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More "Peasantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... are men who would fain persuade the ignorant that all above them are drones who live on the proceeds of their labour—as if indeed every man, however high in rank, had not his share of labour and care—I fear, then, that if there should be a rising of the peasantry we may have such scenes as those that took place during the Jacquerie in France, and that many who would, were things different, be in favour of giving more extended rights to the people, will be forced to ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... the time, the Master of Ravenswood attended the Lord Keeper to his apartment, followed by Caleb, who placed on the table, with all the ceremonials due to torches of wax, two rudely-framed tallow-candles, such as in those days were only used by the peasantry, hooped in paltry clasps of wire, which served for candlesticks. He then disappeared, and presently entered with two earthen flagons (the china, he said, had been little used since my lady's time), one filled with canary wine, the other with brandy. The canary sack, unheeding ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... as it is now commonly spelt), Moville, Moyarta, and thousands of other cases. And those who are acquainted with the Irish language will at once tell, by the ear, that Armagh, as the word is pronounced by the native peasantry, even by those who have lost that language (as most of them in that district now have), could not be a compound of magh, ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... sight of war and tumult—of burning towns and bleeding captives—of insolent soldiers and cruel taskmasters can have made you less in favor with our own native, vine-covered retreat, with its neighborhood of simple peasantry? Or would you say that since then you have met others whom you can love better than me? Whom, indeed, have you seen but weary prisoners like myself, or else unpitying conquerors whose love would be your shame? You blush, Leta! Pray the gods that it be not the latter! Struggle ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... them, "evil communications may have corrupted good manners;" but in the country at large, there never was a more simple-minded, healthful-hearted, and happy race of people than our present British peasantry. They have cast off, it is true, many of their ancestors' games and merrymakings, but they have in no degree lost their soul of mirth and happiness. This is never more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... with the Muscovites, who were led by the Russian general Voynilovich, and that scoundrel, his friend, Pan Wolk of Logomowicze. You remember how we took Wolk captive, and how we were going to hang him to a beam in the barn, because he was a tyrant to the peasantry and a servant of the Muscovites; but the stupid peasants took pity on him! (I must roast him some time on this penknife.) I will not mention countless other great forays, from which we always emerged as befitted ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... kind of yeomen, or bonnet-lairds, as they would be called over the border, living on their own land, and owning no allegiance to any feudal lord. Their rank is inferior to that of the Samurai, or men of the military class, between whom and the peasantry they hold a middle place. Like the Samurai, they wear two swords, and are in many cases prosperous and wealthy men claiming a descent more ancient than that of many of the feudal Princes. A large number of them are enrolled among the Emperor's body-guard; and these have played a conspicuous part ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... and the enriching of their land; a manly race, despising luxury, they cared little whether their home was thought comfortable by the few guests they occasionally invited to spend a week with them. They saw much of the peasantry, and went daily among them, understanding their wants, and wisely promoting in their minds the belief that land cannot prosper unless both landlord ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Our peasantry, settled around our own frontier, and around the shores of our lakes, have a notion that the Scotch Highlanders were, not long since, the same kind of wild, half-naked people compared with the true English, that the Choctaws, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... folk for whom all these and smaller cottages were built now live, who shall say? Probably in mean streets; anyway, not here. The exterior remains often the same, but inside, instead of the plain furniture of the peasantry, one finds wicker arm-chairs and sofa-chairs, all the right books and ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... age will not be against you, only pray for a time give up all idea as to the necessity of washing. The dirtier your hands and faces, the better, especially if the dirt will hide your clear healthy color, which is very unlike the sallow complexions almost universal among our peasantry. And now, good-bye. I move about too much to hope to receive any letter from you, but as you have of course arranged with Count Preskoff to send him word when you have safely crossed the frontier, I shall hear of ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... passes along Pearl or Broad Street, he beholds the daily spectacle of unemployed carmen reading newspapers;—there may be said to be no such thing as popular literature in France; mental recreation, such as the German and Scotch peasantry enjoy, is unknown there. The Art and letters of the kingdom flourished in her court and were cultivated as an aristocratic element for so long a period, that neither has become domesticated among the lower classes; we find in them the sentiment of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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
... special view to the reception which an invading force would meet with, and it goes into great detail. The people of the towns—London, Bristol, &c.—were, he says, generally heretics. The peers, the gentry, their tenants, and peasantry, who formed the immense majority of the population, were almost universally Catholics. But this writer distinguishes properly among Catholics. There were the ardent impassioned Catholics, ready to be confessors and martyrs, ready to rebel at the first opportunity, ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... offended. Among so many tombs which strike our sight, names are ascribed to some without any positive certainty; but even the emotion which this uncertainty inspires will not permit us to contemplate any of these monuments with indifference. There are some in which houses for the peasantry are built; for the Romans consecrated an extensive space and vast edifices to the funereal urns of their friends or their illustrious fellow-citizens. They were not influenced by that dry principle of utility ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... agree that they have received most extraordinary hospitality from the civilians and peasantry of Belgium and France. Whole villages, themselves facing starvation, gave their last crumb of bread and their last drop of wine to the British troops and cheerfully slept in the fields in order that the soldiers might snatch a bit of rest in ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... only by the exertions of great and powerful barons, like Randolph and Douglas, that the freedom of Scotland was to be accomplished. The stout yeomanry and the bold peasantry of the land, who were as desirous to enjoy their cottages in honorable independence as the nobles were to reclaim their castles and estates from the English, contributed their full share in the efforts which were made to deliver the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... The French peasantry are, in all the essentials of intelligence and sterling worth, infants compared with them; and the farmers of England are either the merest 'ockeys in grain, with few ideas beyond their sacks, samples, and market-days,—or, with added cultivation, they lose their independence in a ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... up the final f again. Sewel, in the Introduction to his Dutch Dictionary, 1691, gives henketsjer, and Voltaire, forty years later, hankercher, as the received pronunciation. Sewel tells us also that the significant l was still sounded in would and should, as it still is by the peasantry in many parts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of many parts of Ireland is as backward, or perhaps more backward, than the condition of the rural population of England at the end of last or the beginning of this century. The Irish peasantry still live in poor hovels, often in the same room with animals; they have few modern comforts; and yet they are in close communication with those who live at ease in the cities and farms of the United States. They are also imbued with all the advanced political notions of ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... farm laborer, the son of Lord Lackwit. On the death of his lordship, Robin Roughhead comes into the title and estates. This brings out the best qualities of his heart—liberality, benevolence and honesty. He marries Dolly, to whom he was already engaged, and becomes the good genius of the peasantry on his ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... villages, and with the apparent ease of the inhabitants of a country where property seems pretty equally divided, and where he is not shocked (as he is unhappily too generally throughout Europe) by the melancholy contrast between the splendour of the opulent, and the extreme misery of the peasantry. Here the ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... reverential way in which Scott took it in both hands when he showed it to him. The whole evening was pleasant and the more so from being unexpected. . . . One little thing which adds always to the charm of Scotch scenery is the dress of the peasantry. One never sees the real Highland costume, but every shepherd has his plaid slung over one shoulder, making the most graceful drapery. This, with the universal Glengarry bonnet, ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... victims to the treachery of high-placed mandarins like Yue Hsien, and hundreds of others had had to fly for their lives, many of them owing their escape to the courageous protection of petty officials and of the local gentry and peasantry. In the Yangtsze valley order had been maintained by the energy of the viceroys of Nanking and Wu-chang, who had acted throughout the critical period in loyal co-operation with the British consuls and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... best of these had paid for their loyalty to the Company with their lives, and the rest had destroyed their authority by revolting against the source from which it was derived. At that, the Skilkan peasantry who made up the Tenth Infantry and the Zirk cavalrymen tried briefly to fight as individuals, shrieking "Znidd suddabit!" until the Kragans were upon them, stabbing and shooting. They drove the rioters from the steps or killed them there, they wiped out those ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... washing clothes or preparing the evening meal over little charcoal fires. A certain quantity of meat had been served out to each family, and they were therefore doing better than in their own houses, for meat was a luxury seldom touched by the French peasantry. ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... most clearly inculcate would point to our fellow countrymen in Ireland. But we own we have a different reading of the lesson, and consider that the peculiar perils here described must as yet have been scarcely felt among the priesthood of a peasantry. It is in circles where there is less physical privation and more sentimental excitement, that the evils of spiritual fascination and domestic division are likely ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... fearless enthusiasm, thrilling with pride at their morning's success, commanded by a man whom they obeyed with confidence and love. The doomed and devoted Montcalm had what Wolfe had called but "five weak French battalions," of less than two thousand men, "mingled with disorderly peasantry," formed on commanding ground. The French had three little pieces of artillery; the English, one or two. The two armies cannonaded each other for nearly an hour; when Montcalm, having summoned De Bougainville to his aid, and dispatched ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pairs, are scattered cottages, which bespeak a comfort and a rural luxury, less often than our poets have described the characteristics of the English peasantry. It has been observed, and there is a world of homely, ay, and of legislative knowledge in the observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a bird-cage at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better and wiser than ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... same dead Christ which had been lying in state in the church, for the past few days, to be worshipped and kissed by the peasantry. I had seen a similar image at Settignano the day before and had watched how the men took it. They began by standing in groups in the piazza, gossipping. Then two or three would break away and make for the church. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... disbelieved. No restriction was placed upon her going to the grotto, however, and she continued to visit it, when her vision arose before her again and again. In course of time the singular event became much talked about, especially among the peasantry of that vicinity, who believed implicitly that the Virgin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... knowledge, and with no property but his clothes and his flute. His flute, however, proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a bed. He wandered as far as Italy. His musical performances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained at the gates of the convents. It should, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nobly and gave great relief, 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 ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... poetical character of the Swiss; but take its inhabitants all in all, as with deep love and stern penetration they are painted in the works of their principal writer, Gotthelf, and I believe we shall not easily find a peasantry which would completely sustain ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... ruins of the houses, but many perished in fires that were kindled in most of the towns, particularly in Oppido, where the flames were fed by great magazines of oil. Not a few, especially among the peasantry dwelling in the country, were suddenly engulfed in fissures. Many who were only half buried in the ruins, and who might have been saved had there been help at hand, were left to die a lingering death from cold and hunger. Four Augustine ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... 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 families of today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... to watch the dog, what they had seen would have excited wonder at the amount of reason that the animal displayed; not that Lupe, big wolf-hound, one of the kind kept by the peasantry in the far-back past for the protection of their flocks, was anything exceptional, for plenty of dogs at the present time are ready to display an instinct that ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... short of the requirements of the service. Wellington had not yet begun that career of victory which created a national enthusiasm for war, and filled our ranks with willing soldiers. And another clause of the same bill was framed in the hope of making the service more acceptable to the peasantry, by limiting the time for which recruits were to be enlisted, and entering men, at first, in the infantry for seven years, or in the cavalry (as that branch of the service required a longer apprenticeship) for ten; then allowing them the option of renewing ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... opposition, by the rural population of America. They fancied the colonists to be an ignorant, ragged people, living in log cabins, scattered through the wilderness, and, in social position, two or three degrees below European and Irish peasantry. Great was their surprise to hear from all the colonies, and from the remotest districts in each colony, the voice of intelligent and ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... 120 of the English were killed in the struggle, of whom more than twenty are said to have fallen at the hands of Wallace alone. Many other similar deeds did Wallace perform; his fame grew more and more, as did the feeling among the Scotch peasantry that in him they had ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... It was composed of those who in the time of war showed an aptitude for arms, and who were most serviceable in the campaigns which they undertook. Gradually they became distinct from the agricultural peasantry, and by education and training came to look upon arms as their legitimate profession. They naturally attached themselves to the military commanders who led them in their various expeditions, and thus were in time regarded as the standing troops of the empire. ...
— Japan • David Murray
... slightly curdled, a delicacy little known in the circle of fashion, but never surpassed either in that or any other. Some fresh hay was procured and strewn on an article of furniture common in the houses of the Kerry peasantry, called a "settle." It is a sort of a rude sofa, made of common deal timber. On this "settle" my host prepared my bed of new-mown hay, barricaded with old chairs and a table against the assaults of the hungry animals. I had not long lain down when a man entered (the door consisted of a pair ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... peopling them with the prisoners taken in the Polish and Swedish wars. It was the custom in those barbaric times to drive, as captives of war, the men, women and children of whole provinces, to be slaves in the territory of the conqueror. Often they occupied the position of a vassal peasantry, tilling the soil for the benefit of their lords. With singular foresight, Alexis planned for the construction of a fleet both on the Caspian and the Black Sea. With this object in view, he sent for ship carpenters from Holland and ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... was born at Strasburg(,) in 1832, and labors,' etc. 16. 'We should never apply dry compresses, charpie, or wadding(,) to the wound.' 17. '—to stand idle, to look, act, or think(,) in a leisurely way.' 18. '—portraits taken from the farmers, schoolmasters, and peasantry(,) of the neighborhood.' 19. '—gladly welcomed painters of Flanders, Holland, and ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... a Country Town A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of Eve The Firm of Nucingen The Peasantry ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... be said of the Shakespeares of Coventry and Fillongley. There is a tablet recording Shakespeare benefactions in Fillongley Church, and many still bear the name among the neighbouring peasantry. But to complete the pedigrees of the Warwickshire families, we must follow ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... civil rulers; the Feudal System, which had received a mortal blow by the intermingling of the classes and the masses in the era of the Crusades, was threatened, from above, by the movement towards centralisation and absolutism, and from below, by the growing discontent of the peasantry and artisans, who had begun to realise, but as yet only in a vague way, their own strength. In every department the battle for supremacy was being waged between the old and the new, and the printing-press was at hand to ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... reserved for the gentry, who, in spite of an academical dislike to Ormsby's conversion, gathered to witness this Catholic marriage, as a rare thing in Ireland, at least amongst their own class. But behind them, and I should say in unpleasant proximity (for the peasantry do not carry handkerchiefs scented with White Rose or Jockey Club,—only the odor of the peat and the bogwood), surged a vast crowd of men and women, on whose lips and in whose hearts was a prayer for her who was entering on ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... claims, Lord Cornwallis (then Governor-General) made great 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 to "middle men." ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... wonder,' said Lancelot; 'at all events, I should not think they got much of it. But it does seem strange that no other amusement can be found for them than the beer-shop. Can't they read? Can't they practise light and interesting handicrafts at home, as the German peasantry do?' ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... writes these strong words: "President Lincoln was dead against the confiscation of estates, and bent upon restoring a powerful landed aristocracy, with a wretched dependent peasantry free in name only.... A far sterner nature than his was wanted, which understands that Justice to the oppressed must go before Mercy to the guilty; and I believe they have got the ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... repulsed with the following answer: "We want neither salt nor herrings under the reign of the King of Denmark, and another King could not give us more: besides, if we take arms against so great a Prince, we shall unavoidably perish." The Swedish peasantry, however, soon felt that the cruelty and tyranny of Christiern were something more than a ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... which he was perfectly satisfied, and informed me that he would communicate to the Crown Prince precisely what I stated to him. There have been very serious commotions in Scania on account of the conscriptions, wherein several of the peasantry have lost their lives, and about three thousand guards under the Prince, and a strong body of troops, have been ordered to that province to restore order. I have had the honour to receive your letter of the 14th by the Impetueux, and since that one of the 8th, with a commission ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... on the singular hazard of bringing untried troops against the proverbial discipline of a German army, and the probability that the age of the wild armies of peasantry in Europe would be renewed, by the evidence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... felt inclined to believe otherwise, that they were living in the present. But, even here, amid all the hissing of steam, and creaking of carriages, and whirr of moving machinery, the queer old-world costumes of the peasantry, with their quaint hats and mantles, which more resembled the stage properties of a Christmas pantomime than the known dress of any people of the period, all spoke of the past—a past when the great Barbarossa reigned in Central Europe, and when there were "Robbers ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 had ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... old governess, migrate from Kensington to the West of Ireland. Belonging as they do to "the ould family", the girls are made heartily welcome in the cabins of the peasantry, where they learn many weird and curious tales from the folk-lore of the district. An interesting plot runs through the narrative, but the charm of the story lies in its happy mingling ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... woodcutters' wives and the village women and farm people as if she had played in childhood about their doors. In fact the knight had a shrewd notion that if he had been a bachelor the taming of his half-British, half-Saxon peasantry would have ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... the flow of blood are plentiful in the early literature of Germany, and are still employed to some extent. In Dr. G. Lammert's "Volksmedizin in Bayern" (Wuerzburg, 1869), many hemostatic formulas are given, which are popular among the peasantry in various portions of the empire. They are usually adjurations or commands addressed to the blood, considered as a personality. Thus a spell in vogue in the mountainous region of Odenwald in Hesse, is as follows: "Blood, stand still, as Christ ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... person, as well as that of his virgin mother, is ornamented with diamonds and other precious stones; for which purpose, we are informed, the princesses and ladies of high rank lend their jewels. Groups of cattle grazing, peasantry engaged in different occupations, and other objects, enliven the picturesque scenery; every living creature in the group, with eyes directed towards the Presepio, falls prostrate in adoration. In the front of this theatrical representation ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... inspired the former with panic, and they fled in confusion. But this occurrence, except for its moral influence on the English soldiery, was of small importance. General Stuart had been sent to support the Calabrian peasantry in an insurrection against Joseph Buonaparte; the insurgents were on the whole unable to stand their ground against the regular army of the intrusive king; and the English, soon after their fruitless victory, altogether ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... her a few old houses that they both recognised, looking antiquated in the midst of a modern growth of narrow, conceited new tenements. The shouting crowd had, to Fitzjocelyn's eyes, more the aspect of a rabble than of a genuine rejoicing peasantry. What men there were looked beer-attracted rather than reputable, and the main body were whooping boys, women, nurse-girls, and babies. The suspicion crossed him that it was a new generation, without memories of forty years since, wondering rather than welcoming, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... against the existing government, but that network of organization, delicate as lace for ladies, and strong as the harness of artillery horses, which now enmeshed almost every province of Ireland, knitting the strength of her peasantry into unity and disposable divisions. This, it seems, was completed in 1795. In a complete history of these times, no one chapter would deserve so ample an investigation as this subtile web of association, rising upon a large base, expanding in proportion ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... in England is the institution of the Laborer's Friend Society, under the patronage of the most distinguished personages. Its principal object has been the promotion of allotments of land in the country, to be cultivated by the peasantry after their day's labor, thus adding to their day's wages the produce of their fields and gardens. It has been instrumental, first and last, of establishing nearly four hundred thousand of these allotments. It publishes, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... really occurred; and hence, in the absence of more positive proof, we are disposed to take Mr. Roby's view of the case, and treat it as one of the thousand and one pleasant stories which "rumour with her hundred tongues" ever circulates amongst the peasantry of a district where some royal visit, or {332} other unexpected memorable occurrence, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... Church dogmas, and looked only to aggrandizement through her. The priesthood, which alone possessed a knowledge of letters, prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility spent their lives in warring upon each other; the peasantry were the sport and victim by turns of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of all; her person and her rights possessing no consideration only as they could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of noble, husband, father, or priest—some ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... invitation carried thus from house to house throughout the parish, good-breeding, which is extremely conservative among the peasantry, requires that only two persons in each family should take advantage of it,—one of the heads of the family to represent the household, one of their children ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... soothing his nervous irritability. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood. The country around is fertile, and diversified and rendered picturesque by ranges of near hills and more distant mountains. The peasantry are a handsome intelligent race; and there was a gladsome sunny heaven spread over us, that rendered home and every scene we visited cheerful and bright. During some of the hottest days of August, Shelley made a solitary journey on foot to the summit of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... nicknames of "the Hooks" and "the Cods," kept the land in a continual state of disorder and practically of civil war. They had already been active for many years. The Hooks were supported by the nobles, by the peasantry and by that large part of the poorer townsfolk that was excluded from all share in the municipal government. The Cods represented the interests of the powerful burgher corporations. In later times these same principles and interests divided the Orangist and the States parties, and were ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... wholly upon acorns. Before the great oak forests of this country were cut down for lumber, millions of hogs were fattened on mast, and the price of pork depended more upon the acorn crop than on the corn crop. The peasantry of southern France and northern Italy during half the year make two meals a day ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... Sittengesch., I, p. 364. It appears that astrology never obtained a hold on the lower classes of the rural population. It has a very insignificant place in the folklore and healing arts of the peasantry. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... the events just recorded, a still greater sorrow befell this worthy family, so united and so affectionate, as the families of the peasantry usually are. Michael drew the lot in a second conscription, as Gaspar had done before; and as he was thus obliged to serve on his own account, the son of his adopted parents, whom he could not now serve as a substitute, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... is found, not in Asia Minor only, but wherever Turks are to be found in power. Throughout the whole extent of their territory, if you believe the report of travellers, the peasantry are indigent, oppressed, and wretched.[54] The great island of Crete or Candia would maintain four times its present population; once it had a hundred cities; many of its towns, which were densely populous, are now obscure villages. Under the Venetians ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... in all Europe, no country to which colonies are so entirely useless; for the French never emigrate and seldom even travel; and to send conscripts to tropical settlements cannot be popular with the peasantry. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... German financiers, the Empress of Russia, and the Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and while Paris fashions wonderful trinkets and playthings for rich folk all the world over, two-thirds of the French peasantry have not proper lamps to give them light, or the implements necessary for modern agriculture. Lastly, unproductive land, of which there is plenty, would have to be turned to the best advantage, poor soils enriched, and rich soils, which ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... they owe it to the loyalty of Oxfordshire, diffused throughout its neighborhood by the influence of the University, during the great Civil War and the rule of the Parliament. It speaks well, too, for the upright and kindly character of this old family, that the peasantry, among whom they had lived for ages, did not desecrate their tombs, when it might have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... recooperated my physikil system, I went over into the village. The peasantry was glad to see me. The skoolmaster sed it was cheerin to see that gigantic intelleck among 'em onct more. That's what he called me. I like the skoolmaster, and allers send him tobacker when I'm off on a travelin ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... sustained low notes darken the woodland in "Der Frieschutz." I found myself presently at the graveyard. It was a barren place, enclosed by a mud wall with a gate to admit funerals, and numerous gaps to admit peasantry, who made short cuts across it as they went to and fro between Four Mile Water and the market town. The graves were mounds overgrown with grass: there was no keeper; nor were there flowers, railings, or any other conventionalities ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... or shot down if they persevered in refusing to submit. Other forces representing law and order were found in the yeomanry, who were chiefly Orangemen and officered by Orangemen, and who regarded the Catholic peasantry as their born enemies. A state of tumult raged {319} through the greater part of the unhappy island, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that the floggings, hangings, and shootings inflicted by the militia ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in the March number of The Forum has drawn a vivid picture of France in its poverty, misery and tyranny in 1789, and contrasted with this the thrift, the improved land culture, and the better clothing, food, home and intelligence of the French peasantry of 1889. The Revolution of 1789 broke the tyranny of the old crushing regime and opened the way for the new world that brightens and gladdens the France of to-day. But the Revolution did not itself make the great change; it ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... with many, who remembered grim days of hard service and starvation when, without appreciation or reward, they had fought France's battle. The habitants were, in truth, friendly enough to the Americans; but they would not fight for them. The invaders tried to arouse the fear of the peasantry by a tale that when the British caught sixty rebel Canadians, they had hanged them over the ramparts of Quebec, without time even to say "Lord, have mercy upon me," and had thrown their bodies to the dogs. But this only made the habitants ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... Society of United Irishmen was formed, and drew many of the brightest and most cultivated men in Ireland into its councils. It numbered over 70,000 adherents in Ulster alone. The government was alarmed, and began a systematic persecution of the peasantry all over Ireland. English regiments were put at "free quarters," that is, they forced themselves under order into the houses and cabins of the people with demands for bed and board. The hapless people were driven to fury. Brutal murders and barbarous tortures of men and women by the soldiers, savage ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... 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 destroyed ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... By the peasantry for miles around my home was called the Castle of Le Blanc. It stood on the brow of a hill, overlooking a wide plain, and was defended by a dry moat and massive walls. A score of resolute men inside might easily have kept two hundred at bay, and more than once, ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... commonplace motive pointed so directly towards a career of subserviency to the ruling class among the laity, it could not be expected that they should take a lofty view of their profession. The Anglican clergy were not like the Irish priesthood, in close sympathy with the peasantry, or like the Scottish ministers, the organs of strong convictions spreading through the great mass of the middle and lower classes. A man of energy, who took his faith seriously, was, like the Evangelical clergy, out of the road to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... dress with long white apron is worn by women and children, and over the head a light chintz handkerchief, or a gay "bandanna";—quite suggestive of the every day wear of foreign peasantry. We are told that a girl's wealth is sometimes estimated by the number of handkerchiefs she owns. Mrs. R. says she has, in winter, seen a girl divest herself of no less than ten head-kerchiefs; ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... the perfect preciousness and distinction of truthfulness. Truthfulness in manners gives distinction and dignity in all classes of society; truthfulness gives that simplicity of manners which is one of the special graces of royalty, and also of an unspoiled and especially a Catholic peasantry. Vulgarity has an element of restless unreality and pretentious striving, an affectation or assumption of ways which do not belong to it, and in particular an unwillingness to serve, and a dread of owning any obligation of service. Yet service perfects manners and dignity, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... Irish fairies from Lady Wilde's "Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland" and "Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland," and I have gained not a little from the books of William Carleton, especially his "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry," but from none of these have I taken any considerable part of a story. Indeed I have found help, greater or less, in more books than ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... of 1644-45, as in that preceding it, troubles broke out in many parts of France, and in some the risings of "the barefooted ones," as they were called, became for a time very formidable. The rage of the unhappy peasantry was principally directed, as during the Jacquerie, against the nobles, and any chateaux were sacked and burned, all within killed, ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... parting between the prisoner and his children. He drew a 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, and set ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... 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 men. There was ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... declining productivity of the soil are supported by the overwhelming evidence of the poverty of the fourteenth century peasantry—poverty which can be explained only by the barrenness of their land. Many of the features of the agrarian changes of this period are familiar—the substitution of money payments for villain services, the frequency of desertion, the amalgamation and leasing ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... they stopped at Castel Franco, which presents one of the best specimens of an Italian town, and Italian peasantry, that a stranger ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the Trappist ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... on the day fixed for it. She was away a fortnight and, on her return, the captain issued orders that none of the junior officers, when allowed leave, were to go beyond the lines; for the rumours of approaching troubles had become stronger and, as the peasantry were assuming a somewhat hostile attitude, any act of imprudence might result in trouble. Jim often had leave to come ashore in the afternoon and, as this was the time that Bob had to himself, they wandered together all over the Rock, climbed up the flagstaff, and made themselves acquainted ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... field, killed in cold blood, and without resistance, more than fifteen hundred men, while more than as many prisoners were taken who were sent to the galleys: the rest were put to death by the followers of M. de la Rochefoucauld and by the peasantry. So that M. de Soubise re-entered La Rochelle with thirty horsemen out of the seven hundred whom he had with him, and not four hundred infantry of the seven thousand who comprised his army on the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, the bastard great-uncle of the little king, and William, the young marshal, the eldest son of the Earl of Pembroke. The regent wandered from town to town in Sussex, receiving the submission of the peasantry, and venturing to approach as near London as Dorking. The victorious Wilkin was made Warden of the Seven Hundreds of the Weald. The greatest of the magnates of Sussex and Surrey, William, Earl Warenne, followed the example of his tenantry, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Gascon patois was peculiarly expressive and heart-touching, and in the South it was held in universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... nobility—a measure immediately overruled and suppressed by Prussia and Rossia, both accusing Poland of being a dangerous nest of Jacobinism. In 1807, in the grand duchy of Warsaw, after it was retaken from Prussia, the condition of the peasantry was far more clear and protected than even now promised by the Czar Alexander II., and was probably better preserved than it can be under the crowd of employes and magistrates, nominally elected by the peasants, but in fact imported from Saratow, Kazan, Penza, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lost his balance and fell heavily in the roadway, turning over two or three times with the force of his fall, and lying at last still and motionless, a dust-coloured heap. A loud yell of rage broke from the troopers at the sight, which was answered by a shout of defiance from the Puritan peasantry. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by Nemours and the longer by Moret. The first road was the smoother, but apart from the chance of seeing the Vendange the route de Burgoyne was far the more picturesque. Smollett's portraiture of the peasantry in the less cultivated regions prepares the mind for Young's famous description of those "gaunt emblems of famine." In Burgundy the Doctor says, "I saw a peasant ploughing the ground with a jackass, a lean cow, and a he-goat yoked together." His vignette of the fantastic petit-maitre ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... it is related, being in one of his grim humours after the dearly bought victory of Czaslaw, invited the neighbouring peasantry to come and share the spoil of the carcases on the field of battle. They responded in great numbers; whereupon he, surrounding them, pressed three hundred of the most promising and "cloathed them immediately from the dead." ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... bishop, having gathered his luggage together, followed in another carriage. He enjoyed the drive along that winding upward track; he admired the festal decorations of the houses, the gardens and vineyards, the many-tinted rock scenery overhead, the smiling sunburnt peasantry. There was an air of contentment and well-being about the place; something joyful, opulent, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... country was in a bad way. On the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was prepared to furnish due and proper reasons. In the first place he traced it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid on the nation, draining the peasantry from 'the Land'; and in the second place to the influence of a narrow and insidious Officialism, sapping the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... between the various classes and political tendencies—the idea of coalition. The election law of the Duma provided for the representation of all group interests of the community, and representation by an actual member of the group, by a bona fide peasant in the case of the peasantry. The seats in the assembly were distributed specifically to landlords, manufacturers, the smaller bourgeoisie, workmen, and peasants. The election law of the local government bodies made similar provision for group representation. On the war-industry committees, the workmen had elected ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... collected a group of negroes, men, and women, and children, laughing, shouting, and talking, looking wonderfully happy; the former all neatly habited, and though the smaller members of the community were not overburdened with clothing, they looked as plump and jolly as need be. "I only wish that our peasantry in old Ireland were as well off as these people ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than two inches deep. It held quite enough water, however, to serve for the ablutions of a baron a century and a half ago. Much the same notion of what is fit and proper in a washingbasin remains to this day among the French peasantry, and even among the middle class in the provinces the growth of the toilet crockery has been far from rapid since the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... along the road with a small cask of wine in a cart. One of the staff-officers instantly appropriated the keg, and proceeded to share his prize most generously. Never had I tasted anything so refreshing and delicious, but as the wine was the ordinary sour stuff drunk by the peasantry of northern France, my appreciation must be ascribed to my famished condition rather than to any virtues of ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... what period this formation began to supersede the phalanx, which appears to have preceded it, and which is the natural order of half-disciplined or imperfectly armed masses, as we see in the case of the army formed by Philip out of the Macedonian peasantry, and again in the case of the French Revolutionary columns. We cannot say, therefore, whether this formation in three lines is in any way traceable to experience dearly bought in wars with Italian highlanders, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... accomplished, the Marquis ordered the steward to see that all the portraits were sent to the Chateau de Montgeron; then, after pressing his hand in farewell, he returned to the station by the road whence he had come, avoiding the village in order to escape the curious eyes of the peasantry. ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... 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 had material, and they were ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... slave trade, and that 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
... tradition of Latona having been subjected to such cruel treatment from some country clowns; or, which is more probable, it may have been originally invented as a satire on the rude manners and uncouth conduct of the peasantry of ancient times. The story may also have been framed, to account, in a poetical manner, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... discontents were increased by the conversion of considerable quantities of land from a state of tillage to that of pasturage, for the purpose of feeding more cattle. By this measure, great numbers of the peasantry were deprived at once, not only of employment, but of their cottages. Many small farms were indeed still let to some cottagers at rack-rent, which cottages had the right of commonage, guaranteed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... child is allowed to remain at home when wanted if he has attended school regularly during the six previous months. The interest of the parent and the inclination of the child are thus combined to the retarding of the intellectual progress of the boer. And yet, although they are so badly taught, the peasantry have a very good opinion about things in general, and if you assist them in their work and show them that you can use your hands as well as they can they have great respect for you, and will listen to anything you like to tell ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... popular tribune, but certain in the long run to sell themselves to those who could bid highest for their voices. Excuses could be found, no doubt, for this miserable expedient, in the state of parties, in the unscrupulous violence of the aristocracy, in the general impoverishment of the peasantry through the land monopoly, and in the intrusion upon Italy of a gigantic system of slave labor. But none the less it was the deadliest blow which had yet been dealt to the constitution. Party government turns on the majorities at the polling places, and it was difficult afterward to recall a privilege ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... of some of which most 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
... shall presently see that in England itself there was strong ground for discontent with the prevailing social order and the relations between the peasantry and the landed classes: but in Germany matters were very much worse. In England there had always been a tendency for the religious reformers to associate their movements with demands for social reform; and so it was ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... soil there, 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 of ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... without spectres or legends of a ghostly nature attached to them; now, what is a castle or abbey worth without such appendage?; do tell me candidly, are none of the turrets of your old family mansion in Monmouth rendered thus terrific by some unquiet, wandering spirit?, dare the peasantry pass it after twilight, or if they are forced into that temerity, do not their teeth chatter, their hair stand erect and their poor knees ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the thick growth of ivy that clothes the chimney? Certainly not for utility, nor pecuniary profit. It is because he has some amount of appreciation of the beauty of flowers, of vine leaf, and green ivy. Men like these are the real backbone of our peasantry. They are not the agitators; it is the idle hang-dogs who form the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... expression. I hed recently gone through this same country ez chaplin to the Presidential tour, and every stashen hed its pecooliar onpleasant remembrances. Here wuz where the cheers for Grant were vociferous, with nary a snort for His Eggslency; there wuz where the peasantry laft in his face when he went thro' with the regler ritooal uv presentin the constitooshn and the flag with 36 stars onto it to a deestrick assessor; there wuz—but why recount my sufferins? Why harrow up the public bosom, or lasserate the public mind? Suffice to say, I endoored ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... (which appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as The Siege of Roxburgh), The Three Perils of Woman, The Shepherd's Calendar and numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had abundant stores of unpublished folklore, he could invent more when wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of nature plants unknown, unnumbered, matchless in colour, and breathing the aroma of the sweet south; let all, learned or unlearned, listen to the song, the guitar, the Castanet; let all mingle with the gay, good-humoured, temperate peasantry, the finest in the world, free, manly, and independent, yet courteous and respectful; let all live with the noble, dignified, high-bred, self-respecting Spaniard; let all share in their easy, courteous society; let all admire their dark-eyed women, so frank and natural, to whom the voice of all ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... suddenly quieted, supported by the firm pressure of that arm, clinging to which the last trembling of her indignation vanished, left the palace between two respectful lines of people. A sublime though rustic couple, the son's millions illumining the mother's peasantry like the relics of a saint enclosed in a golden shrine, they disappeared in the bright sunlight, in the splendor of the gorgeous carriage, brutal irony in presence of that sore distress, a striking example of the ghastly ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
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