Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Feudal   Listen
adjective
feudal  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to feuds, fiefs, or fees; as, feudal rights or services; feudal tenures.
2.
Consisting of, or founded upon, feuds or fiefs; embracing tenures by military services; as, the feudal system.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Feudal" Quotes from Famous Books



... hence the modern phrase to signify the departure of one person from another, which in feudal times could not be done without leave or permission ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown

... royal progress through the country, meeting the principal men in each district, and travelling in view of the entire population, so rapidly have manners changed in Japan. When the Mikado was elevated to supreme power, the feudal system, which had existed up to that time, was abolished, and we now see no more of the Samuri, or two-sworded men, or of the Daimios, the petty princes who formerly promenaded the streets in gorgeous dresses, accompanied by their military retainers. The soldiers, sailors, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... castle of Buchan resembled more a citadel intended for the accommodation of armed vassals than the commodious dwelling of feudal lords, one turret gave evidence, by its internal arrangement, of a degree of refinement and a nearer approach to comfort than its fellows, and seeming to proclaim that within its massive walls the lords of the castle were accustomed to reside. The apartments ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... of which she dreamed confusedly, of a meeting on the border of a lake and of being rescued from a great danger by a young man more beautiful than the day, was added the recollection of her excursion to the Chateau of Hautecoeur, and a calling up to view of the feudal donjon, in its original state, peopled with the noble ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola

... 1877, your servant received and accepted with pleasure the invitation of the President and Board of Trustees to deliver a course of lectures upon the religions of Japan. In that country and in several parts of it, I lived from 1870 to 1874. I was in the service first of the feudal daimi[o] of Echizen and then of the national government of Japan, helping to introduce that system of public schools which is now the glory of the country. Those four years gave me opportunities for close and constant observation of the outward side of the religions of Japan, and facilities ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... was never lacking in respect to white people of proper quality; but Major Carteret, the quintessence of aristocracy, called out all her reserves of deference. The major was always kind and considerate to these old family retainers, brought up in the feudal atmosphere now so rapidly passing away. Mammy Jane loved Mrs. Carteret; toward the major she entertained ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... by a slave, punishable only by the master; and in the majority of cases, if the familia were a large one, they probably never reached his ears. The jurisdiction to which the slave was responsible was a private one, like that of the great feudal lord of the Middle Ages, who had his own prison and his own gallows. The political result was much the same in each case. Just as the feudal lord, with his private jurisdiction and his hosts of retainers, became a peril to good government and national unity until he was brought ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... "the Three Houses of Kings," because that title was employed by the founder of each. Some of their successors were called Ti; but Hwang-ti, the term for "emperor" now in use, was never employed until it was assumed by the builder of the Great Wall on the overthrow of the feudal states and the consolidation of the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house. But again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced later novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial; later religious and speculative beliefs; a later style ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... eighteenth century ideas of revolution were widely in the air. The people were rising against the tyranny of the kings. First in this struggle for liberty came the English colonies in America. Then the people of France sprang to arms and overthrew the moss-grown tyranny of feudal times. The armies of Napoleon spread the demand for freedom through Europe. In Spain the people began to fight for their freedom, and soon the thirst for liberty crossed the ocean to America, where the people of the Spanish colonies had long been oppressed ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... all. As the road rises we get views of the broad valley, with its lakes and green meadows, and the great white haciendas with their clumps of willows, their church-towers, and the clusters of adobe huts surrounding them—like the peasants' cottages in feudal Europe, crowding up to ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... be happier in a partially cleansed state?" said Mr. Red House. And Mrs. Red House, who is my idea of a feudal lady in a castle, said, "Oh, come along, let's go and partially clean ourselves. I'm dirtier than anybody, though I haven't explored a bit. I've often noticed that the more you admire things the more they come off ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... course of Lectures on the Law of Nature, the Law of Nations; the Jewish, the Grecian, the Roman, and the Canon Law; and then on the Feudal Law; and on the several forms of Municipal Jurisprudence established in Modern Europe. I printed a Syllabus of these Lectures, which was approved. They were intended as introductory to the professional study of Law, and ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... despite the brilliant days of the Empire, despite his autocracy, his militarism and his arrogance, represented "the people," the advanced spirit of the Revolution; his downfall had meant a return to the old regime—the regime of feudal rights, of farmers general, of heavy taxation and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... Apropos of Miranda, I'll rest on my oars And drift through a trifling digression on bores, For, though not wearing ear-rings in more majorum, Our ears are kept bored just as if we still wore 'em. There was one feudal custom worth keeping, at least, Roasted bores made a part of each well-ordered feast, And of all quiet pleasures the very ne plus Was in hunting wild bores as the tame ones hunt us. Archaeologians, I know, who have personal fears 1220 Of this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... Fairhair (860-933) was the first to unite all Norway in one kingdom as a sort of feudal state. His success in his struggles with the petty kings who opposed him was made complete by his victory over viking forces in the battle on the waters of Hafursfjord, 872. Many of the rebels emigrated, a movement which led to the settlement of Iceland front 874 on. Haakon the ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them. They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind, and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians were ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... themselves charters. By these charters they acquired the right to govern themselves; that is, the burghers elected their own mayor and their councilor aldermen, and this body governing the community was called the commune. When the feudal system fell in France, and all power was centralized in the king, city governments were established by royal edict only. Paris, for instance, was governed by the Prefect of the Seine,—he had under him the maires of twenty Arrondissements; ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... his life, but that little is very pleasant. It exhibits him in the rare light of a poet who was at once rich, romantic, an Arcadian and a man of the world, a feudal lord and an indulgent philosopher, a courtier equally beloved by prince ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt

... feudal law was introduced here in all its rigor, the whole of which is built on a military plan. I shall not now enter into the particulars of that constitution, which belongs more properly to the next part of our "Commentaries"; but shall only observe that, in consequence thereof, all the lands ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... indispensable to society, but so far it has remained in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this condition of uncertainty ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... a nominal dominion over so many vassal kings. Even tribes of barbarians in their mountains, and the Greek cities of Upper Asia, [31] within their walls, scarcely acknowledged, or seldom obeyed. any superior; and the Parthian empire exhibited, under other names, a lively image of the feudal system [32] which has since prevailed in Europe. But the active victor, at the head of a numerous and disciplined army, visited in person every province of Persia. The defeat of the boldest rebels, and the reduction ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... naturally desired to imitate, on such a scale as they could afford, the chateaux of their allies and patrons. The state of the country, too, made it a more suitable pattern than the Tudor style. France was still a country of feudal warfare—so was Scotland; and it was necessary in both to have defence associated with ornament. The chief peculiarity of this new style was, the quantity of sharp-topped turrets, which form a sort of crest to the many details of the lower parts of the buildings. These are not solely ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various

... old kings who thereafter became his earls and vassals. Those who would not be subdued he killed or maimed. He made new laws, took from the peasants their odal estates, and declared all land to be the king's property. Many of the conquered people rebelled against his rule and his strict feudal laws, and some of his provinces had to be conquered twice over. But with every year he came nearer to his goal, and those who opposed him only brought ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton

... things more clearly than European lovers of liberty, because Americans are detached from the actual conflicts by the Atlantic, and because Americans have had no real contact with the feudal or the imperial system for nearly 300 years. Pilgrim and Puritan, Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran and Catholic alike left the feudal system and autocratic government behind them when they crossed the Atlantic. Americans, therefore, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... what profound snobbishness the University System produced, you will allow that it is time to attack some of those feudal Middle-age superstitions. If you go down for five shillings to look at the 'College Youths,' you may see one sneaking down the court without a tassel to his cap; another with a gold or silver fringe to his velvet ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... first settlement on feudal rights, has been so far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit will be found in each period to have been acting in all its members. The study of Shakespeare's poems—(I do not include his dramatic works, eminently as they too ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... day sprang, "we may admit," she says, "that they were the link between the classic Collegia and all other art and trade Guilds of the Middle Ages. They were Free-masons because they were builders of a privileged class, absolved from taxes and servitude, and free to travel about in times of feudal bondage." The name Free-mason—Libera muratori—may not actually have been used thus early, but the Comacines were in fact free builders long before the name was employed—free to travel from place ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... nobles and freemen. There were arbitration courts where the lawgivers decided on penalties, and whose decisions were enforced by the assemblies. One of the reasons, the bishop said, that England had found it difficult to rule the Irish, was that she attempted to force a feudal government on ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell

... showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would certainly not have missed this touch, and it is ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but note the cluster of readers at the open fronts ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... of my sudden accession to wealth? A moment later a second deed made me possessor, on payment of one hundred and eighty thousand francs in ready money, of the Chateau d'Arcis,—a grand edifice which had caught my eye, on my first arrival in the town, by its lordly and feudal air. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... strolled along the river bank. What had I stumbled into? Here was an old inn, with rather a feudal air; but it was only one in a thousand; a common feature throughout the Continent. And yet, why had the gods, when they cast out Hebe, chosen this particular inn for her mortal residence? The pipe solves many riddles, ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath

... country—ce pays du Vendomois—the names and scenery of which so often recur in it:- -the great Loire, with its long spaces of white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, with its scattered pools of water and waste road-sides, and retired manors, with their crazy old feudal defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, where the vast rolling fields seem to anticipate the great western sea itself. It is full of the traits of that country. We see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening, or hunting with their dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day; and with all this ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... extinction of the name he had illustrated and the family he had hoped to found. And while his noble works remain to make his memory ever loved and honored, this Brummagem mediaeval mansion, this mock feudal castle with its imitation baronial hall (upon a diminutive scale) hung round with suits of armor, testifies to the utter perversity of good sense and good taste resulting from this one mental infirmity, this craving to be a Border chieftain of the sixteenth century instead of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... in a still grander ratio. Then the cry of tyrants, that self-government is a phantom, and republics a failure, would cease to oppress the listening ear of humanity. Then the chains would soon fall everywhere from the limbs of the slave. Then the reactionary and feudal party of Europe, now so loudly proclaiming republics a failure, while exulting over the anticipated fall of the American Union, would retire discomfited from the contest, while the rights of man would be immensely promoted, and civilization advance, at a single bound, more than ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... element was an increased reverence for secular rank, which grew out of the feudal system, when a great hereditary aristocracy arose and all European society was moulded into a compact hierarchy, of which the serf was the basis and the emperor the apex. The principle of subordination and obedience ran through the whole edifice, and a respect for rank ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... they take sanctuary with some neighbouring Mfumo, who, despite the inevitable feud, is bound by custom to protect them. Cold and hunger, the torments of the poor in Europe, are absolutely unknown to them, and their condition contrasts most favourably with the "vassus" and the "servus" of our feudal times. Their wives and children are their own: the master cannot claim the tyrannous marriage-rights of the baron; no "wedding-dish" is carried up to the castle; nor is the eldest born "accounted the son of the serf's lord, for he perchance it was who begat him." The brutality of slavery, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... importance that, from certainly the twelfth century onwards, the nobles and the burghers dwelt together within the walls of the cities. The interests and pleasures of both classes were thus identified, and the feudal lord learned to look at society from another point of view than that of his mountain castle. The Church, too, in Italy never suffered itself, as in northern countries, to be used as a means of providing for the younger sons of noble families. Bishoprics, abbacies, and canonries were ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... centuries, constituted a firm bulwark in the struggles against the nobility, the Church and the Princes,—a bulwark that broke down by little and little, but that did not wholly crumble even after the feudal State had come to power, and the one-time free peasants were in droves reduced to the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... Yverdon, an old feudal stronghold, which Pestalozzi had received from the municipality of that town in 1804, to enable him to establish a school and work ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... not derived from a natural source, could not easily be held in check by natural restraints: neither chains nor dungeons could bind it down or confine it. You might load the witch with irons, you might bury her in the lowest cell of a feudal prison, and still it was believed that she could send forth her imps or her spectre to ravage the fields, and blight the meadows, and throw the elements into confusion, and torture the bodies, and craze the minds, of any who might be ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... old chateaus on the hills, built with an appearance of military strength, their towers and battlements telling of feudal times. The groves by which they were surrounded were for the most part clipped into regular walls, and pierced with regularly arched passages, leading in various directions, and the trees compelled by the shears to take the shape of obelisks ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... occasioned by the overflowing of waters, . . . also by the lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases." In the general dulness and squalor two things were remarkable: one, the last splendour of the feudal time; the other, the first dawn of the new learning from Italy. In 1452, George Neville of Balliol, brother of the King-maker, gave the most prodigious pass-supper that was ever served in Oxford. On the first day there were 600 messes of meat, divided into three courses. The ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... rheumatism and dress his wounds. From the lordly manor, the plant propagated itself in all directions, while remaining faithful to the walls under whose shelter the noble dames of yore used to grow it for their unguents. To this day, feudal ruins are its favourite resorts. Crusaders and manors disappeared; the plant remained. In this case, the origin of the clary, whether historical or legendary, is of secondary importance. Even if it were of spontaneous ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... historical criticism. Fletcher describes a new social type; the 'King's Young Courtier' who is deserting the good old ways of his father, the 'old courtier of the Queen.' The change is but one step in that continuous process which has substituted the modern gentleman for the old feudal noble; but the step taken at that period was great and significant. The chivalrous type, represented in Sidney's life and Spenser's poetry, is beginning to be old-fashioned and out of place as the industrial elements of society become more prominent. The aristocrat in the rising generation ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... old and feudal clans, Their pikes, and bills, and partisans, Their hauberks, jerkins, buffs? A battle was a battle then, A breathing piece of work; but men Fight now—with ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... known as the "Farmer Duke," from his love of agriculture and rural pursuits, though he was a D.C.L. and F.R.S. and possessed the feudal dignity of Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex. His father had been Prime Minister; but the son made no effort to shine in politics and contented himself with developing the resources of his estates and adding to the wealth ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard

... dominion; heteronomy; republic, republicanism; socialism; collectivism; mob law, mobocracy^, ochlocracy^; vox populi, imperium in imperio [Lat.]; bureaucracy; beadledom^, bumbledom^; stratocracy; military power, military government, junta; feodality^, feudal system, feudalism. thearchy^, theocracy, dinarchy^; duarchy^, triarchy, heterarchy^; duumvirate; triumvirate; autocracy, autonomy; limited monarchy; constitutional government, constitutional monarchy; home rule; representative government; monocracy^, pantisocracy^. gynarchy^, gynocracy^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... have said that. But Marcus Aurelius belonged to a race peculiarly insensitive to beauty. The Japanese stoics were also artists and poets. Their earliest painters were feudal lords, and it was feudal lords who fostered and acted the No dances. If Nietzsche had known Japan—I think he did not?—he would surely have found in these Daimyos and Samurai the forerunners of his Superman. A blood-red blossom growing out of the battlefield, that, I think, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... slave of antiquity was transformed into the serf of the middle ages, and afterwards into the day laborer of modern times.(413) It is more particularly to be remarked, that machines, since 1750, "first made the constitutional liberty of many, instead of the feudal freedom of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... ambassador. He turned a page. "There's Darth. Its social system is practically feudal. It's technically backward. There's a landing grid, but space exports are skins and metal ingots and practically nothing else. There is no broadcast power. Strangers find the local customs difficult. There is no town larger than twenty thousand people, and few approach that size. Most ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... aim of their policy to form a chain of factories, and cities, and islands, along the maritime coast, from the neighborhood of Ragusa to the Hellespont and the Bosphorus. The labor and cost of such extensive conquests exhausted their treasury: they abandoned their maxims of government, adopted a feudal system, and contented themselves with the homage of their nobles, [9] for the possessions which these private vassals undertook to reduce and maintain. And thus it was that the family of Sanut acquired the duchy of Naxos, which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... connected with real property, has been taken up by the executor or administrator. The persona continued by the heir was from an early day confined to real estate in its technical sense; that is, to property subject to feudal principles, as distinguished from chattels, which, as Blackstone tells us, /2/ include ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... artists, struggling against the intolerable exactions of doctrine, have found powerful support; indeed, only with its aid have they succeeded at last in securing their positions as masters who, though not disdaining to pay homage for what they hold from the new theories, are as independent as feudal princes. But the more I consider the period the more this strange and restless alliance of doctrine with temperament appears to be of its essence; wherefore, I shall not hesitate to make of it a light wherewith to take a hasty look about me. Here are two labels ready to hand—"temperamental" ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... For a fuller account of Feudal and Civil Jurisprudence, the writer of these pages begs leave to refer to his work, entitled, "HORAE JURIDICAE SUBSECIVAE, being a connected series of Notes respecting the Geography, Chronology, and Literary History of the principal Codes and ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler

... of the ferocious pride of Attila, that the grass never grew on the spot where his horse had trod. Yet the savage destroyer undesignedly laid the foundation of a republic, which revived, in the feudal state of Europe, the art and spirit of commercial industry. The celebrated name of Venice, or Venetia, [54] was formerly diffused over a large and fertile province of Italy, from the confines of Pannonia to the River Addua, and from the Po to the Rhaetian and Julian Alps. Before the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... tops, mounted guard at the angles of the mansion, and gave it rather a feudal air. The deep grooves upon its facade betrayed the former existence of a draw-bridge, rendered unnecessary now by the filling up of the moat, while the towers were draped for more than half their height with a most luxuriant growth of ivy, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... have died in the seeking.' Guttorm gave great thanks to the king for his oath, saying it was "royal work fulfilling royal rede." The new and strange government that Harold tried to enforce—nothing less than the feudal system in a rough guise —which made those who had hitherto been their own men save at special times, the king's men at all times, and laid freemen under tax, was withstood as long as might be by the sturdy ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous

... that her young mistress was so securely closeted with Dona Maria that morning as to be inaccessible to curious eyes and ears, she saw fit to bewail to her fellow-servants this further evidence of the decay of the old feudal and patriarchal mutual family confidences. "Time was, thou rememberest, Pepita, when an affair of this kind was openly discussed at chocolate with everybody present, and before us all. When Joaquin Padilla was shot at Monterey, it was the Dona herself who told us, who read aloud the letters describing ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte

... personal property, including, of course, claims in the nature of choses in action. Congress may, therefore, take and cancel claims to service owned by Rebel slave-owners without any compensation whatever. Under the feudal law, a serf, owing service to a noble guilty of treason, became, because of his master's guilt, released ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... events of 1848. When they saw that a conflict with the Magyars was inevitable, owing to the new Hungarian Constitution which created an enormous and free Hungary, but only free for the Magyars—a State founded on a mixture of democratic and feudal principles, reserving always the chief places for the magnates, lay and ecclesiastic, while rejecting the idea of universal suffrage—then the Serbs of southern Hungary assembled at Karlovci at the beginning of May and conferred upon Archbishop Rajacsich the title ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... loftier than that on which the feudal castle rears its crumbling towers, and the landscape below me ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... rent asunder, Sloth in the mart and schism in the temple; Broils festering to rebellion; and weak laws Rotting away with rust in antique sheaths. I have re-created France; and, from the ashes Of the old feudal and decrepit carcase, Civilisation on her luminous wings ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... example of a great feudal fortress, as the little castellated manor I spoke of a while since is an example of a small one. The great courtyard at Ludlow is as large as the central square of a city, but now it is all vacant and grassy, and the day I was there a lonely old horse was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... upon him as an unfortunate man, towards whom loyalty now required even a greater show of respect than while he owned his father's farm. The impulse transmitted to him from the devotion of ancestors to the patriarchal head of the clan, had found blind vent in the direction of the mere feudal superior, and both the impulse and its object remained. He felt honoured, even now that he had reached the goal of his lofty desires and was a popular preacher, in being permitted to play backgammon with the great man, or ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... the king seemed most free, that he was in fact most hampered. A vast system of public offices had been gradually formed, with regulations, traditions, and a professional spirit. This it was which had displaced the old feudal order, substituting ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... the difficulty is, that while the people get their travel, oil, sugar, and necessities of life cheaper and better than ever, they become the dependents, wage-slaves, and political and social underlings of the industrial Feudal System which that integration of transporting and producing monopolies builds up. For, those who can and do combine to control the conditions of the people's life and welfare have the people and their Republic in their power. Under the integration ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... themselves and their partners arrived in Carolina in 1670, bringing with them that pompous and preposterous anachronism, the "Fundamental Constitutions," contrived by the combined wisdom of Shaftesbury and John Locke to impose a feudal government upon an immense domain of wilderness, they found the ground already occupied with a scanty and curiously mixed population, which had taken on a simple form of polity and was growing into a state. The region adjoining Virginia ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... many parts intrude upon the Turkey carpet, an air of order, of comfort, and of taste, pervades the chamber. The hangings of crimson damask silk blend with the antique furniture of oak; the upper panes of the windows are tinted by the brilliant pencil of feudal Germany, while the choice volumes that line the shelves are clothed in bindings which become their rare contents. The master of this apartment was a man of ordinary height, inclined to corpulency, and in the wane of middle life, though his unwrinkled ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... what nature had effected. Happily, there was a public fund at disposal—the accumulation of rents and profits derived from the estates forfeited at the rebellion of 1745—which was available for the purpose. The suppression of the rebellion did good in many ways. It broke the feudal spirit, which lingered in the Highlands long after it had ceased in every other part of Britain; it led to the effectual opening up of the country by a system of good roads; and now the accumulated rents of the defeated Jacobite chiefs were about to be applied to the improvement of the Highland ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... her brother with much scorn. 'Upon my word, that is the vulgarest of denominations! Who doesn't call himself so nowadays! A man's a man, I take it, and what need is there to lengthen the name? Thank the powers, we don't live in feudal ages. Besides, he doesn't seem to me to be ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... fountain and good-sized basin in the middle of the courtyard, and a big clock over the door—sometimes they stand in a moat, one goes over a drawbridge with massive doors, studded with iron nails and strong iron bolts and chains which defend the entrance, making one think of old feudal days, when might was right, and if a man wanted his neighbours property, he simply took it. Even some of the smaller chateaux have moats. I think they are more picturesque than comfortable—an ivy-covered house with a moat around it is a nest ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... rock, with huts for his followers; and became known directly all over the country as Sir Roger de Rockville, or Sir Roger of the hamlet on the Rock. Sir Roger, no doubt, was a mighty hunter before the lord of the feudal district: it is certain that his descendants were. For generations they led a jolly life at Rockville, and were always ready to exchange the excitement of the chase for a bit of civil war. Without that the country would have grown dull, and ale and venison ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... struck upon the bell in that tower of the Lion began the tolling for the passing away of the feudal system, and began the joy- peal, or carillon, for whatever deserves joy, in that of our modern liberties, whether of ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... was a strange enough apartment for the daughter of a lawyer in the city of Thorn, within a mile of the bare feudal strengths of the Red Tower and ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... Datto Mandi seemed eminently happy, and from all we could learn, slavery among the Moros is a sort of feudal state, the slaves having many privileges and considering themselves always as members of the family to which they belong. They live their own lives to a great degree, marry, and bring up their children, seeming to be considered more as followers ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... to come back alone to her solitary seat in the afternoon. All day no one dared speak to her. She was as much an object of contumely as the thieves and smugglers who, in the end of last century, it was the privilege of Feudal Bailie Wood (as he was called) to whip round ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... by reason of its association with Napoleon Buonaparte, for it was inspired by Beethoven's belief—formed in those days when the soldier of the Revolution was regarded as the liberator of peoples and the enemy only of the old feudal order—that Napoleon was marked out by destiny to realise Plato's ideal of government. One recalls how the act of Napoleon in proclaiming himself Emperor shattered this illusion; how Beethoven erased the fallen hero's name from ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... me, some years since, in the course of some historical inquiries, to wish for fuller information in regard to the barbarous feudal codes of the Middle Ages,—as the Salic, Burgundian, and Ripuarian,—before the time of Charlemagne. The common historians, even Hallam, gave no very satisfactory information and referred to no very available books; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... verdant, then sombre and then sable by age and atmosphere. Outwardly the edifice required the application of paint and lacquer in rich tints, its recurved roof-edges gladly welcoming the crest and monogram of the feudal prince, and its railings and stairways accepting willingly the bronze caps and ornaments. In front of its main edifice was the imposing gateway with proportions almost as massive as the temple itself, with prodigal wealth of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... its light displays Each buttressed mountain side, And softly shines through stately pines Where feudal castles hide, And every height grows dazzling white In the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... of the Sierras of Spain. On approaching near enough to distinguish objects we discovered several large baronial castles, or convents, perched high up on bold pinnacled crags, in positions most inaccessible and impregnable. One goes back, in fancy, to the feudal days, and recalls those heroes of our boyish imaginations to ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... control of the government. Its constant presence in politics is dictated, therefore, by despair, as well as by the wish to secure fresh privileges. Money, however, is not the only strength of the slave power. That, indeed, were enough, in an age when capitalists are our feudal barons. But, though driven entirely from national shelter, the slave-holders would have the strength of old associations, and of peculiar laws in their own States, which give those States wholly into their hands. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... rocks, were sought in Switzerland, Italy, and wherever else these natural means of protection could readily found. Other circumstances, such as climate wealth, the habits of a people, and the nature of the feudal rights, also served greatly to modify the appearance and extent of the building. The ancient hold in Switzerland was originally little more than a square solid tower, perched upon a rock, with turrets at its angles. Proof against fire from without, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... 18th century one of the rooms in the great tower was still called the chambre de Cesar. The jurisdiction was that of the provostship (prevote) and viscountship of Paris, which was certainly of feudal origin, probably going back ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... merit, to the highest offices of state under an Egyptian monarch, and who conceived and successfully carried into execution a comprehensive agrarian policy which had the effect of transferring the landed estates of the great feudal aristocracy to the crown, and of completely changing Egyptian tenures. Nor does any one question, at this day, the reality of the power which the Biblical writers ascribed to the Empire of the Hittites. Under such conditions the course of the commentator ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... nobility for that singular institution "The Truce of God." At the commencement of the eleventh century, the clergy of France, sympathising for the woes of the people, but unable to diminish them, by repressing the rapacity and insolence of the feudal chiefs, endeavoured to promote universal good-will by the promulgation of the famous "Peace of God." All who conformed to it bound themselves by oath not to take revenge for any injury, not to enjoy the fruits of property usurped ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... conflict between the White and Red Roses, of regarding Ireland as a country where a rebel in England was a free man: a notion which had greatly facilitated the intrigues of both Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck on Irish soil. Further, besides some enactments for checking feudal customs which tended to disorder, it was ordained that the principal castles should always be under the command of Englishmen. Poynings also endeavoured, by bestowing pensions (on terms) on some of the principal chiefs outside the Pale—such as O'Neill ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... was in its bloom, it consisted of four provinces, viz.: 1, the principality of Antioch; 2, the duchy of Edessa; 3, the principality of Syria or Jerusalem; and 4, the duchy of Tripolis. These four formed the kingdom of Jerusalem, of which they were feudal dependencies. The principality of Jerusalem was the home domain of the king of Jerusalem, as Hugh Capet, for instance, was duke of France and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... himself as king, and for fourteen years (not without the help of a few more murders) he kept some sort of rude order and justice in the wretched land. Remember him, for, bad man as he is, he does represent a principle. He initiated, by that gift of the lands to his soldiers, the feudal system in Italy. I do not mean that he invented it. It seems rather to be a primaeval German form, as old as the days of Tacitus, who describes, if you will recollect, the German war-kings as parting the conquered lands among their 'comites,' ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... for wherever I travelled throughout Pomerania, as the faithful servant of your Highness, nothing was heard but lamentations from old and young, rich and poor, that this execrable Sorceress, out of Satanic wickedness, had destroyed this illustrious race, who had held their lands from no emperor, in feudal tenure, like other German princes, but in their own right, as absolute lords, since five hundred years, and though for twenty years it seemed to rest upon five goodly princes, yet by permission of the incomprehensible God, it has now melted away until ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... The feudal system soon became hereditary. Chivalry, on the contrary, has never been hereditary, and a special rite has always been necessary to create a knight. In default of all other arguments this would ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... "opposed though we have always been to revolutionary politics, a clear line is indicated to us out of the throes of the Re-birth. The old feudal relations between Foxes and Men have had their day. The England that has been the paradise of the wealthy, of the pink-coated, of the doubly second-horsed, must become that of the oppressed, the hunted, the hand-to-mouth liver. In a word, we have had enough of Fox-Hounds; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various

... pleasure-loving; while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life finds expression in the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. The graceful buildings which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure of its own authority and loved of the people. Feudal despotism, on the contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold, moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public square and ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... was, and would continue to be, an institution dear to the French heart, this one was not so, and needed an apology; for his imperial nobility had never been taken seriously or kindly by the people, who could not draw the nice distinction between a feudal and an imperial aristocracy. Even in the first steps of his enterprise he was made to feel the need of caution, and it was by statute, after all, not by decree, that the whole matter was finally regulated. So curious ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... in New England corresponding at all to the feudal aristocracies of the Old World. Whether it be owing to the stock from which we were derived, or to the practical working of our institutions, or to the abrogation of the technical "law of honor," which draws ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... an old clanish knowledge of each other, this fellow and I, because, although he was a Farquharson, the croft on which his people dwelt was near the Gordon estate of Balmoral. We had played with each other as boys, for the feudal system of the clans was communal and democratic. It was, to take one illustration, customary for the sons of chiefs to have foster-brothers adopted from the commonalty, companions in peace time, comrades ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... to complain—progress is built upon discomfort, contentment means stagnation. I could see the workers fixed in their contented groove under the studied philanthropy of his employers and ending as in the dumb-driven-cattle age of the Feudal Barons." ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... halberds at the coming of the Spanish generals. They swaggered down the streets of Malolos, clashing their swords behind them, and they knew that if they won, the Philippines would be divided into fiefs which they, as dukes and marquises, would hold in feudal tenure from a Malay potentate. They were confident. They held Luzon. They held the people. They had no intention of returning to office stools or to the life of outlaws and hunted men. The United States force in Manila was small and America was far. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... the Roman cities were allowed to decay: the forest resumed its rights: the feudal castle was constructed from the ruins of the Proconsul's palace and the Basilica, or if these edifices were too massive for demolition, they were left standing in the waste—the Mammoths and Saurians of a bygone civilization. ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne

... not in power, himself a king,—and tracing his legendary history back to old and half-forgotten sources, he had proved, satisfactorily, to his own mind, that he, Svensen, must lawfully, and according to old feudal system, be this king's serf or vassal. And, growing more and more convinced of this in his dreamy and imaginative mind,—he had sworn a sort of mystic friendship and allegiance, which Gueldmar had accepted, imposing on him, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... were happier in the ancient feudal state of subordination, than they are in the modern state of independency. JOHNSON. To be sure, the CHIEF was: but we must think of the number of individuals. That THEY were less happy, seems plain; ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... path which could lead them to peace and to freedom. Yet it was, as they well knew, a dangerous road to follow. All down the Richelieu River were the outposts and blockhouses of the French, for when the feudal system was grafted upon Canada the various seigneurs or native noblesse were assigned their estates in the positions which would be of most benefit to the settlement. Each seigneur with his tenants under him, trained as they ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... "John Locke has not emancipated himself from his admiration of the feudal system. Let this be our principle,— that those whose lives, properties, and liberties are most concerned in the administration of the laws shall be the people to form them. Let there be two bodies to be elected by the people,—a council and an assembly. Let the council ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston

... demagogues of the nobility, wearied with a protracted discussion upon the rights of man, and burning to signalise their zeal, rose all at once, and with loud exclamations called for the last sighs of the feudal system. This demand electrified the Assembly. All heads were frenzied. The younger sons of good families, having nothing, were delighted to sacrifice their too fortunate elders upon the altar of the country; a few country cures felt no less pleasure in renouncing ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... of their country? Bleeding from the loss of their sons—will they think more of money and corn-stacks and vintages than of that true peace and freedom which can only be won by driving out tyranny? Nobody wants to put them back as they were before 1789. The feudal ages are gone—we have given up our rights, and there is an end of it—but we want our own kings again, and we want peace for France, and time to breathe and to let her wounds heal. We want to be ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... author,[A] speaking of those times which succeeded the dissolution of that empire, acquaints us, that as christianity prevailed, it very much removed those wrong prejudices and practices, which had taken root in darker times: after the irruption of the Northern nations, and the introduction of the feudal or military government, whereby the most extensive power was lodged in a few members of society, to the depression of the rest, the common people were little better than slaves, and many were indeed such; but as christianity gained ground, ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet

... pack of wolves, and he would be ruined. Lorraine, Bourbon, and St. Pol do not see that Burgundy alone stands between them and the greedy maw of France. Should King Louis survive my—my Lord of Burgundy five years, these dukes and counts will lose their feudal rights and become servile vassals of France, not in name, as now they ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major

... not a part of English law at the time; but it was granted "in free and common soccage" with the holder a tenant of the King with obligations of fealty and of the payment of a quitrent. The fixed rent replaced the service, military or personal, required under feudal law; and the socage tenure in effect did not subject the land to the rules of escheat or return of the land to the King if inherited by minors or widows. For Englishmen in America, the "Instructions for the government of the colonies" in 1606 were explicit in showing that their legal and tenurial ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.

... with, and when the black curtain was last raised over Syria, Jemal the Great had disposed of over eight hundred of the heads of the most influential of Syrian Arabs. He had got rid, in fact, of the whole House of Lords, and something more. Those who are acquainted with 'feudal values' among the Arabs will understand what that means. He decapitated, not individuals only, but groups. For devilish ingenuity in this combination of starvation and pestilence for the poor, and death or lifelong imprisonment for the chiefs, ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... an ancient feudal castle, heavily fortified, standing in splendid isolation upon a snowy hill, on that night of all others when war was forgotten and peace proclaimed. Drawn by six horses, the great Yule log was brought into the ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... only two counts in the whole country who have estates, and exact some feudal observances from their tenantry. All the rest of the country is divided into small farms, which belong to the cultivator. It is true some few, appertaining to the Church, are let, but always on a lease ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... which has been aptly described as a prose-poem, is one of the happiest illustrations possible of the language, manners, modes of thought and expression prevalent in England in the fifteenth century. Chivalry was not yet dead, ideals were still cherished, the feudal system still obtained, Gothic architecture had not yet said its last word, Englishmen were papal to the backbone, and religion was a potent factor in their live, in spite of much that was harsh, crude, and violent. "Herein," ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... elapsed, since some of the fairest portions of this "land of the free," were held as conquered tributaries by other cantons, and were governed by a bailiff residing in his castle, and exercising a power like that of a feudal baron. A considerable portion of Switzerland is still subject to an aristocracy, as absolute in its sway, and as much opposed to the extension of light and liberty, as any other branch of the holy alliance. The press is, in many cantons, under severe ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... when he returned to Germany certain of his barons remained there and became citizens." The two families just mentioned are specified. So far, then, the Guelfs may be regarded as representing native civic liberties against an alien feudal nobility, and the struggle between the two factions will fall into line with that which at a somewhat later date went on in Germany between the traders of the cities and the "robber-barons" of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... walls, and the people felt instinctively that a new era had begun for them, that there would be life in the old place again, and that the young lord would build up Sigmundskron to be what it had been before. Though not a foot of land remained to the name outside the ramparts, the feudal tradition had not disappeared. Old men were alive whose fathers had told them of the good old Sigmundskrons, how they had been brave in war and kind in peace, and generous till all was gone, and the voices of these drowned the ill-natured ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... Celine was clerical. Christophe asked what he meant by that. Andre replied that he meant that she was religious, and had vowed a sort of feudal service to ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... kidnapped[137] in England and sent into the colony. There was nothing in the moral atmosphere of the colony inimical to the spirit of bondage that was manifest so early in the history of this people. England had always held her sceptre over slaves of some character: villeins in the feudal era, stolen Africans under Elizabeth and under the house of the Tudors; Caucasian children—whose German blood could be traced beyond the battle of Hastings—in her mines, factories, and mills; and vanquished Brahmans in her Eastern possessions. How, then, could ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... the great naval engagement of the 17th of September, 1894, a hawk alighted on the fighting-mast of the Japanese cruiser Takachiho, and suffered itself to be taken and fed. After much petting, this bird of good omen was presented to the Emperor. Falconry was a great feudal sport in Japan, and hawks were finely trained. The hawk is now likely to become, more than ever before in Japan, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... the little party. He wanted to take plenty of time and drink in the astonishing details of what to him was a palace. And about the weather-beaten old house he felt that there was a touch of mystery of a more or less feudal romance. Climbing the steps to the porch he turned; a broad sweep of hills opened above the tops of the spruces, and the blue ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... birth of Luther, leader of the other great movement of that age, the Reformation—Urbino, under its dukes of the house of Montefeltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of native artistic faculty from the first a willing learner. The gloomy old fortress of the feudal masters of the town had been replaced, in those later years of the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of Quattro-cento taste, a museum of ancient and modern art, the owners of which lived there, gallantly ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... an antagonist to deal with, a falsehood to quell, or a wrong to avenge. Never till then does my mind feel quite alive. Could I have chosen my own period of the world to have lived in, and my own type of life, it should be the feudal ages, and the life of a Cid, the redresser ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... dilettantism comes in between the reader and what he reads. Indeed, the best of volumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a binding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal. To the feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, a tenpenny book in a ten-pound binding, I say fie. Perhaps the ideal library, after all, is a small one, where the books are carefully selected and thoughtfully arranged ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... the use of artillery, the duel, [Footnote: Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, 35.] the use of quasi-royal formulas in their documents, [Footnote: Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos, IV., 191, 192.] and other proud old feudal customs. No slight influence was exercised upon the nobility by the increasing ceremony, size, and expenditure of the court, to which they came to be attached in positions of nominal service and honorable dependence, a position altogether favorable to the supremacy of the monarchs and unfavorable ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... new period of music begins. He stands midway between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical period is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is termination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There are times when his art appears entirely ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... altar in some particular church, whose patron saint became the protector of the guild. And indeed the constitution of the guild included even political rights and obligations—military service among the rest, like other feudal institutions. Each town had its own special corporations, which thus led to the formation of separate schools of art; while travelling apprenticeships gave the opportunity to all of acquiring knowledge not accessible at home. Members were ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... to the core, exhibited quite a feudal loyalty to the paper which had raised him from the ruck and placed him on ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... is Chirk Castle, now the home of Mr. R. Myddelton Biddulph, a combination of a feudal fortress and a modern mansion. The ancient portion, still preserved, was built by Roger Mortimer, to whom Edward I. granted the lordship of Chirk. It was a bone of contention during the Civil Wars, and when they were over, $150,000 were spent in repairing the great quadrangular fortress. It stands ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... I, who had known the ease and the delights and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers at old Mana, and of Puuwaawaa! You remember. We did live in feudal spaciousness in those days. Would you, can you, believe it, Martha—at Nahala the only sewing machine I had was one of those the early missionaries brought, a tiny, crazy thing that one ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... attachment. The reasoning on this head has been abundantly exemplified by the experience of all federal constitutions with which we are acquainted, and of all others which have borne the least analogy to them. Though the ancient feudal systems were not, strictly speaking, confederacies, yet they partook of the nature of that species of association. There was a common head, chieftain, or sovereign, whose authority extended over the whole ...
— The Federalist Papers

... expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.'' "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.'' Feudal relations became fetters: "They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. . . . A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.'' "The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... the very erroneous idea I had had of Jerusalem. From the west it does not look at all like a city built on a hill; for, rather below you, at the farther end of a barren plain, you see nothing but the embattled walls of a feudal town, with one or two large buildings and a minaret alone visible above them. To the right the ground dips into the Valley of Hinnom,—but to the left it is level with the city-walls, and its surface is covered with bare ribs of rock running along ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... Venetians became the agents of the general commerce of Southern Europe, they had scarcely any competitors: the thing would not have been done at all without them, and there was really no limit to their profits except the limit to what the ignorant feudal nobility could and would give for the unknown luxuries then first presented to their sight. At a later period competition arose, and the profit of this operation, like that of others, became amenable to natural laws. The carrying-trade was taken ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... like our own the phenomenon of spiritual power is as significant and inspiring as it is rare. No longer associated with the "divine right" of kings, it has survived the downfall of feudal and theocratic systems as a mystic personal emanation in place of a coercive ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... 64, art. 7, in corp.) seems to allow the soldier fighting against the enemy to mean to kill his man. But by enemy in this passage we should probably understand rebel. The soldier spoken of is the instrument of the feudal lord bringing back to duty his rebellious vassal. In the Middle Ages, till the end of the fifteenth century, the notion of independent nations scarcely ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... of these child-marriages Dr. Furnivall is inclined to rank "the desire to evade the feudal law of the Sovereign's guardianship of all infants," for "when a father died, the Crown had the right to hold the person and estate of the propertied orphan until it came of age, and it could be sold in marriage for the benefit of the Crown or ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... had just given the reins to her imagination, without allowing sociological preoccupations to spoil everything. During her excursions in Berry, she had stopped to gaze at the ruins of an old feudal castle. We all know the power of suggestion contained in those old stones, and how wonderfully they tell stories of the past they have witnessed to those persons who know how to question them. The remembrance of the chateau of Roche Mauprat came ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... mother, and even her own, the land of her heart and her soul-Hungary. She knew, from her mother, about all its heroes: Klapka, Georgei, Dembiski; Bem, the conqueror of Buda; Kossuth, the dreamer of a sort of feudal liberty; and those chivalrous Zilah princes, father and son, the fallen ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie

... single cocoa-nut was not current, like money, for its full value in rice. Another great advantage arising to the proprietor from rice-grounds well-occupied, is, that he is entitled, by immemorial custom, to the labour of every male on the estate one day in seven, in virtue of a sort of feudal law. A friend of mine in Java, on whose estate were fifteen thousand adults, seven thousand of whom were males, had thus the command of the labour of one thousand men per day free. On a new estate, these are the men to clear jungle, to make roads, to trim coffee-trees, ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson

... colonists first came to this country, of however mixed ingredients their ranks might have been composed, and however imbued with the spirit of feudal and aristocratic ideas, the discipline of the wilderness soon brought them to a democratic level; the gentleman felled the wood for his log-cabin side by side with the plowman, and thews and sinews rose in the market. "A man was ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... he had his answer pat. "To build up the type!" he would cry. "We're all committed to that; we're all under bond to fulfil the American Type! Loudon, the hope of the world is there. If we fail, like these old feudal monarchies, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... property in Lower Canada is still in part based upon the old French feudal system. There are still 'seigneurs' who hold lands, and have 'censitaires' or tenants, paying fee-rent in produce, services, and money. It is true that a law has been passed enabling a fixed commutation, in money, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin

... all things!" cried Hamilton, dropping a delicious morsel of sanglier in its way from hand to mouth, in his hurry to speak. "Of course, the historian, Boulainvilliers, advocates the 'Germany,' from its mention of the origin of the feudal system,—that incomparable bundle of excellences, which Le Comte de Boulainvilliers has declared to be le chef d'oeuvre de l'esprit humain; and which the same gentleman regrets, in the most pathetic terms, no longer exists in order that the seigneur may feed ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... we shall if it is a faithful reproduction of the old castles of feudal times that we have read of!" ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley

... a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He was in full uniform. It was the secret of Saint Francis that he knew how to bridge the gulf on either side of which we, prisoners in feudal holds, have cried to each other in vain. It was the secret of the Delia Robbia too. The god shall sink that we may rise to meet him in the way. Why not? Here in Pistoja are some precious pieces—a Visitation in San Giovanni, a pearly Madonna Incoronata on the big door of San Giacopo, ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... plain that if that plan should be accepted by the country no material change would follow, for the reason, chiefly, that the abolition of slavery would have been abolition only in name. While physical slavery would have been abolished, yet a sort of feudal or peonage system would have been established in its place, the effect of which would have been practically the same as the system which had been abolished. The former slaves would have been held in a state of servitude through the medium of labor-contracts which they would have been ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch

... was a combination of feudal castle and Swiss chalet erected thirty years before by the parents of Augustus, and occupying a commanding position on Sunset Ridge. The irreverent sometimes referred to it as ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard

... old one, they do not understand them; that mental faculty by which an abstraction is reached is not yet formed in them. On being taken to a political club they fall asleep; they open their eyes only when some one announces that tithes and feudal privileges are to be restored; they can be depended on for nothing more than a brawl and a jacquerie; later on, when their grain comes to be taxed or is taken, they prove as unruly under the republic ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... The villagers are too poor to enclose each a farm for himself, and the farms are simply cultivated plots lying unenclosed in a great waste, which belongs, perhaps, to the Government, or to some great feudal lord. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... sceptre, and for three hundred years the Capets held at bay the powerful chieftains who alternately assailed and defended the throne. Thirteen hundred years after Christ, the last of the Capets was borne to his tomb, and the feudal lords gave the pre-eminence to Philip of Valois. For about two hundred years the house of Valois had reigned. At the period of which we treat in this history, luxury and vice had brought ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... it the most of the hill tracts dependent from Badakhshan, including Ishkashim and Wakhan, were ruled not direct by the Mir, but by relations of his or hereditary chiefs who held their districts on a feudal tenure. The twelve days' journey which Marco records between Badashan and 'Vokhan' are, I think, easily accounted for if it is assumed that the distance from capital to capital is meant; for twelve marches are still allowed for as the distance from Baharak, the old Badakhshan ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... divided the great families in the feudal times had lost little of its bitterness, though it no longer expressed itself in deeds of open violence. Not the feelings which Ravenswood had begun to entertain towards Lucy Ashton, not the hospitality due to his guests, were able entirely to subdue, though ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... nuncio was dismissed from Madrid and relations between Spain and Rome were interrupted for a long period; the papal representatives were excluded from the negotiations preceding the Peace of Utrecht (1713); and feudal territories of the Holy See were disposed of without consulting the wishes of the Pope, Sicily being handed over to Victor Amadeus of Savoy (1675-1713) with whom Clement XI. was then in ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... his approval. "You are quite right, for somebody might be overhearing us. So, let us get on, and do you stop interrupting me. Item, you must hold Poictesme, and your heirs forever after must hold Poictesme, not in fee but by feudal tenure. Item, you shall hold these lands, not under any saint like Ferdinand, but under a quite different ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... regret that snug might-have-been, little, grocery business in a country town. She forgot even to hanker after prayer meetings, anniversary teas, and other mild, soul-saving dissipations unauthorised by the Church of England. She ruffled her feathers, so to speak, and cooed to the young man half in feudal, half in unsatisfied maternal affection—for Mrs. Chifney was childless. And it followed that as he teased her a little, going back banteringly on certain accepted subjects of difference between them, praised, and made a hole, in her ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet



Words linked to "Feudal" :   feudal lordship, feudal lord, feudalism



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com