"Peasantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other countries the peasantry use a Lichen, called Lecanora tartarea to furnish a red or crimson dye. It is found abundantly on almost all rocks, and also grows on dry moors. It is collected in May and June, and steeped in stale urine for about three ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... the ax at the root of another tree whose fruit had cursed the Irish peasantry. This was the system of land tenure which prevailed in the southern and western counties. In the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, the tenantry were of another sort, and there were other means of livelihood than agriculture. Out of this condition had sprung the so-called "Ulster tenant-right," ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... political liberty. They preferred the liberty of conscience to the liberty as citizens. Under all these titles the new institutions were odious: faithful priests nourished this hatred, and sanctified it in the hearts of the peasantry, whilst the nobility kept up a royalism, which pity for the king's misfortunes and the royal family made more full of sympathy at the daily recital ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... somewhat unusual. He divides professions into (1) honourable, or those which increase the actual quantity of goods in the community or help its development, such as ecclesiastical offices, the law, the soldiery, the peasantry, artisans, and merchants, and (2) degrading—such as ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... it is to the decline of this happy simplicity that the decline of this custom may be traced, and the rural dance on the green, and the homely May-day pageant, have gradually disappeared in proportion as the peasantry have become expensive and artificial in their pleasures, and too knowing for simple enjoyment. Some attempts, indeed, have been made by men of both taste and learning to rally back the popular feeling to their standards of primitive ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and very different dialects, the boundaries of which are strongly marked by the River Parret. To the east and north of that river, and of the town of Bridgewater, a dialect is used which is essentially, (even now) the dialect of all the peasantry of not only that part of Somersetshire, but of Dorsetshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent; and even in the suburban village of Lewisham, will be found many striking remains of it. There can be no doubt that this dialect ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... we've won a victory, But tempered is our exultation; We have lost a host of peasantry And all the ...
— Axel Thordson and Fair Valborg - a ballad • Thomas J. Wise
... him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to man takes the first steps toward healing the wounds which man inflicts on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of the Scotch peasantry. He popularised the work which the Lake poets had begun, of re-opening the primary springs of human passion. "Love he had found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery; teaching the "world" of English ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... information of such travellers as from their known wealth or external appearance might be supposed worth attacking. They were well-made, active, and athletic men, in whom it would not be easy to recognise any particular character at variance with that of the peasantry around them. It is unnecessary to say that they were all armed. Having satisfied himself as to the identity of master and man, with a glance at his companions, the ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Seigniors, and Priests, controlled the colonists as they willed. However much the Governor may have despised the Intendant, the Intendant the Seignior, or the Priest all put together, the merchant, artisan, and peasant were of no account. Wealth without title was only a bait for extortion. The peasantry were serfs, and the nobles uneducated despots. Education was in the hands of the clergy, while power was solely vested in the Heads of Military Departments. But if ignorance was particularly characteristic of the Canadians, the New Englanders could lay little claim to superior ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... in July, and had not really left it alone, so that the civilians had made a rather hurried departure. A few had elected to remain, and were to be seen walking furtively about the streets with that curious strained look that the war-driven peasantry of France and Belgium always wore. Here we met the 2nd battalion of the Manchesters, and were glad of the opportunity to make their acquaintance. A 7th officer, then Capt. L. Taylor, was amongst them and it may be mentioned here that later in the war he added lustre to the Fleur ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... Samos, it would seem, envious of this comparative happiness of Scio, landed upon the island in an irregular multitude, for the purpose of compelling its inhabitants to make common cause with their countrymen against their oppressors. These, being joined by the peasantry, marched to the city and drove the Turks into the castle. The Turkish fleet, lately reinforced from Egypt, happened to be in the neighboring seas, and, learning these events, landed a force on the island of fifteen thousand ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... princes having been employed in conducting the attack. In the Pharaoh's IXth year a revolt broke out on the Egyptian frontier, in the Shephelah, and the king placed himself at the head of his troops to crush it. Ascalon, in which the peasantry and their families had found, as they hoped, a safe refuge, opened its gates to the Pharaoh, and its fall brought about the submission of several neighbouring places. This, it appears, was the first time since the beginning of the conquests ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... them in the coarse cloth of the country, made in the style common among the peasantry of Bergen; but the delicacy of his limbs, the smallness of his head, the easy elegance of his poise, and the natural gracefulness of his movements and attitudes, all seemed to denote ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... made acquainted with the circumstances under which this poem was written. It was included by Mr. J. H. Dixon in his "Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England" (edited by Robert Bell), with ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... older continents America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean all America, Spanish-speaking ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... carver and gilder in the trade. Besides, he had always an eye open for new business. At that time, when the war was raging with France, gold was at a premium. The guinea was worth about twenty-six or twenty-seven shillings. Bianconi therefore began to buy up the hoarded-up guineas of the peasantry. The loyalists became alarmed at his proceedings, and began to circulate the report that Bianconi, the foreigner, was buying up bullion to send secretly to Bonaparte! The country people, however, parted with their guineas readily; for they ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... delightful he must have looked! Why have we no such types nowadays? Wearing a "white merino frock-coat, nankeen trowsers, a large-brimmed straw hat, and white shoes," he must have been a fairly conspicuous object in the landscape. That hat alone will have alarmed the peasantry who to this day and hour wear nothing but felt on their heads. And note the predominance of the colour white in his attire; it was popular, at that period, with English travellers. Such men, however, were unknown in most of the regions which ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... fertile, but neglected and thinly peopled, of Spanish provinces. "Nothing," he says, "is wanted but a good government to assist the bounteous hand with which the gifts of Providence have been showered on this beautiful region." But, alas! instead of a thriving peasantry and well-tilled soil, what does he meet with? Despoblados, or deserts, with here and there some wretched villages, few and far between, and from time to time a cortijo, or farm-house, with its cultivated patch; but the general face of the country ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... to live in nominal freedom. But despotism, with savage leer and stealthy step, saw that Fenelon was kept far away. In those declining days, when the shadows were lengthening toward the east, her time and talents were given to teaching the simple rudiments of knowledge to the peasantry, to alleviating their material wants and to ministering to the sick. It was a forced retirement, and yet it was a retirement that was in every way in accord with her desires. But in spite of the persecution that followed her, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... effect perceptible, let us suppose that the change takes place on a considerable scale, and that a large sum is diverted from buying plate and jewels to employing productive laborers, whom we shall suppose to have been previously, like the Irish peasantry, only half employed and half fed. The laborers, on receiving their increased wages, will not lay them out in plate and jewels, but in food. There is not, however, additional food in the country; nor any unproductive laborers or animals, as in the former case, whose food is set free for productive ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... forest and clearing, and a clever delineation of the passions which actuate humanity in the rough.... The stories, eleven in all, deal with love and life and religion in many aspects, and as character studies of the simple Canadian peasantry, French and English, can compare favorably with similar selections in which Scotch, Welsh and Irish rural life have been exploited.... Its readability might be ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... for allowing the peasantry of England to divert themselves with certain games in the open air, on Sundays, after evening service, was published by Charles the First, it is needless to say the English people were comparatively rude and uncivilised. And yet it is extraordinary ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... stay on one farm a lifetime, and never leave it—an invaluable aid to a farmer. They frequently possess some little special knowledge of carpentering or blacksmith's work, which renders them extremely useful, and at the same time increases their earnings. These men are the real true peasantry, quiet and peaceful, yet strong and courageous. These are the class that should be encouraged by every possible means; a man who keeps his little habitation in the state I have described, who ornaments it within, and ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... rolling collar, the earrings, the stout shoes, the trousers of blue-gray drilling unevenly colored by the various lengths of the warp,—in short, all those humble, strong, and durable things which make the apparel of the Breton peasantry. The big buttons of white horn which fastened the jacket made the girl's heart beat. When she saw the bunch of broom her eyes filled with tears; then a dreadful fear drove back into her heart the happy memories ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... people of Ruscino because he foresaw the hopelessness of forging their weak tempers into the metal necessary for resistance. As well might he hope to change a sword-rush of the river into a steel sabre for combat. Masaniello, Rienzi, Garibaldi, had roused the peasantry and led them against their foes; but the people they dealt with must, he thought, have been made of different stuff than these timorous villagers, who could not even be make to comprehend the magnitude of the wrong which was ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... not swear or scold. The woman-chasing, whisky-swilling type, who has disgraced us in the open ports, is unknown here. These native mountaineers are rough and uneducated savages, but they are honest and healthy. We feel on easy terms with them, as we do with our own peasantry. In the village street of Chuzenji I have seen a young English officer instructing the sons of boatmen and woodcutters in the mysteries ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and civilization are so far superior to that found anywhere in the Turkish territory that they are capable of maintaining the substantial progress which the English occupation achieved in Corfu; and, though we found the peasantry not largely inoculated by the fever of progress, the better classes of the city population succeed in supporting the better condition attained to. But the obstinacy of the conservatism retained by the agricultural classes is equal to ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... proper and legitimate boundary of France against Germany. This debate, it is well known, produced a perfect storm of popular passions in Germany. In a few weeks the whole shores of the Rhine were bristling with bayonets; the peasantry in the Black Forest began to clean and polish their rusty muskets, buried since the fall of Napoleon, and the princes perceiving that the spirit of nationality was stronger than that of freedom, encouraged this popular declaration against French usurpation. Nicolas Becker, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... all sides, and Boris' danger grows momently more imminent. He hears of the revolt of the peasantry and the provincial towns,—of the inactivity and mutiny of the army,—of the commotions in Moscow,—of the advance of Demetrius. Romanow, whom he has deeply wronged, arrives in Moscow. This gives ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others. Mazzini, that greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the condition of the South European peasantry, said: "Education is not merely a necessity of true life by which the individual renews his vital force in the vital force of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead and living, by which he fecundates all his faculties. When he is ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... being descendants of the dethroned imperial families; a circumstance which is probable enough, and which nobody takes the trouble to dispute, any more than the alleged nobility of the Castilian peasantry, or the absurd genealogies of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... restraining hand. "A werewolf," he said, "is a true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire. As in the case at hand, he may ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... overlooking a low tract occasionally flooded by the river Inny. In this house Goldsmith was born, and it was a birthplace worthy of a poet; for, by all accounts, it was haunted ground. A tradition handed down among the neighboring peasantry states that, in after years, the house, remaining for some time untenanted, went to decay, the roof fell in, and it became so lonely and forlorn as to be a resort for the "good people" or fairies, who in Ireland are supposed to delight in old, crazy, deserted mansions for their ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... sufficiently educated or skilful to carry out that 'petite culture' which requires—as I have said already—not only intellect and practical education, but a hereditary and traditional experience, such as is possessed by the Belgians, the Piedmontese, and, above all, by the charming peasantry of Provence and Languedoc, the fathers (as far as Western Europe is concerned) of all our agriculture. It may be, too, that as the sugar cultivation increased, they were tempted more and more, in the old hard drinking days, by the special poison of the West Indies—new rum, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of the opulent classes who derive enjoyment from their labour. They consist, for the most part, of Shropshire and Welsh girls, who walk to London at this season in droves, to perform this drudgery, just as the Irish peasantry come to assist in the hay and corn harvests. I learnt that these women carry upon their heads baskets of strawberries, or raspberries, weighing from forty to fifty pounds, and make two turns in the ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... harrowing picture of the unhappy fate of wife and children left defenceless and in poverty to become the prey of such men as Rosenblatt. He drew a vivid picture of that age-long struggle for freedom carried on by the down-trodden peasantry of Russia, and closed with a tremendous appeal to them as fathers, as lovers of liberty, as fair-minded, reasonable men to allow the prisoner the full benefit of the many doubts gathering round the case for the prosecution, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... property concealed in the full anticipation that the conquerors would act upon the world-wide maxim, "to the victors belong the spoils." But, as we have already seen, it was the government and not the peasantry or people of the country that O'Neill had come to overthrow. No better evidence of this could be afforded than that shown by the circumstance, that, although two infamous and relentless robbers, and their scarcely ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... the possibility of obtaining a commission in the little army of the Duchy of Maasau. This hint set him on the right track. The regiments of Maasau, though few in number, carried splendid traditions. Their ranks were drawn from a stolid, silent peasantry, and officered by a wire-strung, high tempered aristocracy, born of a mixed race, it is true, but none the less frantically devoted to the freedom and independence of their shred of ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... capital, and but slight experience with the larger world. Some were middle-class lawyers, merchants, and squires; a few, but very few, were of higher rank, while scores were of the soil, coarse in language and habits, and given to practices characteristic of the peasantry of England at that time. The fact that hardly a fifth of those in Massachusetts were professed Christians renders it doubtful how far religious convictions were the only driving motive that sent ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... is that we Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East Slavonic peasantry. At best we know—and even that not always—what oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions are to blame, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... at which not a few of the neighbouring families had been purchasers. After all, however, a great many things were left unhid for, which were not, from a money point of view—the sole one taken—worth removing; and now the peasantry were, like jackals, admitted to pick the bones of the huge carcase, ere the skeleton itself should be torn asunder. Nor could the invading populace have been disappointed of their expectations: they found numberless things ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... homogeneous community whose main constituent and real core consisted of the farmers, large and small, and minor artisans. In the last centuries of the Republic the social development had occasioned the complete decay of the Roman peasantry, and the free artisans had fared little better. In the place of the old Rome had arisen the capital of an empire, inhabited by a population of a million and of extraordinarily mixed composition. Not only did this population comprise a number of immigrant ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... adherents of Charles had assured him that the whole country would rise in his favor on the arrival of the fleet, and that the town itself would probably open its gates to receive him. These promises had, like all others he had received from his Spanish friends, proved delusive. Few of the peasantry appeared to receive them on the coast, and these were unarmed and ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... by their careful owners, rain-water butts fell to pieces; well-buckets were lowered inside the covers of the well-hole, to preserve them from the fate of the butts, and generally, water seemed scarcer in the country than the beer and cider of the peasantry ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Dublin, sure, there is no doubtin', Beats every city upon the say. 'Tis there you'll see O'Connell spouting, And Lady Morgan making "tay." For 'tis the capital of the greatest nation With finest peasantry on a fruitful sod, Fighting like devils for conciliation, And hating each other for the love ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... man knew whither, as he had appeared for no man knew what—fell in with the universal prostration of mind that laid France on her knees, as before the slow unweaving of some ancient prophetic doom. The famines, the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the peasantry up and down Europe—these were chords struck from the same mysterious harp; but these were transitory chords. There had been others of deeper and more ominous sound. The termination of the Crusades, the destruction of the Templars, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... The peasantry and the mechanics of the towns resisted. The poor found their mouth-piece in John Ball, "a mad priest of Kent," as Froissart calls him. Mad his words must have seemed to the nobles of the land. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... words of the language of the Irish people. Lord Stanhope, in his "History of England from the Peace of Utrecht," writes as if the Irish clergymen—the clergymen, that is, of the Established Church of Ireland—might have accomplished wonders in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language. We are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind. The Irish Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... children of the French peasantry almost invariably address their parents as "father" and "mother," those of the working classes of Paris, and some other large cities, usually employ ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... went to Turin and its neighbourhood, on a visit to her aunt, a Roman Catholic lady. As Miss Procter had herself professed the Roman Catholic Faith two years before, she entered with the greater ardour on the study of the Piedmontese dialect, and the observation of the habits and manners of the peasantry. In the former, she soon became a proficient. On the latter head, I extract from her familiar letters written home to England at the time, ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... them wait till they have ten million vermin overrunning their country—we shall see how long they will be sentimental. Think of it! A burrowing swarm creeping and crawling everywhere, ugh! They ruin our peasantry with their loans and their drink shops, ruin our army with their revolutionary propaganda, ruin our professional classes by snatching all the prizes and professorships, ruin our commercial classes by monopolising our sugar industries, ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... no affectation that he spoke in the fashion of the peasantry; his grandfather and his father were tillers of the soil, and he had gone straight from the farm to study medicine in Quebec, amongst other young fellows for the most part like himself—grandsons, if not sons of farmers—who had all clung to the plain country ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... of Richmond had done admirably in capturing the incendiary who has been taken, and who they think will afford a clue whereby they will discover the secret of all the burnings. This man called himself Evans. They had information of his exciting the peasantry, and sent a Bow Street officer after him. He found out where he lived and captured him (having been informed that he was not there by the inmates of the house), and took him to the Duke, who had ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... large monkey, which escaped from his chain, and was abroad in Morayshire for some eight or ten days. Wherever he appeared he spread terror among the peasantry. A poor fisherman on the banks of the Findhorn was sitting with his wife and family at their frugal meal, when a hairy little man, as they in their ignorance conceived him to be, appeared on the window sill ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... the cause of that extraordinary vividness in the speech of the Scotch peasantry?" said Allan—more to keep the blades from bickering than from ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... management of a small establishment. The parents were invited as guests, to enjoy the dishes which the princesses had prepared with their own hands, and there each child was free to follow the bent of its own industrial inclination. In the Highlands, again, among the reserved and dignified Scottish peasantry, the children were encouraged to visit freely, to make themselves acquainted with the wants and feelings of the poor, and to regard them with an understanding sympathy ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... iniquitous business is kept up entirely by the Arabs, but that very important matter had no weight at that time with Harry, who merely knew that the slaves he had met were almost as free and much better off than the Fellaheen or peasantry of Egypt. ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... illustrative of superstition in English peasant folk, and Piers had only to draw upon his Russian experiences for pursuit of the subject. He told how, in a time of great drought, he had known a corpse dug up from its grave by peasantry, and thrown into a muddy pond—a vigorous measure for the calling down of rain; also, how he had seen a priest submit to be dragged on his back across a turnip field, that thereby a great crop might be secured. These things interested ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... at the head of their new State. With pardonable eagerness they plunged into the campaign of speculation which was now open to them, and many of their number rapidly grew rich. Thus after a time they became employers of labour on a large scale, incidentally solving the labour question of the peasantry ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... the years he spent in this monotonous place, without any society worth speaking of, with only the shabbiest collection of books, with hardly any interest in life except the sky, and the hills, and the peasantry?' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... heretical women with whom those parts were infested. He accordingly consigned more than one hundred to the flames, every day, like a new holocaust, sacrificing such persons to Vulcan, as, in the judgment of the historian, were subjects demanding rather hellebore than fire; till at length the peasantry of the vicinity rose in arms, and drove the merciless judge out of the country. The culprits were accused of having dishonoured the crucifix, and denying Christ for their God. They were asserted to have solemnised after a detestable way the devil's sabbath, in which the fiend appeared ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... afterwards possess considerable advantages over the untrained blacks, and often contrive to save enough money to buy their freedom. Altogether, I don't think the negroes of Jamaica can be said to be much worse off than the peasantry in many parts of the old country; they may in some respects be even better off than the ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... give his poor mother a good deal of trouble. Another thing, of which I have still a vivid recollection, was the mischief wrought by Captain Swing. In Kent there had been an alarming outbreak of the peasantry, ostensibly against the use of agricultural machinery. They assembled in large bodies, and visited the farm buildings of the principal landed proprietors, demolishing the threshing machines then being brought into use. In some instances they set fire to barns ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... They were free of the burden of Jim Crow. Along with white citizens they were given better schooling, a major factor in improving status. The mass migration also meant that this part of America's peasantry was rapidly joining America's proletariat. The wartime shortage of workers, coupled with the efforts of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and other government agencies, opened up thousands of jobs ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... one of those rural fetes, where the peasantry of France gather on the village green, to mingle in the exhilarating dance. An aged couple came forward, hand in hand, in coarse grey overcoats, wooden sabots, and flapped hats, fastened by gray handkerchiefs ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of England the peasantry formerly asserted that, on the anniversary of the Nativity, oxen knelt in their stalls at midnight,—the supposed hour of Christ's birth; while in other localities bees were said to sing in their hives and subterranean bells to ring a ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... make it a happy one for all their people. But when Twelfth Night was gone by, and quietness descended upon the four occupants of the castle, they found that they had succeeded in telling each other much more than they supposed, in the intervals between Christmas trees, and dinners for the peasantry, and all the pleasant noise and excitement of the Yuletide. Very soon their lives dropped into peaceful channels again, and upon the tidal wave of merriment succeeded the calm flow of an untroubled existence. There ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... guerilla warfare, lying in ambush behind hedges, harassing the enemy, picking off his sentinels, holding the woods, from which not a Prussian was to emerge alive; while the truth of the matter was that they had made themselves the terror of the peasantry, whom they failed utterly to protect and whose fields they devastated. Every ne'er-do-well who hated the restraints of the regular service made haste to join their ranks, well pleased with the chance that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Dublin's city, there's no doubtin', Bates every city on the say; 'Tis there you'll hear O'Connell spoutin', And Lady Morgan making tay; For 'tis the capital of the finest nation, Wid charmin' peasantry on a fruitful sod, Fightin' like divils for conciliation, An' hatin' each other for the love ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Airsmoss, the scene of the skirmish, in 1680, between a body of the soldiers of Charles II. and a small party of Covenanters, when their minister, the famous Richard Cameron, was slain. The traditions which still floated among the peasantry around the tombstone of this indomitable pastor of the persecuted Presbyterians, essentially fostered in his mind the love of poetry; and he afterwards turned them to account in his poem of "The Cameronian's Dream." Some years having passed at this place, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... one belonging to a neighbour of the writer's grandfather. He was hanged at the now demolished Ivel-chester or Ilchester jail above mentioned—that building formerly of so many sinister associations in the minds of the local peasantry, and the continual haunt of fever, which at last led to its condemnation. Its site is now an innocent-looking ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... already delivered them out of the house of bondage without any petition on their part, but many from their task-masters to a contrary effect; and for myself, when I consider this, I pity the Catholic peasantry for not having the good fortune to be born black. But the Catholics are contented, or at least ought to be, as we are told; I shall, therefore, proceed to touch on a few of those circumstances which so marvellously contribute to their exceeding ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the priests of the Eastern church in Siberia, but it must also be admitted there are many bad ones. In a country where the clergy wields as great power as in Russia the authorities should take care that the representatives of the church set a good example. The intemperance so prevalent among the peasantry is partly due to the debaucheries of the priesthood. Where the people follow their religious leaders with blind faith and obey their commands in all the forms of worship, are they not in danger of following ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... heroes have outlived the Reformation, the union of the two crowns, the civil and religious wars of the revolution, and the subsequent union of the kingdoms; and, at a comparatively late period, were collected from the oral traditions of the peasantry. Time had it not in its power to chill the memories which lay warm at the nation's heart, or to efface the noble annals of its long and eventful history. There is a spell of potency still in the names of the Bruce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Prussian monarchy in 1807, the noble families—for the most part hereditary knights (Herrn von)—almost entirely monopolized the governmental and higher municipal posts, and a considerable portion of the peasantry were under servitude to them as feudal superiors. The numbers of the lesser nobility—in consequence of the right of every nobleman's son, of whatever grade, to bear his father's title—were so great, and since the introduction by the great Elector,[A] and his royal successors, of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... is wonderfully ludicrous in its extravagance. We are led to infer that those best of friends, der Kaiser and his cousins George and Nicholas, are merely pretending hostility in order to rid themselves of a troublesome peasantry! We do not know what Mr. Shufelt has been reading lately, but we hope that time may modify his ideas to such a degree that he will turn his dignified style and pure English to some object worthy of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... complete manner by Mr. MacCulloch, whose study provides the material for a statistical survey of story incidents founded on primitive custom and belief.[110] They are the most ancient history to which we have access. That this history is contained in the folk-tales of modern peasantry shows it to have come from that far-off period which saw the earliest condition of these people. It is still history, if it tells us of a life which preceded the written record. It is history of the most valuable description, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the land to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay, Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade, A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged playfellows. It takes a few dashes into the world to give the young, great man that proper, decent, unnoticing disregard for the poor, insignificant, stupid devils, the mechanics and peasantry around him, who were, perhaps, born in the same village. My young superiors never insulted the clouterly appearance of my plough-boy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons. They ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... undergrowth. And then—what else can one offer to these Abruzzi mountain-folk? Their life is one of miserable, revolting destitution. They have no games or sports, no local racing, clubs, cattle-shows, fox-hunting, politics, rat-catching, or any of those other joys that diversify the lives of our peasantry. No touch of humanity reaches them, no kindly dames send them jellies or blankets, no cheery doctor enquires for their children; they read no newspapers or books, and lack even the mild excitements of church versus chapel, or the vicar's daughter's love-affair, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... increasing vehemence, regardless of the supplications of his terrified auditors, in a fervid tirade that abounded with symbols and striking images. It was the untainted, the reasoning, the substantial portion of France, the peasantry, the tillers of the soil, those who had always kept close contact with their mother Earth, that was suppressing the outbreak of the crazed, exasperated part, the part that had been vitiated by the Empire and led astray by vain illusions and empty dreams; and in the performance ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... at that time, a revolting exhibition. The irony of Orlov and his friends knew no bounds, and spared no one and nothing. If they spoke of religion, it was with irony; they spoke of philosophy, of the significance and object of life—irony again, if any one began about the peasantry, it was with irony. ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in my plaid, beneath the arch of an impending rock! I see, gentlemen," continued the Highlander, "that you appear surprised to hear a man, who has so little to recommend him, express himself in rather loftier language than you are accustomed to among your peasantry here. But you should remember that a certain degree of education is more general in Scotland than where you live, and that, wanting almost all the gifts of fortune, we cannot afford to suffer those of nature to remain uncultivated. When, therefore, my father saw that the determined ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... Waife's and Sophy's daily bread, with even more than the surplus set aside for the rent. For the rest, the basketmaker's cottage being at the farthest outskirts of the straggling village inhabited by a labouring peasantry, his way of life was not much known nor much inquired into. He seemed a harmless, hard-working man; never seen at the beer-house; always seen with his neatly-dressed little grandchild in his quiet ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... younger sons, perhaps, or relatives of stockholders in the London Company, attracted to Virginia because of the newness of the adventure and the spice of danger; sons of professional men and men of business, intrigued by a new business life and opportunity; men from the laboring classes and the peasantry of rural sections. But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... of the queen of the elfin tribe. On this place are found a number of small stones, of a singular shape and appearance, resembling guns, cradles with children in them, bonnets, &c., several of which I obtained in a tour to Scotland. They are called elf-stones by the neighbouring peasantry. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia, where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-rescuing, wrong-redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Englishmen and even some Americans are rather unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could not be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he could not be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a secret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square miles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is something invisible, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... auspices less benign we might have found the former mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant and unknown to them—the price of land, and the points of a pedigree bull—so we follow with an ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... by foreign corporations. "Certain of these foreigners are titled noblemen. Some of them have brought over from Europe, in considerable numbers, herdsmen and other employees who sustain to them a dependent relationship characteristic of the peasantry on the large landed estates of Europe." Two British syndicates, for instance, held 7,500,000 acres in Texas. [Footnote: House Reports, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... his popularity. It was no slight temptation to his vanity; for, as some one has said truly, no successful adventurer in after-life ever wins such undivided admiration and hearty partisans as a school hero. The prestige of the liberator among the Irish peasantry comes nearest to it, I think; or the feeling of a clan, a hundred years ago, toward their chief. It must be very pleasant to be quoted so incessantly and believed in so implicitly, and to know that your decisions ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... larger than the rest; from its dimensions, it might be termed a "bonfire," such as is made by the flattering and flunkeyish peasantry of old-world lands, when they welcome home the squire and the count. It was placed directly in front of the solitary tent, and not a dozen paces from its entrance. Its blazing pile gave forth a flood of red light that reached even to the spot where I stood, and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... people, a peasant woman, take her place and often her husband's place, as he has a right to delegate his vote to her at elections, and she may also take it at county meetings and assemblies of every kind. Lately the government of the peasantry have made an effort to deprive the women of the right to hold office but the Senate has prevented them on the ground that if women share the hard struggle for existence with the men, as they do in our remote rural districts, they must also share the privileges. Gentlemen, I hope ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... admiring circles of simple listeners, and they had not yet come to that hour of authorship when it reverted to the peasantry, now turned people, and threw itself upon the people's generous acceptance and recognition for bread and fame. But when that hour came, it brought with it the honor of a reverent and persistent curiosity concerning ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... rule contain nothing of interest beyond the bare records of births, deaths and marriages. The great proportion of villagers, however, who at this time signed their names with a mark, shows that the art of writing was still a rare thing among the peasantry. The church account books of the period reveal many curious items such as the frequent repairs of the thatch on the vestry at Middleton (thatched churches are still to be seen in Norfolk and Suffolk), and "L5, 19s. 6d. in all for the Violin or Base Musick" ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution." She was thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... "better bodies" the Irish retained beyond all question up to the Famine. It was upon it alone that the Wexford peasantry relied in 1798, and with and by it alone that they again and again, armed with but pike and scythe swept disciplined regiments of English mercenaries in headlong ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... that he had spent 150,000 pounds, but that 60,000 pounds of damage had been done "by reason of the opposition of the commoners," who cut the banks of his channels in the night and during floods. The peasantry, indeed, resisted the improvements that have proved so beneficent to that part of England, because the draining and cultivation of so many miles of swamp would deprive them of fishing and fowling privileges ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... while the Chinese merchants did not lag behind in acts of charity. The hardest heart would have been touched at the utter misery of these poor harmless people, for whatever may be said of their rulers, no one can deny but that the Chinese peasantry are the most obedient, quiet, and industrious ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... learning any less universal language, because the best company in any nation will usually have some knowledge of French, and this tempts one to remain on neutral ground and be lazy. But the best company in Fayal was so much less interesting than the peasantry, that some of us persevered in studying the vernacular. To be sure, one finds English spoken by more of the peasants than of the small aristocracy of the island, so many of the former have spent some years in American ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... insignificant rocklet—there are hundreds like it on every granite coast—where Death the Consoler sets on Gilliatt's head the only crown possible for his impossible feat, and where the dislike of the ignorant peasantry, the brute resistance of machinery and material, the violence of the storm, the devilish ambush of the pieuvre, and all other evils are terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... flocks. In the management of these Gregory's care did not disdain the minutest supervision. His strong sense of justice did not prevent his being a merciful landlord, and especially he cared for the peasantry and cultivators of ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... second day there was to be A festival in church: from far and near 490 Came flocking in the sunburnt peasantry, And knights and dames with stately antique cheer, Blazing with pomp, as if all faerie Had emptied her quaint halls, or, as it were, The illuminated marge of some old book, While we were gazing, life ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... once to their rescue, and attacked the Prussians, placing them between two fires, and capturing five of their cannon. The route by which the Prussians entered Bohemia is now entirely cut up and destroyed. The Bohemian peasantry do all the mischief they can to the Prussians, who have besides constant desertions among their troops; but these are matters which you must know both sooner and better than we do. But I must write you some of our news here. The French have forced ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... competition for every vacant post. When the reserve of supernumeraries became absorbed, the competition turned the other way, and the surviving clergy could make their own terms. It was otherwise with the masses, especially with the peasantry. If there were an insufficient number of labourers to till the land heretofore in cultivation, the worst land fell out of cultivation, and no one was much the worse. It was all very well for some landlords to complain that their rents had fallen off. Yes! Then—as now, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the subject of Cavalier and his exploits, when our entertainer launched out into a description of the battle of Martinargues, in which the Royalists had been "toutes abattus." Like most of the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes, he displayed a very familiar acquaintance with the events of the civil war, and spoke with enthusiasm and honest pride of the ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... native Busseto, a house of quaint artistic architecture, approached by a venerable, moss-grown stone bridge, at the foot of which are a large park and artificial lake. When he takes his evening walks, the peasantry, who are devotedly attached to him, unite in ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... others, including Herrera, obstinately refused, I was not without hopes of overcoming their repugnance. But last evening news came of the excesses that Rodil's division has been committing in Biscay, burning houses, ill-treating the peasantry, and refusing quarter to prisoners. This greatly exasperated the general, and he talked of recommencing the system of reprisals, which, since the removal of Quesada from the command of the Christino forces, has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... repeated the same story; and what with the Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with England was patched up in 1360; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... important to Kautsky that he even opposes such a vital piece of democratic reform as direct legislation where the town-country population is the more numerous than that of the towns. "We have seen" he says, "that the modern representative system is not very favorable to the peasantry or to the small capitalists, especially of the country towns. The classes which the representative system most favors are the large owners of capital or land, the highly educated, and under a democratic electoral system, the militant and class-conscious ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... the rule of Earl Hakon the increase was good in the land, & peace was there within it among the peasantry. Well-beloved, too, was the Earl among them for the greater part of his life, but as his years waxed old it happened that his intercourse with women became unseemly, and to such a pass came this that the Earl would cause the daughters of powerful men to be brought ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... obtained, by this maniac, over the small farmers and peasantry in his neighbourhood, is most astonishing. They believed in all he told them; first that he should be a great chieftain in Kent, and that they should all live rent free on his land, and that if they would follow his advice, they ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... Introduction, p. 9). This enterprising American's remarkable book, though dealing only with a small region of northern Italy, deserves more consideration than it has received. The author may have been uncritical, but beyond doubt he had the gift of extracting secrets from the peasantry. He claims to have proved that "la vecchia religione" contains much that has come down direct from pre-Christian times; and the appearance of Mr. Lawson's remarkable book on Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... The peasantry, who had before possessed liberty of movement, were by him bound as serfs to the soil. Thousands of them fled, and an insupportable inquisition was established, as hateful to the landowners as to the serfs. All this was made worse by famine and pestilence, which ravaged ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... line, the graceful meandering of the river St. Charles, the numerous village spires on either side of the St. Lawrence, the fertile fields dotted with innumerable cottages, the abode of a rich and moral peasantry,—the distant falls of Montmorency,—the park like scenery of Point Levis,—the beauteous Isle of Orleans,—and more distant still, the frowning Cape Tourmente, and the lofty range of purple mountains of the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... sacrifices in their favour, levying only a small tribute in proportion to their often great revenues, in the hope that they would be induced to devote their energies, and some of their means, to the improvement of the condition of the peasantry. This expectation was not realized: the younger Zemindars especially, subject to no restraint (except from aggressions on their neighbours), fell into slothful habits, and the collecting of the revenue became a trading speculation, entrusted ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was a lonely one. Not a man was to be met with. The houses stood untenanted; the doors lay open; no smoke wreathed from their deserted hearths. The peasantry had taken to the mountains; and although the plains were yellow with the ripe harvest, and the peaches hung temptingly upon the trees, all was deserted and forsaken. I had often seen the blackened walls and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... prevents the gazer from obtaining a complete view. The name of Llangollen signifies the church of Collen, and the vale and village take their name from the church, which was originally dedicated to Saint Collen, though some, especially the neighbouring peasantry, suppose that Llangollen is a compound of Llan, a church, and Collen, a hazel-wood, and that the church was called the church of the hazel-wood from the number of hazels in the neighbourhood. Collen, according to a legendary life, which exists of him in Welsh, was a Briton by birth, and of illustrious ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... [1] The Irish peasantry are very fond of giving fine names to their pigs. I have heard of one instance in which a couple of young pigs were named, at their birth, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... thoroughly, lead it far enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else nicely. Lead the fashions for the poor first; make them look well, and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time among your peasantry are not pretty ones; their doublets are too irregularly slashed, and the wind ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... isolated from large towns, the people retain the language as it was spoken two centuries ago—though without the accent of the old provinces of their origin—and consequently many words and phrases which are rarely now heard in France, still exist among the peasantry of French Canada, just as we find in New England many expressions which are not pure Americanisms but really memorials of old English times. In French Canada the Anglicisms are such as occur under the natural condition of things. The native of old France has no ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher"—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... on these occasions was as follows: On receiving information from some proprietor that the brigands were threatening his property,—it was impossible to get intelligence from the peasantry, for they were all in league with the brigands; indeed they all took a holiday from regular work, and joined a band for a few weeks from time to time,—we proceeded, with a force sufficiently strong to cope with ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... reach the explanation. For Orpheus is the wind sighing through untold acres of pine forest. "The piper is no other than the wind, and the ancients held that in the wind were the souls of the dead." To this day the English peasantry believe that they hear the wail of the spirits of unbaptized children, as the gale sweeps past their cottage doors. The Greek Hermes resulted from the fusion of two deities. He is the sun and also the wind; and in the latter capacity he bears away the souls of the dead. So ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... a Country Town The Secrets of a Princess The Peasantry A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Another Study of Woman ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... consumed in Paris; the wealth produced by the manufacturers of North England is largely spent in the south of England and upon the Continent; until their recent and successful revolt, the wealth produced by the Irish peasantry was largely spent in London and upon ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... legends about them are probably often considerably exaggerated, but there is nevertheless a terribly serious sub-stratum of truth beneath the eerie stories which pass from mouth to mouth among the peasantry of Central Europe. The general characteristics of such tales are too well known to need more than a passing reference; a fairly typical specimen of the vampire story, though it does not profess to be more ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... particularly struck on landing with the brilliant colours and varied hues, not only of the sky and water, the earth and the buildings, but of the dresses and very skins of the peasantry. Every cake out of my paint-box would have been required, I was sure, to give effect to the scene. Even the barefooted porters wore red scarfs round their waists, while shawls and handkerchiefs of every tint adorned the heads and shoulders of the women—hats, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... which prompts them—that is a matter to be dealt with in a spirit of broad sympathy, on its historic and social merits—but because of the dire poverty they reveal. Even its of broken crockery are held worthy of a place at these little shrines; so bereft are the peasantry of the simplest ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... very analogous to that now held by African slaves in our country. But the system has been changed. From being serfs, compelled to toil for masters, under the influence of compulsion or fear, they have become a free peasantry, working in the employment of landlords, for wages. But this change has not depressed or degraded the landlords, or injured them in any way. On the contrary, it has probably elevated and improved the condition ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... Osmond had been. Pansy, however, in spite of HER simplicity, really did understand, and was glad that Lord Warburton should talk to her, not about her partners and bouquets, but about the state of Italy, the condition of the peasantry, the famous grist-tax, the pellagra, his impressions of Roman society. She looked at him, as she drew her needle through her tapestry, with sweet submissive eyes, and when she lowered them she gave little quiet oblique glances ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... has no right whatever to enjoyment even of the unenclosed commons and heaths and the mountain and forest wastes of his native country, but is everywhere in the eye of the law a trespasser whenever he ventures off a public road or pathway."[9] By the sixteenth century the English peasantry had been evicted even from the commons, which were turned into sheep walks by the impoverished barons to make money from the Flemish wool market. The land at home wrenched from them, the poor English immigrants ardently ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... violence all that its wants demanded, but destroyed in mere wantonness what did not tempt its cupidity. No vandal ferocity was ever more destructive. Those crimes, however, were not committed with impunity. Want, sickness, and an enraged peasantry, inflicted terrible reprisals, and caused daily a fearful reduction ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... they could have happened. Not from mere military license, for the discipline of the German Army is proverbially stringent, and its obedience implicit. Not from any special ferocity of the troops, for whoever has traveled among the German peasantry knows that they are as kindly and good-natured as any people in Europe, and those who can recall the war of 1870 will remember that no charges resembling those proved by these depositions were then established. The ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be traced the outlines of the graves of several suicides; one of these had the remains of a very old oaken stake sticking diagonally from it. Every storied spot fascinated me, but although many of my friends among the peasantry tried hard to make me believe in the fairies or, as they called them, "the good people," I never placed the slightest credence in what ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... which soon followed, roused the enthusiasm of the Moriscos to the highest pitch. From all sides the warlike peasantry flocked to the standard of their able chief, and a war began resembling that of a century before, when the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella were invading the Kingdom of Granada. From peak to peak of the sierras beacon-fires flashed their signals, calling the bold mountaineers ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... white caps of the women glittered in the sunshine, and their well-made sabots clicked cheerfully on the hard, clean roads. Touraine is a land of old chateaux,—a gallery of architectural specimens and of large hereditary properties. The peasantry have less of the luxury of ownership than in most other parts of France; though they have enough of it to give them quite their share of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the little chaffering place of the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... should replace, no interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately bloom under their supervision. The excuse of their folly is in two words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry. The measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral practice. To the world their serious faces were never deformed by the suspicion of any simper of self-contentment. Yet it was known. "They ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gamekeeper has been murdered; and at Buckhill, in Buckinghamshire, a person has recently been killed in a poaching affray. This insane system is the cause of a fearful loss of life; it tends to the ruin of your tenantry, and is the fruitful cause of the demoralization of the peasantry. But you are caring for the rights of property; for its most obvious duties you have no concern. With such a policy, what can you expect but that which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... a fragment for thirteen years Mr. Lanier's interest in the subject never abated. Far on in this interval he is found planning for leisure to work out in romance the story of that savage insurrection of the French peasantry, which the Chronicles of Froissart had ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... The people had been obliged to sell their lands and even themselves to the king for bread, and become from henceforth a population of royal slaves. The lands of Egypt were divided between the king and the priests; the peasantry tilled them for the state and for the temples, while the upper classes owed their wealth and position to the offices which they received ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... or the zeal with which that or Hungarian independence has been maintained first through Turkish, and then German domination for some hundred years past, doubts may be entertained. Neither do the Hungarian peasantry or people reflect high credit on their "natural superiors." Something should be deducted for the forced vivacity and straining after effect of the litterateur; but this sketch of a large class of peasantry from Max Schlesinger's ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... scarlet flannel, sacking, curtain serge, and patches of old carpet, and went either bare-footed or on rude wooden sandals. These people, the reader must understand, were an urban population sunken back to the state of a barbaric peasantry, and so without any of the simple arts a barbaric peasantry would possess. In many ways they were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost any idea of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes when they ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells |
