"Peasantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... produce of the chase, they chiefly depend for subsistence. They are, however, not destitute of money, which they obtain by various means, but principally by curing diseases amongst the cattle of the mujiks or peasantry, and by telling fortunes, and not unfrequently by theft ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... colder while he advanced from the more sheltered part of the valley to meet them, the Douglas Dale farmer wrapped closer around him the grey plaid, which, from an early period, has been used by the shepherds of the south of Scotland, and the appearance of which gives a romantic air to the peasantry and middle classes; and which, although less brilliant and gaudy in its colours, is as picturesque in its arrangement as the more military tartan mantle of the Highlands. When they approached near to each other, the lady might observe that this friend of her ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the old ways of doing things," said the Justice solemnly. "Those were good times when the tablets with the lists of imposts and taxes of the peasantry used to hang in the church. In those days everything was fixed, and there were never any disagreements, as there are nowadays all too often. Afterwards it was said that the tablets with the hens and eggs and bushels and pecks of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... pretentious, glaring, and assuming; and Rhythm stoops to rock the cradle of the newborn infant; to soothe the negro in the rice swamp or cotton field; to shape into beauty the national and patriotic songs of a laborious but contented peasantry, as among the Sclaves—but what cares the age for the happiness of the race? 'Put money in thy purse,' is its consolation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... to the Soleil d'Or, where he naturally conversed with the landlord while waiting for dinner. Mitouflet was an old soldier, guilelessly crafty, like the peasantry of the Loire; he never laughed at a jest, but took it with the gravity of a man accustomed to the roar of cannon and to make his own ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... people which the large-farm system has introduced. "A fertile improved country is West Lothian," we find the latter poet remarking, in one of his journals, "but the more elegance and luxury among the farmers, I always observe in equal proportion the rudeness and stupidity of the peasantry. This remark I have made all over the Lothians, Merse, Roxburgh, &c.; and for this, among other reasons, I think that a man of romantic taste—'a man of feeling'—will be better pleased with the poverty but intelligent ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... was to have a bishop, but he was to have nothing in common with the occupant of an ordinary "vulgar" colonial see. He was to be a scholarly and well-endowed prelate, with a small and compact diocese in which there should be no dissenters, but where an aristocratic gentry and a loyal peasantry should be watched over by a numerous and well-paid clergy. To attract such a class there must be not only fertile land and easy means of communication, but also good churches and good schools. Churches and schools must therefore be provided, ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... is clear from the grave historical use he makes of poetic fables in his treatise on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told, Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones, are existing under the sanction of other names;—heathenisms christened. A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets, concluded his list ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... longer bade their followers to become Christians. On the contrary, they ordered them to renounce the new faith, under threat of punishment. Their harshness resulted in rebellion, so new a thing among the peasantry of Japan that the authorities felt sure that they had been secretly instigated to it by the missionaries. The wrath of the shogun aroused, he sent soldiers against the rebels, putting down each outbreak with bloodshed, and in 1606 issued a decree abolishing the Christian faith. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to promote emigration from Ireland, of which Archbishop Whately was chairman, called attention to the subject of transportation. It was the opinion of the committee (1836), that to send the peasantry of Ireland to a community so polluted, was base, cruel, and impolitic. The right reverend prelate asserted that statesmen were tolerating a social organisation, destined one day to involve the empire in deep disgrace, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... was gone, Maltravers left Cleveland alone to write letters (Cleveland was an exemplary and voluminous correspondent) and strolled with his dogs into the village. The effect which the presence of Maltravers produced among his peasantry was one that seldom failed to refresh and soothe his more bitter and disturbed thoughts. They had gradually (for the poor are quick-sighted) become sensible of his justice,—a finer quality than many that seem more amiable. They felt that his real object ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... directing the procedure. The guest turned away from the spectacle, but was told by his servant that this was the tenth man who had undergone the same punishment that morning. The offence was, that they had not begun work at sunrise. Of course a peasantry so treated could have no affection for their masters. All the work was done in the worst manner, while the lord was plundered in every way by his servants. Of the supplies for the family, more than half were regularly stolen, there being no supervision in the household. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... desire to get the Irish Church out of the way of many social reforms, and to have it done with as already done for. I do not in the least believe myself that agrarian Ireland is to be pacified by any such means, or can have it got out of its mistaken head that the land is of right the peasantry's, and that every man who owns land has stolen it and is therefore to be shot. But that is not ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the earth brought forth abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled the happy world: no baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the blood of the industrious and contented peasantry. Slavery and private property were alike unknown: all men had all things in common. At last the good god, the kindly king, vanished suddenly; but his memory was cherished to distant ages, shrines were reared in his honour, and many hills ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... to goodwill and rejoicing all over the world—the old "daft days" even of sober, austere Scotland. Jenny and Menie, in the kitchen, were looking forward to that Handsel Monday which is the Whit Monday of country servants, and the family gathering of the peasantry in Scotland. First footing and New Year's gifts were lighting up the servant girls' imaginations. The former may be safely looked upon as over with Miss Sandys and Miss West, but they were not without visions of New Year's gifts—the useful, considerate New Year's gifts of mature ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... taxes and the new levies of soldiers are driving the people to despair and many are running away from the land, which will no longer feed them after paying all exactions, to join the Bedaween in the desert, which is just as if our peasantry turned gipsies. A man from Dishne visited me: the people there want me to settle in their village and offer me a voluntary corvee if I will buy land, so many men to work for me two days a month each, I haven't a conception why. It is a place about fifty ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... staff and eyed the group, would have made a subject worthy of the pencil of a Landseer. She was wrapped in an old red cloak, with a large hood, and in her ears she wore a pair of long gold-dropped earrings, similar to what one sees among the Norman peasantry—the gift, as I afterwards learned, of a drowned lover. After scrutinising us for a second or two, during which time a large black cat kept walking to and fro, purring and rubbing itself against her, she held back the door and beckoned us to enter. The little place was cleanly swept up, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... disguise of Danes. He then told the count that Edmund intended to reconnoitre the place alone, and that he hoped he and his people would attack the town, while the Saxons in their galley made an assault from the sea. The count replied that the peasantry could not be induced to take ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... 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 hundreds of these men to New England. The leaders were, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... uncommon abilities, of which, however, there is abundant evidence in her drawings and groups of modeled figures, and in the five volumes of charming stories called "Tales of a Chaperon," and "Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry," which were not published with her name but simply as edited by Lady Dacre, to whom their authorship was, I think, generally attributed. The mental gifts of Lady Dacre appear to be heirlooms, for they have been inherited for ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the wars are over, The spring is come; The bride and her lover Have sought their home: They are happy, and we rejoice; Let their hearts have an echo from every voice! [Exeunt the Peasantry, singing. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... successful, would have seemed to him at his age and at that period—twenty years back—too presumptuous to be attempted, at any rate till he had better learnt his ground. How his system would have succeeded, we cannot tell. The nature of the peasantry of the county he had to deal with is, to be quick-witted, argumentative, and ready of retort; open to religious impressions, but with much of self-opinion and conceit, and not much reverence, and often less conscientious in matters of honesty and morality than denser rustics of less apparent ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... (though I know better, having seen lusty troopers and porters, without art or manners, accepted by fashion as principal tenors at that institution during the long interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let us remember that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry, and that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable of a famous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether England is so poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to the centre of Europe to ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... hospitably received by a farmer in the forest, who harnessed his work-horses to their carriage. Thence they went on to their own Chateau d'Eu. The danger to which during this journey they were exposed arose, not from the new Government at Paris, but from the excited state of the peasantry. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... tales, although he would declare they were true ones and was always careful to point them with an excellent moral, dealt largely with the old Scottish fairy folk, and with the many superstitions handed down from generation to generation amongst the peasantry. ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... you,' said his lordship, 'that the police in that barbarous district are as superstitious as the peasantry. I, myself, told the chief constable my theory, and for six weeks he has been trying to run down the miscreants, who, I am sure, are making a rendezvous of the castle. Would you believe it, sir, that the constabulary, after a few nights' experience in the castle, ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... a revolution has commenced, it is certain to widen out. The peasantry are, everywhere, fanatically hostile to foreigners. Attacks have been made upon these in various country districts; and, should Arabi be triumphant, the position of Christians will become very precarious. Matters are evidently seen in that light in England; for I heard today, at ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... when the same enthusiastic spirit accompanied his progress. "Every town and village was crowded. The sacred emblem of the arch, with flowers and branches of trees, with happy devices, prevailed everywhere. The peasantry all well dressed." Subsequently, a curious incident occurred. "Some hundreds of miners from the mountains came to serenade their king. They are a particular race of Saxon origin, and for centuries have preserved ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... proceeded a lovely and pleasing picture met his astonished gaze. In the midst of the grassplot near which he was stood a great white cow, one of those splendid creatures that are only seen on Dutch pastures. A fine-looking maid, dressed in the national costume of the Dutch peasantry, with the gold-edged cap over the full, luxuriant hair that fell in long braids down her back, sat on a stool beside the cow, and was busied in milking. In melodious, regular cadence the steaming milk flowed over her rosy hands down into the white ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... however, accomplished nothing. Glendower, with his following, took refuge among the forests of Snowdon; and the English army marched along the north coast, putting to the sword a few bands of peasantry, who ventured to oppose them; crossed to the Isle of Anglesey and, entering the Franciscan monastery of Llanfaes, slew some of the monks and carried the rest to England, and established a community of English monks in the convent. This was done because ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... we recollect aright), that there was no reason why independence should not be established at once, seeing that the two things needed already existed in the Philippines, to-wit, the governed in the shape of the peasantry of the fields, and the governors among the gente fina, the gente ilustrada (the superior classes) of Manila. However this may be, a native newspaper of Manila, distinguished by its hostility to ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... sharp-eyed picked up gun-flints and brass buttons that had been dropped among those very trees by the marauding soldiery of King George III. of tyrannical memory. There was no deer there when I was a boy. Deer go naturally with a hardy peasantry, and not naturally, perhaps, but artificially, with the rich and great. But deer cannot coexist with a population composed of what we call "People of Moderate Means." It is not in the eternal fitness of things that ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... of Venus the worship of Ishtar-Ashtaroth is by no means obsolete. The Metawali heretics, a people of Persian descent and Shiite tenets, and the peasantry of "Bilad B'sharrah," which I would derive from Bayt Ashirah, still pilgrimage to the ruins and address their vows to the Sayyidat al-Kabirah, the Great Lady. Orthodox Moslems accuse them of abominable orgies and point to the lamps and rags which they suspend to a tree entitled Shajarat ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... rose into prominence as a predatory power, which depended for its stability upon those productive countries which it was able to conquer and hold in sway. It never had a numerous peasantry, and such as it had ultimately vanished, for the kings pursued the short-sighted policy of colonizing districts on the borders of their empire with their loyal subjects, and settling aliens in the heart of the homeland, where they were controlled ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... united. The Scotch people loved too well their ancient liberties to submit quietly to this extinguishment of their national independence. Under the inspiration and lead of the famous Sir William Wallace, an outlaw knight, all the Lowlands were soon in determined revolt. It was chiefly from the peasantry that the patriot hero drew his followers. Wallace gained some successes, but at length was betrayed into Edward's hands. He was condemned to death as a traitor, and his head, garlanded with a crown of laurel, was exposed on London Bridge (1305). The romantic life of Wallace, his patriotic ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Trinity College, Dublin, in the event of the rising proving successful. Pearse was not even an Irishman, being the son of an English convert to Catholicism who had emigrated to Ireland, but he was an enthusiastic Gaelic scholar, and there was nothing he loved better than wandering among the peasantry of Galway and Connemara, while in his own establishment all the servants ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... with most of the officers and more than sixteen hundred men. All their artillery, ammunition, horses, etc., were captured, and a very small portion of the army escaped. Some of these fled before the battle was decided, but many of them were taken by the peasantry of the surrounding country and brought in as prisoners. The loss of the patriots was incredibly small,—only ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... or working-classes, rose in 1378 and demanded higher wages. They had been grievously oppressed by the nobles, and were encouraged by a general spirit of revolt which affected the peasantry of Europe. They were strong enough in Florence to set up a new government with one of their own rank as chief magistrate. But democracy did not enjoy a lengthy rule and the rich merchant-class came into power. Such families as the Albizzi ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... of the President of the French Republic are an epitome of the character and the military record of Joffre. He is representative of the real France, not the France of Paris and scandals. He is of the peasantry, and he and his kind, men of character, brought about the glorious ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... another thing to be remembered, and that is—the enormous and the tragical influence of habit in dulling the mirror of our souls, on which our deeds are reflected in their true image. There are places in Europe where the peasantry have become so accustomed to minute and constantly repeated doses of arsenic that it is actually a minister of health to them, and what would poison you is food for them. We all know that we may sit in a hall like this, packed full and steaming, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that all the peasantry for ten leagues around were under arms, and that the Baron d'Escorval was the ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... 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; ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... taking a circuit of some distance, and a third, a narrow, unfrequented path, entering into a dark forest. Into this wood the boy had never been allowed to enter, from the evil name it had acquired in the traditions of the peasantry. Some said that robbers haunted its deep recesses, for travellers had entered it, notwithstanding all the entreaties of those who would have detained them, but had never been seen again; in fact, none had ever been known to ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... but ruin and devastation. It is true that with respect to grandeur, or even beauty, the scenery through which we now travelled was not to be compared with the sublime passes of the Pyrenees, or with many spots which we had beheld; but in truth, a hamlet uninjured and tenanted by its own rude peasantry, a field of Indian corn exhibiting no wasteful track of foragers, nay, a single cottage with its flowers and evergreens budding around it, was at this a more welcome object to our eyes than the wildest mountains or most romantic valleys displaying no habitations except white tents ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... the Cretan peasantry in 1820. Two thousand years before, Apollodorus had told much the same story of Peleus and Thetis (Bibliotheca, iii. 13). The chief difference is that it was Thetis who placed her son on the fire, to make him immortal, and Peleus who cried out. The Tayl of the yong Tamlene is ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... explanation of the writer's wish to spend some time in the west of Ireland. Theophilus Lovaway had managed, in the middle of his professional reading, to study the literature of the Irish Renaissance. He had fallen deeply in love with the spirit of the Celtic peasantry. He described at some length what he thought that spirit was. "Tuned to the spiritual" was one of the phrases he used. "Desire-compelling, with the elusiveness of the rainbow's end," was another. Dr. Farelly grew despondent. If Theophilus expected life in Dunailin to be in the least like one of ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... calico 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; taking them off, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... The peasantry, who had before possessed liberty of movement, were by him bound as serfs to the soil. Thousands of them fled, and an insupportable inquisition was established, as hateful to the landowners as to the serfs. All this was made worse by famine and pestilence, which ravaged Russia for three years. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... philosophical. They should only be used for purposes of parade, or to acquire greater power over a difficult team, or loosely to keep cart-horses "out of mischief." Sir Francis's observations are also true of the harness used by the peasantry of Nassau which he describes, but this arises from the poverty, not the philosophy of the peasants; those among them, who have money enough to buy smart harness have the most elaborate bearing-reins that I have ever seen. One, a chain, from the lower part of the collar, which binds the ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... would itself set up this organisation, and maintained this intention with the greatest stubbornness. But the authority in the country had been destroyed by the Revolution, and then by the Bolshevist invasion; the peasantry turned Radical, and the estates were occupied by revolutionaries and cut up. The power of the Government, then, in respect of collecting supplies of grain, was altogether inadequate; on the other hand, however, it was still sufficient (as some actual instances proved) to place serious, ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... dreamed himself into his impossible world of theory and fantasy. I fell to thinking busily about him during the first part of the ascent, and convinced myself, as usual, that, but for his generosity to the poor, and his benign aspect, the peasantry must undoubtedly have regarded him as a wizard who speculated in souls and had dark dealings with the world ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... have I ever seen a priesthood at once so devoted and high-minded in all the concerns the home life of their people, as in French Canada. A land without poverty and yet without riches, French Canada stands alone, too well educated to have a peasantry, too poor to have an aristocracy; as though in her the ancient prayer had been answered "Give me neither poverty nor riches, but feed me with food convenient for me." And it is of the habitant of Quebec, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in one branch of archaeology. Let those who are interested in the history of Religion consider what a treasure we should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and castles; and if every building destroyed in the French ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... tales in groups. They acquired their collective title, La Comedie Humaine, in 1842. He would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, ... the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the steamers go outside, which lengthens the passage considerably. A large West Indiaman, with a cargo of rum, &c., was lost a few years ago on a rock near Porthcawl, called the Tusca, which disappears at high-water; and a dreadful scene of riot occurred amongst the peasantry along shore in consequence. The coast near Porthcawl appears at Swansea to be the eastern extremity of the bay; but the bluff point called the Nass, about eight miles farther, is so in reality. The coast onwards past the Nass point is almost perpendicular, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... to overflowing with those crowded out of other callings. Those who follow them will do so only because the monopolized occupations are closed to them. Thus will our farming population degenerate into a peasantry more miserable than that of Europe, and our laborers be ground down to a level lower than they have yet known. Is there a probability that such a state of affairs will come to pass? There might be if the public were not keenly alive to the curse of monopoly. But as it is, the greater ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... illustrating the tendency to divide time by natural phenomena and natural events, it may be noticed that even by our own peasantry the definite divisions of months and years are but little used; and that they habitually refer to occurrences as "before sheep-shearing," or "after harvest," or "about the time when the squire died." It ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... international finance, and that the forces created by British taxpayers for the defence of their country's honour, are used for the sordid purpose of wringing interest for a set of money-grubbers in the City, out of a poor and down-trodden peasantry overburdened by the exactions and extortions of their rulers. Mr. Brailsford, of course, puts his case much better than I can, in any brief summary of his views. He has earned and won the highest respect by his power ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... good history, we shall find that Warham was one of the leaders of that despondent party which will always have its antitype in England. Have we, too, not heard within the last seven years similar prophecies of desolation, mourning, and woe—of the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the peasantry starving under the horrors of free trade, noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax? Even such a prophet seems Warham to have been—of all people in that day, one of the last whom one would have asked for ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... descriptions of 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
... very small body of men who were police, rather than soldiers, there was no force permanently kept up. Every man was expected to know something of military duty, and all were able to build stockades. From the fact that the flesh of wild fowl formed one of the principal articles of food, the peasantry throughout the country were all accustomed to the use of the gun, and were ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... other tribes, which I consider part of the great Pelasgic family, were expelled from Boeotia by Thracian hordes. [They afterward returned in the time of the Dorian emigration.] Some of the population must, however, have remained—the peasantry of the land; and in Hesiod we probably possess the national poetry, and arrive at the national religion, of the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of armed men to suppress this audacity in the country parts, and to disperse this rustic assembly. In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasantry and many other rebels were forthwith arrested; their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent home thus mutilated to deter their fellows from such enterprises, and to render them more prudent, for fear of worse. After this experience, the peasants gave up their ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... had no salt, the long distance it had to be teamed being the excuse given for the unpardonable want of it. This hard tack is doing one good thing: it is giving the men white teeth; you can tell an old soldier by his polished ivory; his teeth approach the appearance of the Italian and Swiss peasantry, who also chew hard bread. Reader, did you ever try to work your way through the hard loaf of the peasant's fare? The army regulations require tooth brushes for the men; it is supposed that the proper use keeps off ague and disease; still many regiments were without ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life. But it could not suffice ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... pied-a-terre. Where the country 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 weekly ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... whether his qualities in this regard will for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who, when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. And for their lords and governors, who, until ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... detachment commanded by M. de Goguelat. This detachment was punctually stationed upon the spot fixed on, with orders to wait there for the arrival of certain treasure, which it was to escort; but the peasantry of the neighbourhood, alarmed at the sight of this body of troops, came armed with staves, and asked several questions, which manifested their anxiety. M. de Goguelat, fearful of causing a riot, and not finding the carriage ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... category can give us most interesting and valuable information about quaint little belated cities; about backward country folk, kindly or the reverse, who show a mixture of the ideas of savagery with the ideas of an ancient peasantry; and about rough old highways of travel which in comfort do not differ much from those of mediaeval Europe. The travellers who go up or down the highway rivers that have been travelled for from one to four hundred years—rivers like the Paraguay and Parana, the Amazon, the Tapajos, the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering garlands about ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... mounted grenadiers, chasseurs, hussars and dragoons, had easily attained a position in front of the van of the army commanded by Marmont, which had rested a few hours at St. Prix, where the road crossed the Petit Morin on a bridge. His requisition on the peasantry had been honored, and great numbers of fresh, vigorous draft horses had been brought in from all sides. There was not much speed to be got out of these farm animals, to be sure, but they were of prodigious strength. The ordinary gun teams were relieved, and numbers ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... nearly the whole of France (Proper), Napoleon's name was still an unfailing talisman, appealing as it did to the two strongest instincts of the Celt, the clinging to the soil and the passion for heroic enterprise. Thus it came about that the peasantry gave up their sons to be "food for cannon" with the same docility that was shown by soldiers who sank death-stricken into a snowy bed with no word of reproach to the author of their miseries. A like obsequiousness was shown by the officials and legislators of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... written at least "Childe Harold." There is the case of a living publisher (not either of the brothers Murray) whose presence at his country chateau is indicated to the surrounding nobility, gentry, and peasantry by the unfurling of the Royal standard over ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... on the sixth of December, 1732. His mother died a few days later, and he was left dependent on his distressed grandfather. The child was early sent to the village school, where he learned his letters on the same bench with the sons of the peasantry. Nor did anything in his garb or fare indicate that his life was to take a widely different course from that of the young rustics with whom he studied and played. But no cloud could overcast the dawn of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fiction maintained by Henry, that he was marching in a friendly country; plunder was strictly forbidden, and everything was to be paid for; but unfortunately, the peasantry on his way never realized this, and the soldiery often took care they should not. Therefore, when the advanced guard came to the village that had been marked out for their halt, instead of finding provisions and forage to be purchased, they met with only bare walls, and a ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, two pleasant ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... indications of 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 ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... course, the hill rises abruptly; and here were hundreds of persons of both sexes, in an excellent position to see the running, and to impart a pretty effect to the scene. A large number of peasantry were present, dressed in their peculiar costume, and taking great interest in the whole matter. Both men and women wear a little blue cap lined with scarlet, so small that one wonders how it sticks on the head. In shape it is like an inverted funnel, running up to a sharp ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... 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, Abelard ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... however, was the cheerfulness of the peasantry. At the little roadside stations the people crowded around the trains and ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction ensued. In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt worse than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the absence from his teaching of any tangible system of church government; ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... along the belt of that march the things that were the sacrament of civilization had gone. Rheims was possessed, the village churches of the "Island of France" and of Artois were ruins or desolations. The peasantry already knew the destruction of something more than such material things, the end of a certain social pact which war in Christendom had spared. They had been massacred in droves, with no purpose save that of terror; they had been netted in droves, ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... used by the peasantry both in ploughing and in tempering the mud in the wet paddi fields before sowing the rice; and when the harvest is reaped they "tread out the corn," after the immemorial custom of the East. The wealth of the native chiefs and landed proprietors frequently ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... up, explosive; comparable not to victorious thunder. Comparable, say rather, to the first stirring of an Alpine Avalanche; which, once stir it, as here at Sainte-Menehould, will spread,—all round, and on and on, as far as Stenai; thundering with wild ruin, till Patriot Villagers, Peasantry, Military Escorts, new Berline and Royalty are down,—jumbling ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... opportunities of intercolonial travel are frequent and common. Hence the Anglo-Australian labourer without, on the one hand, the sharpened eagerness which marks his Transatlantic cousin, has yet an air of independence and intelligence, combined with a natural grace of movement, unknown to the peasantry ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... These cults, paid to less personally conceived spirits, were of older standing and no doubt had deeper roots in the popular mind. Fundamentally associated with agricultural and pastoral life, they have in many cases been preserved by the most conservative element in the population, the peasantry. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Affairs and four members nominated by the Emperor, who sit in St. Petersburg. The Emperor has the veto power over any act of theirs. That National Assembly consists of representatives of the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasantry, the consent of all of whom must be obtained to any measure that makes a change in the constitution or imposes taxes. But the royal veto ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... condition of merit Mr. O'Connell himself had translated his claim to a very distinct one founded upon a clear, known, absolute attempt to coerce the Government into passive collusion with prospective treason. This attempt, said the peasantry, will the Government stand, or will it not? 'Why, then,' replied the Government, on the 17th of October, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... advanced, the peasantry and fishermen, attracted by curiosity and encouraged by the peaceable demeanour of the debarkers, drew nearer, and mingled ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... title was the name of an unjustly confiscated estate, is almost inconceivable. {225} Few of the foremost men in power, except Sir George Mackenzie and Claverhouse, were free from personal profligacy of every sort. Claverhouse has left on record his aversion to severities against the peasantry; he was for prosecuting such gentry as the Dalrymples. As constable of Dundee he refused to inflict capital punishment on petty offenders, and Mackenzie went as far as he dared in opposing the ferocities of the inquisition of witches. But in cases of alleged treason ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... the great movements 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. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 was some centuries ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... of farming are not the best, and an acre of land produces scarcely one-third as much as the same area is made to yield in other states. The farming class, or peasantry, was in a condition of serfdom until within a few years. Poverty unfits them to compete with farmers of western Europe; moreover, the laws of land ownership and tenure also ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... failure; the peasantry did not join as was expected, and on the 8th of September General Humbert surrendered ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... the winter 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, and ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... The same tale, a series of incidents and plot, with the monstrous element modified, which survived in the oral traditions of illiterate peasantry. ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... opinion is not manufactured solely in the reverberating furnace of a city, fickleness ceases to characterise democracy; and, in fact, is not found in Switzerland, or the United States, nor in France so far as politics, depend upon the peasantry. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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 their neighbours; and ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... language of their own, and a literature rich in folk-lore and songs. Of a strong religious temperament, they embraced Christianity late (13th century), and still retain many pagan superstitions; formerly serfs, they are now a humble peasantry engaged in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... delightful it would be to write a pamphlet together" on this mighty agricultural interest; and then came a panegyric on the character of country gentlemen, and English yeomen, and the importance of keeping up the old English spirit in the peasantry, &c. &c. &c. &c.; and then, when Vivian had led Mr. Toad to deliver a splendid and patriotic oration on this point, he "just remembered (quite apropos to the sentiments which Mr. Toad had just delivered, and which, he did not hesitate to say, 'did equal honour to his ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... distinct and separate part of the population. 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. This ...
— Japan • David Murray
... submission and occasional insurrection of the common people, whom the governing class despised while subsisting on the products of their labor, as a tree draws its nutriment from the base soil above which it proudly rises. Insurrections of the peasantry took place at times, we have said, though, as a rule, nothing was gained by them but blows and bloodshed. We have described such outbreaks in England. France had its share of them, all of which were speedily and cruelly suppressed. It was not by armed insurrection that ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... persons were exempted from the draft. This immunity covered not only the sons of aged parents who were dependent on them for support, but privileged persons of all sorts, from apothecaries to advocates, gentlemen and their servants and game-keepers. The burden was thus thrown entirely on the poorer peasantry.[Footnote: Broc, i. 117; Babeau, Le ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... them; that is, I made the ricks by day, and I frequently thatched them by night, or at least before the common labourers came to work in the morning. I was never tired of labour and active exertions; and at this period, the labourers possessed all the strength and vigour of the English peasantry of former days. Notwithstanding they began to feel the effects of war and to suffer some privations, in consequence of the rise of price in provisions, caused by the increase of taxation, they had yet a barrel of good beer to go to in hay-making and harvest ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... position, so that I did not get tired. That evening, he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... Peter. They consisted in lands, villages, and 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 ...
— 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
... uncouth apparition seen in a ball-room. Her grey petticoat exhibited her bare feet; her short upper gown, that graceful and picturesque attire of the Scottish peasantry, was thrown carelessly over her shoulders; her mutch was put on awry, and from under its immense border her face appeared, as white almost as the cap itself. She walked right into the centre of the floor, laid her heavy hand ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... any student of Norman history to walk over the ground, Wace in hand, taking in the graphic description of the honest rhymer, as clear and accurate as usual in his topographical details. And it is pleasant to find how well the events of the day are still remembered by the peasantry of the neighbourhood. There is no fear, as there is said to be in the neighbourhood of Worcester, of an inquirer after the field of battle being taken to see the scene of a battle between some local Sayers and Heenan. The Norman of every rank, when let alone by Frenchmen, is a born antiquary, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... tastes. He took interest in gypsies and horses and prize fighters and a hundred other entertaining matters, and so he despised the literary class, which cared for none of these things. But unhappily for his fame the literary class has had the final word; it has revealed all the gossip of a gossiping peasantry, and it has done its best to present the recluse of Oulton in a disagreeable light. Fortunately for Borrow, who kept the bores at bay and contented himself with but few friends, there were at least two who survived him to bear ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... the Bernese Oberland. Thus western or Romand Switzerland preserves a character definitely apart from the eastern, and this barrier across the Bernese valley, unpassed for a thousand years, still divides the German from the Romand speaking peasantry. To the north and west lies Gruyere, greenest of pastoral countries, uniquely set in a ring of azure heights, where like a lost Provence, the Romand spirit has preserved its eternal youthfulness and charm. Greatly loved by all the Swiss, its annals piously preserved by ancient chroniclers, this ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... ecclesiastical and 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 enable the patrons of both to mould ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... who are content with their lot, and are careful and diligent in their work, who love labor better than idleness, and act sincerely and faithfully, and at the same time live a Christian life. I have now and then talked with those belonging to the peasantry and common people, who while living in the world believed in God and did what was just and right in their occupations. Since they had an affection for knowing truth they inquired about charity and about faith, having heard in this world much about faith and in the ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg |
