded into a compact hierarchy, of which the serf was the basis and the emperor the apex. The principle of subordination and obedience ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... cricketers; their books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Truebner, or the Tract Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the Roman wall. We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of the patriarchal. We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in a period of communism. And this makes them hard ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Civil War in the time of Charles I., we find the Parliament strong in the South and East, where are still the centres of commerce and manufactures, even the iron trade, which has its smelting works in Sussex. In the North the feudal tie between landlord and tenant, and the sentiment of the past, preserve much of their force, and the great power in those parts is the Marquis of Newcastle, at once great territorial lord of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... assigned to France practically the same boundaries that she had had in 1791, before the time of her mighty expansion. That is to say, the nation which in its purely democratic form had easily overrun and subdued the neighbouring States in the time of their old, inert, semi-feudal existence, was overthrown by them when their national consciousness had been trampled into being by the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... book George Sand had just given the reins to her imagination, without allowing sociological preoccupations to spoil everything. During her excursions in Berry, she had stopped to gaze at the ruins of an old feudal castle. We all know the power of suggestion contained in those old stones, and how wonderfully they tell stories of the past they have witnessed to those persons who know how to question them. The remembrance of the chateau ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... hommage, literally, acknowledgment by a man or vassal to his feudal lord); homicide (Lat. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... was made upon Hamilton-Moor, and the march commenced in all the pomp of feudal times. Military music sounded, banners and pennons waved, armour glittered far and wide, and spears glanced and twinkled like stars in a frosty sky. The gallant spectacle of warlike parade was on this occasion dignified ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... ownership. Committing the three others to the keeping of Mr. Poke, I led the individual in the hussar jacket a little on one side, and raising my hat to show that I was superior to the vulgar feelings of feudal superiority, I addressed him briefly ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of those topsy-turvy mixtures of all places and ages which only this jumbled century of ours has witnessed; it impressed me deeply. Here was this Indian prince, a feudal Rajput chief, living practically among his vassals in the Middle Ages when at home in India; yet he said 'I am a Merton man,' as Harold himself might have said it; and he talked about cricket as naturally as Lord Southminster talked ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... feudal organisation of the county is doubtless shadowed forth in the existing rapes. Of these there are six, called respectively after Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. It will be noticed at once that these were the seats of the new bishopric ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the head cook, and principal of all rule and authority in the kitchen department, was filled with wrath at what she considered an invasion of privilege. No feudal baron in Magna Charta times could have more thoroughly resented some ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barn empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions gone; without money, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... kept inviolate, even in the fastnesses of the Alps. A few years only have elapsed, since some of the fairest portions of this "land of the free," were held as conquered tributaries by other cantons, and were governed by a bailiff residing in his castle, and exercising a power like that of a feudal baron. A considerable portion of Switzerland is still subject to an aristocracy, as absolute in its sway, and as much opposed to the extension of light and liberty, as any other branch of the holy alliance. The press is, in ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... few moments in the hall conversing with Lady Beach-Mandarin's butler, whom he had known for some years and helped about a small investment, and who was now being abjectly polite and grateful to him for his attention. It gave Mr. Brumley a nice feudal feeling to establish and maintain such relationships. The furry-eyed boy fumbled with the sticks and umbrellas in the background and wondered if he too would ever climb to these levels of respectful gilt-tipped friendliness. Mr. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... when I first arrived, a quaint composition of all sorts of architecture; of feudal towers, and gable-ends in Queen Bess's style, and rough-patched walls built up to repair the ravages of the Roundhead cannon: but I need not speak of this at large, having had the place new-faced at a vast expense, under a fashionable architect, and the facade laid out in the latest ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... present state of things, provided they relate to husbandry, and not to any servitude or attendance upon the person of the landlord. Upon the whole, I found that the Revolution had much improved the condition of the farmers, having relieved them from feudal tenures and lay-tithes. Oh the other hand, some of the proprietors, even in the neighbourhood of Calais, had lost nearly the whole of the rents, under the interpretation of the law respecting what were ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... Nagoya Hotel. This is a flourishing, commercial city, with one of the longest and widest streets we had seen in Japan. The garrison occupies the castle, whose approach is the same as in the olden time—through gates and past moats. This castle was erected in 1610 by twenty great feudal lords to serve as a residence for Ieyasu's son. Like other Japanese castles, it is a wooden building, standing on immense walls which are eighteen feet thick. The castle has been taken by the Imperial household and is preserved ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... the Russian empire, whose tzar reigns over a hundred lands, contains perhaps as many Gypsies, it not being uncommon to find whole villages inhabited by this race; they likewise abound in the suburbs of the towns. In Hungary the feudal system still exists in all its pristine barbarity; in no country does the hard hand of this oppression bear so heavy upon the lower classes - not even in Russia. The peasants of Russia are serfs, it is ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... head, clear brain, cool self-possession; *****, modest, sensitive, and underrated; *****, the mouth-piece of the debating clubs, noisy, vaporous, and democratic; and so following. Then I could see them receiving their A. Bs. from the dignified, feudal-looking President, with his "auctoritate mihi commissa," and walking off the stage with their diplomas in their hands; while upon the very same day, their classmate was walking up and down California beach with a ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... political economy intervening, coming round upon them, if it had not been perceived before. If the two nations began their warfare, and planned it in defiance of all common laws and exchequers, at any rate the time it lasted was governed by that only. The same thing recurred in the policy of the feudal ages; the bumpkins, the vassals, were compelled to follow the standard, but their service was limited to a certain number of weeks. Afterwards, by law, as well as by custom, they dissolved for the autumnal labour of the harvest. And thus it ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... originally the custom to avoid having thirteen at the festive or family board, not so much from this notion, as to express a horror of the treachery of Judas. Such would be, for instance, the chivalrous spirit of the Crusaders. We can understand how, in feudal times, a knight would consider it an affront to his fellows to bid them to a banquet spread for thirteen. In those days, when a feast was so apt to end in a fray,—when by perfidy the enemy so often entered at the castle gate while the ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... it is consoling to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Chatelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Greve,—than a miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... which the power of strong men is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a Feudal System on a pecuniary basis—and money is the foundation of the Social Contract. (See Les Employes.) The mephitic vapors in the atmosphere of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring about a gradual deterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... stupefied, to this unexpected outburst, so unlike her cousin's usual language; but the charm was broken by its ending with the tremendously long name of Enguerrand, which always made her laugh, it was in such perfect harmony with the feudal pretensions of ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... We raced up the long winding road to Crewe's country-house, sitting like a feudal castle on the summit. And I wondered, at every moment, how I could keep my promise. The boy was a criminal, deserving to be hanged, no doubt, but the naked mother's heart that had dabbed against my fingers ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain of simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud doges, but in which I think most people will ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... then, if to the author of "Szomoru Napok," the whole world seemed out of joint. The book itself is, primarily, a tale of suffering, crime, and punishment; but it is also a bitter satire on the crying abuses and anomalies due to the semi-feudal condition of things which had prevailed in Hungary for centuries, the reformation and correction of which had been the chief mission of the Liberal Party in Hungary to which Jokai belonged. The brutal ignorance of the common people, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... henceforth, or into the dust I trample you again!' And they reconsider themselves, and obey. But many, or most of them, are new men, country gentlemen, and younger sons. She will follow her father's plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still strong enough to throw everything into confusion by resisting at once the Crown and Commons. Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry the Queen ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... inheritance. Hitherto, there had been a great disparity in the condition of high and low: certain properties, descending from eldest son to eldest son, had become enormously large, and were generally ill managed; while prodigious numbers of people had no property at all, and were dependents on feudal superiors. The country was undoubtedly in a bad condition, and some modification of the law was desirable. Reckless of consequences, the system as it stood was utterly swept away, and that of equal partition took its place. About the same period, vast domains ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... 1278 to 1993, Andorrans lived under a unique co-principality, ruled by French and Spanish leaders (from 1607 onward, the French chief of state and the Spanish bishop of Urgel). In 1993, this feudal system was modified with the titular heads of state retained, but the government transformed into a parliamentary democracy. Long isolated and impoverished, mountainous Andorra achieved considerable prosperity since World War II through its ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... new social type; the 'King's Young Courtier' who is deserting the good old ways of his father, the 'old courtier of the Queen.' The change is but one step in that continuous process which has substituted the modern gentleman for the old feudal noble; but the step taken at that period was great and significant. The chivalrous type, represented in Sidney's life and Spenser's poetry, is beginning to be old-fashioned and out of place as the industrial elements of society become ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... discovering of the three preceding centuries had destroyed European isolation and laid the foundation for a new world order of society. The Industrial Revolution was convulsing England and threatening to destroy the Feudal State. Western civilization, in the birthpangs of social revolution, produced first the American and then the ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... one of very respectable antiquity and antecedents. By a certain provision of the Feudal System a freeman who had committed a felony, or become hopelessly involved in debt, might purge himself of either by becoming a serf. So, at a later date, persons in the like predicament were permitted to exchange their fetters, whether of debt or iron, for the dear privilege of "spilling ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... of everything else, and without entering into other people's quarrels, nor into the question of his own earthly rights, England might have remained a Catholic country. Paul the Fourth's answer, instead, was short, cold and senseless. 'England,' he said, 'is under the feudal dominion of the Roman Church. Elizabeth is born out of wedlock; there are other legitimate heirs, and she should never have assumed the crown without the consent of the Apostolic See.' This is the generally accepted account of what took place, as given by Muratori and other historians. Lingard, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the house there were a few cottages, apparently of the same date as the keep, probably built for some retainers of the family, who sought shelter—they and their families and their small flocks and herds—at the hands of their feudal lord. Some of them had pretty much fallen to decay. They were built in a strange fashion. Strong beams had been sunk firm in the ground at the requisite distance, and their other ends had been fastened together, two and two, so as ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... on the ruins of a feudal castle, and took its name from one of the old towers still standing. It was surrounded by a dry stone wall, forming a court, the entrance to which was closed by hurdles. On their arrival at this place late at night, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... To mark thee unfold Nature's mystery. For this we thank thee, yet one thing remains Shall shrine thee deeper in the heart of man, In ages yet to be when we are dust; Thou hast put forth thy hand to rend our chains, Our birthright to restore from feudal ban; O righteous soul, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... reverse, and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls "Feudal Literature" could have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he calls the "Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of "Werther" and Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not indebted to the monks. He could less endure that they should be considered as instruments of absolute power to enslave the people: when this was intimated, he observed that, during the period which immediately followed the extinction of the Carlovingian dynasty, when the feudal law absolutely triumphed over monarchy, the people were wholly left to themselves, and must have sunk into an absolute state of barbarism, if it had not been for the religious establishments. Those, he said, softened ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... history can do, how Englishmen have become what they are. England is not yet a commercial country in the sense in which that epithet is used for her; and let us still hope that she will not soon become so. She might surely as well be called feudal England, or chivalrous England. If in western civilised Europe there does exist a nation among whom there are high signors, and with whom the owners of the land are the true aristocracy, the aristocracy that is trusted as being best and fittest to rule, ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... man was J.J. Malone, with a nature as brilliant and as capable of flashing varying lights from its facets as a diamond—and when need be as hard as a diamond. Had he lived in feudal times other barons would have said, "Where Malone sits there is the head of the table," and the monarch himself would have taken thought before provoking his wrath. In these days of alleged intolerance for tyrants he ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... England corresponding at all to the feudal aristocracies of the Old World. Whether it be owing to the stock from which we were derived, or to the practical working of our institutions, or to the abrogation of the technical "law of honor," which draws a sharp line ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... half that distance of Tallwoods, settlers nestled here or there in these enfolding hills and forests; but of neighbors in importance equal to that of the owner of Tallwoods there were few or none in that portion of the state. The time was almost feudal, but wilder and richer than any feudal day, in that fief tribute was unknown. The original landlord of these acres had availed himself of the easy laws and easy ways of the time and place, and taken over to himself from the loose public ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, "What laws shall we make?" In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, "What laws can we obey?" A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. But even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law. His head ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... separate and combine the raw materials, and work the miracles of our times. No one has the right to monopolise any one of these machines and to say to others—"This is mine, if you wish to make use of it you must pay me a tax on each article you produce," any more than the feudal lord of the middle ages had the right to say to the cultivator—"This hill and this meadow are mine and you must pay me tribute for every sheaf of barley you bind, and on each ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... the north and the south. Roughly speaking, the revolution which established the republic and overthrew the Manchus represented a victory for the south. But the transformation during the last five years of the nominal republic into a corrupt oligarchy of satraps or military governors or feudal lords has represented a victory for the north. It is a significant fact, symbolically at least, that the most powerful remaining tuchun or military governor in China—in some respects the only powerful one who has survived the vicissitudes of the last few years—namely ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... for I always answer the rustic salutations of the people about here, knowing them to have had a sort of feudal attachment to uncle. ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... Boer supremacy, and to this strangers must submit; the Boers to figure as the only caste or military aristocracy privileged to carry arms, very much like the Samouris nobles of Japan, who from of old until recently had represented the feudal estate, and had made quite a famous cult of personal bravery, chivalry and devotion to their Mikado and for their independent caste. Long intercourse and inter-marriage with a Boer family would ultimately remove the barrier. With such rooted ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... day-scholars, as a marked favor to their parents, were admitted with the boarders elect; and of these two I was one. If I remember correctly, Professor Park and my father were among the advisers whose opinions had weight with the selection of our course of study, and I often wonder how, with their rather feudal views of women, these two wise men of Andover managed to approve so ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... is so named on account of the fancied resemblance which its mound of white and grey deposit presents to the ruins of a feudal keep, the crater itself being placed on a cone or turret, which has a somewhat imposing appearance compared with the other geysers in the neighborhood. It throws a column usually about fifty or sixty feet high, at intervals of two or three ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... giving me Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm 280 That Nature breathes among the hills and groves? When he had left the mountains and received On his smooth breast the shadow of those towers [W] That yet survive, a shattered monument Of feudal sway, the bright blue river passed 285 Along the margin of our terrace walk; [X] A tempting playmate whom we dearly loved. Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... still and waiting for the British to catch up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world's arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic organization could make the most of their ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Thomas Rhymer, the tidings that we must back to Fairyland. Other waters we knew well, and loved: the little salmon-stream in the west that doubles through the loch, and runs a mile or twain beneath its alders, past its old Celtic battle-field, beneath the ruined shell of its feudal tower, to the sea. Many a happy day we had there, on loch or stream, with the big sea-trout which have somehow changed their tastes, and to- day take quite different flies from the green body and the red body that led them to the landing-net long ago. Dear are the twin Alines, but dearer is Tweed, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... distinctive features of one being wild forest scenery, glowing with ever-changing hues, and suggestive of a new world; and those of the other, the wild and craggy cliff capped with beetling fortresses, and banks fringed with picturesque villages and towns, all telling of feudal times and an old world. I should as soon think of comparing the castle of Heidelberg, on its lofty hill with Buckingham Palace, in its metropolitan hole.—But ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... some sort of feudal system that the natural bent of the Turanian race tended to develop. Each chief was supreme on his own territory, and the king was only primus inter pares. The chiefs who formed his council occasionally murdered their king and set up one of their own number in his place. ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... surrounding dingy offices and squalid tenements. Its massive construction, steep walls, pointed turrets, raised parapets and long, narrow, slit-like windows, heavily barred, gave it the aspect of a feudal fortress incongruously set down plumb in the midst of twentieth-century New York. The dull roar of Broadway hummed a couple of blocks away; in the distance loomed the lofty, graceful spans of Brooklyn Bridge, jammed with its opposing streams of busy inter-urban traffic. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... ancestors, he was proud of hearing as a sort of surname the knightly title of Headbreaker, hereditary in the original Mauprat stock. As for the elder branch, it had turned out so badly, or rather had preserved from the old feudal days such terrible habits of brigandage, that it had won for itself the distinctive title of Hamstringer. [I hazard "Headbreaker" and "Hamstringer" as poor equivalents for the "Casse-Tete" and "Coupe-Jarret" of the French.—TR.] Of the sons ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... 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, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... a city which has the impress of many ages and many minds stamped upon it. Here each influence—military from the Roman legions, ecclesiastical from the Saxon prelates, feudal from the Norman lords—has sunk deeply into the land, and has affected the general plan of the numerous buildings, as it has moulded the slowly succeeding phases of the civic and the religious life. It is no mere dream of the early ages, no sentimental reverie of mediaevalism. It ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... greater show of respect than while he owned his father's farm. The impulse transmitted to him from the devotion of ancestors to the patriarchal head of the clan, had found blind vent in the direction of the mere feudal superior, and both the impulse and its object remained. He felt honoured, even now that he had reached the goal of his lofty desires and was a popular preacher, in being permitted to play backgammon with the great man, or to carve ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Amazon as manna-fall. The lumber valley was ten miles above a tiny railroad station, and servants had to be tempted with triple wages, were transient, or married an employee before a month could pass. The valley women regarded Rawling as their patron, heir of his father, and as temporary aid gave feudal service on demand; but for the six months of his family's residence each year house servants must be kept at any price. He talked of his domain, and the Irish girl nodded, the rattles whirring when she breathed, muffled in her breast, as if a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "You know my feudal castle at Pludun-Herlouet, near Saint Jacut-de-la-Mer, which I bought two years ago, and in which I have not yet set foot? Very well, then! The day after to-morrow, which is the first of May, we will ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... that he should never have known the small French gentleman. Arthur was full of joy—Yusuf gruff, brief, anxious, like one acting under some compulsion most unwillingly, and even despondently, but apparently constrained by a certain instinctive feudal feeling, which made him follow the desires of the ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wassail, schooled in manly exercises, cleanly even to superstition, loyal to age and filial duties; with a manly pride of personal independence that held a debt the next worst thing to a lie; their fondness for social graces, their feudal dignities, their chiefs giving counsel to the king even while submissive to his person, esteeming prowess before praying; their strong ambition, scorning those who scorned toil." Artaxerxes wore upon ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the intensest local pride to be found perhaps in France, and the boast of the city still is that it has never been conquered. Looking back to the sharp times when every near warfare centred about Bayonne,—when feudal enmities were constantly outcropping on quick pretexts,—when the issue always gathered itself into hand-to-hand encounter, and was determined by personal prowess,—the boast ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... length of Bolshevism. And that is a serious danger. The agitation now going on among the people, therefore, starts with a grievance. The masses have many other grievances besides the one just sketched—the survivals of the feudal age, the privileges of class, the inequality of opportunity. And the kernel formed by these is the element of truth and equity which imparts force to all those underground movements, and enables them to subsist and extend. Error is never dangerous by itself; it is ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... very numerous. The women were principally chosen from the relatives of court officials of high rank, or from the daughters of the great feudal lords; there were, however, many strangers among them, daughters or sisters of petty Libyan, Nubian, or Asiatic kings; they were brought into Pharaoh's house as hostages for the submission of their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... he assumed all the imaginary privileges of his position, granting to his friends vast districts of Canadian soil, creating Nova-Scotian baronets at his own discretion, and acting, if not like a king, at least like a feudal magnate of the first degree. He caused notice after notice to be issued proclaiming his rights, and the records of the time are filled with strange proclamations and announcements, to which his name is attached. As a rule, these productions are far too ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... when the other taxes ran short. Moreover, there were taxes in kind on malt, salt, fish, cattle, and horses, payable to the prince. The landlord (boyard) was entitled to land and pasturage tax, the tenth of the earth's productions, feudal service, bee, pig, and sheep taxes, and in addition to these a rate was levied upon bees, pigs, tobacco, wine, and sheep, for the benefit of the prince.[138] Whilst these imposts and the extraordinary levies and ravages of war ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... a second time, and instantly there was silence once more. He was like a feudal lord dispensing justice in the open ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... once been a palace, a marble palace with marble walls a couple of feet thick and staircases like a stonecutter's nightmare. The place was feudal. A coat-of-arms and a hat, in marble, still balanced themselves over the portico—Robinson's perhaps. I suppose the little glazed office was the sentry-box in the old days, where mendicants got their doles and tall freelances from Germany applied for a situation. ...
— Aliens • William McFee |
