"Black death" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... survey of the results of the Black Death, Matteo notices not only the diminution of the population, but the alteration in public morality, the displacement of property, the increase in prices, the diminution of labor, and the multiplication of lawsuits, which were the consequences direct or indirect of the frightful mortality. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... congenial companion the old man desired. Why shouldn't he go and live with Nicolovius in his new home, the home of perfect quiet and immunity from boarders? And unbroken leisure, too, for of course Nicolovius would bear all expenses, and he himself would fly from all remunerative work as from the Black Death. Nay more, the old chap would very likely be willing to pay him a salary for his society, or at least, see that he was kept well supplied with everything he needed—books to demolish like this one ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... shone and the herdsmen could see the nodding white cotton-grass, the asphodel, and the golden kingcups that hid the black death-traps of the pitiless marshes, they had no fear of Pan. Nor in the daytime, when in the woods the sunbeams played amongst the trees and the birds sang of Spring and of love, and the syrinx sent an echo from far away that made the little silver birches ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... Farming, we are taught, Was introduced 'bout twelve-nought-nought; The Feudal system's weakened and The Tenants 'usufruct' the land. On various counts the serfs go free And work for wages (Edward Three). The Black Death and the foreign wars In labour ranks commotion cause; Strikes and craftsmen's combination Then arise among the nation; These movements preached by one John Ball, Who, born ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... stations in life, laying out alike royalty or the vagrant, the curled-haired and slashed-doubleted knight, or the tonsured monk, we must conclude that syphilis has caused more families to become extinct than any ordinary plague, black death, or cholera epidemic. Without wishing to enter into a history of syphilis, it is not outside of the province of this book to allude to its frequency ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... should marry into the House of Valois to render assassination a Gallic crime. It would have existed in France all the same, had she never been born. It was a moral plague that ran over Europe, as the Black Death made the same tour a couple of hundred years earlier. Poltrot killed Francis, Duke of Guise, the greatest man of a great race. Henry, Duke of Guise, Francis's son, was concerned in a plot to murder the Admiral Coligny, shortly before the St. Bartholomew, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... enforce them, and once slackened could never be enforced again. The laborer would be a slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his shackles. There was much to do and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later which left the English peasant the freest ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered, began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation one-third of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Ojibway was taunting him, that the torture had begun, that Tandakora intended to contrast the magnificent world from which he intended to send him with the black death that awaited him so soon. But the dauntless youth ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... some questions in an understandable language; but he died without uttering a sound, without moving a limb, without twitching a muscle. Only in the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper we could not hear, he frowned heavily, and that frown gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably sombre, brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... and dread, 1348, the Black Death fell upon England. Never before had so frightful a calamity been known; never since has it been equalled. Men died by millions. All Europe had been swept by the plague, as by a besom of destruction, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Night-thoughts,—grown audible to us! They Three are become audible: but the other 'Thousand and Eighty-nine, of whom Two Hundred and Two were Priests,' who also had Night-thoughts, remain inaudible; choked for ever in black Death. Heard only of President Chepy and the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... from the law. Nay, once, on his annual return from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed on his way along the streets of the great town literally scattering the seeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag was empty. And within seven days the "black death" was there, reaping its thousands. As a wise man declared, he who can best cure disease can also ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Perhaps the feature of this old system that bears most directly on the question of allotments was the treatment of the waste of the manor. The lord, like his tenants, was limited by custom as regards the number of beasts he could graze on it. After the havoc of the Black Death in 1349, many changes were necessitated by the scarcity and dearness of labour. It became less unusual for land to be let and for money payment to be accepted instead of services. There was a great demand for wool, and to conduct sheep-farming ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and then he lay And tossed, unrestful, on the straw, Impatient for the coming day,— Working like one who feels, perchance, That, ere the longed-for goal be won, Ere Beauty bare her perfect breast, Black Death may pluck him from the sun. At intervals the busy brook, Turning the mill-wheel, caught his ear; And through the grating of the cell He saw the honeysuckles peer; And knew't was summer, that the sheep In golden pastures lay asleep; And felt, that, somehow, God was ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with my heart in my mouth at the narrowness of my own escape from the rushing black death. Pursuit was impossible. My car was capable of no such burst of speed as his. And then, too, there was a groaning man down in the ravine below. I got out, clambered over the fence, and down in the shrubbery into the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... bade men advance to different developments of organic living forms in every single branch of life, except in the greatest art of all. The Middle Ages had inherited a direct succession of harmonious forms, one rising out of another until the perfection was attained. Then came the Black Death, and the no less fatal scourges of Commercialism and Bureaucracy. Men's thoughts apparently became so riveted upon the grave that they must go back to the art of the dead Romans and the formalism of classical examples to keep breath in their bones at all. And even ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... midst of these calamities, the fearful pestilence swept over France, called the "Black Death." It came from Egypt, possibly from farther east. In Florence three-fifths of the inhabitants perished by it. From Italy it passed over to Provence, and thence moved northward to Paris, spreading destruction in its path. It reached England, and there it ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... form of malaria, contributed to the fall of ancient Greece and Rome. In the fourteenth century 25,000,000 people, one-quarter of the population of Europe, were exterminated by plague, the "Black Death," and in the sixteenth century smallpox depopulated Spanish America. Although these particular diseases have lost much of their power owing to the progress of medical science, we have no right to assume ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... Disease.—Cholera, yellow fever, black death, and smallpox no longer cause people to flee into the wilderness to escape them when they occasionally break out in a town or city. We have learned how to prevent these ailments among people who will obey ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison
... gathering to rise against the poll-groat bailiffs and the lords that would turn them all into villeins again, as their grandfathers had been. And the people was weak and the lords were poor; for many a mother's son had fallen in the war in France in the old king's time, and the Black Death had slain a many; so that the lords had bethought them: "We are growing poorer, and these upland-bred villeins are growing richer, and the guilds of craft are waxing in the towns, and soon what will there be left for us who cannot weave and will ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... advanced city by city, seaport by seaport, sweeping down multitudes before it; nor had science yet discovered how to encounter or forestall it. We heard of it in a helpless sort of way, as if it had been the plague or the Black Death, and thought of ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the infantry who formed his line at Crecy in 1346, and the archers of Crecy were not exactly the sort of men who take kindly to eviction, to say nothing of slavery. As no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349, all went well until after Crecy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged England, and so many laborers died that the cost of farming property by hired hands exceeded the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then the landlords, under the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice, tried coercion. Their first experiment ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... cannot breathe this air, and so you will excuse me from your company. Jean, you will come with your mother and stay with me till this plague has left the house, for I count a visit of Claverhouse worse than leprosy or the black death." ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... custom in early times to attempt to regulate prices; both of wages and commodities. The first Statute of Laborers dates from 1349. Its history was economic. They had had a great plague in England known as the Black Death; and it had carried off a vast number of people, especially the laboring people. There was naturally great demand for workers. Laborers were very scarce. It is estimated that one-third of the entire ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... a saying in Scotland: "He who eats of the Dulse of Guerdie, and drinks of the wells Kindingie, will escape all maladies except black death." This marine weed contains within its cellular structure much iodine, which makes it a specific remedy for scrofulous ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Bulgarian, Gregory Tsamblak, to the metropolitan see of Kiev (1425) by Vitovt, grand-duke of Lithuania; the immediate political consequence of which was the weakening of the hold of Muscovy on the south-western Russian states. During Basil's reign a terrible visitation of the "Black Death" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... a pin into your leg? Well, war and peace have driven more than one spike into the hide of humanity; and of course she howls and dances with the pain. It's just a natural reflex action. Why, they had a fox-trot epidemic just like this after the Black Death in the fourteenth century; only then they ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... These, then, were the voices of Italy and Austria speaking the devilish tongue of the final alternative. Cannon, rockets, musketry, and now the run of drums, now the ring of bugles, now the tramp of horses, and the field was like a landslip. A joyful bright black death-wine seemed to pour from the bugles all about. The women strained their senses to hear and see; they could realize nothing of a reality so absolute; their feelings were shattered, and crowded over them in patches;—horror, glory, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... accumulations of ice on the coast, which prevented intercommunication between them and Iceland, and cut off their chief food supplies. They may also have been decimated through the great pestilence called the Black Death, which prevailed in 1349, especially in the northern countries; while, if any remained, they are supposed to have been killed by the Esquimos, or Skraelings, as they were then called, and who were a far more powerful race than ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... enough, John; indeed, I could not desire it to do better. As soon as it is fairly healed I ought to join Prince Rupert again; but in truth I do not wish to go, for I would fain see this terrible Plague come to an end before I leave; for never since the days of the Black Death, hundreds of years ago, was there so strange and terrible a malady ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... smote each jinn's ear, Black Dragons swore beneath their breath And murdered all rebellious Lords; Strong hands that knew each axe's trust, Escutcheons that all princes fear, Hurl'd swift destruction and black death. Where Titans storm'd a Monarch's throne, There sleeps a Ruler carved in stone; Where vultures guard a serpent's home, A quartered warrior tells its tale. Perturbed at dews that drip from dome As wattling apes their horrors groan, The witch forsakes each glozing gnome, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... various ordinances fixing wages from the time of the Black Death onwards, that labour troubles were acute in France as well as in England at the end of the fourteenth century; and the Menagier's advice throws an interesting sidelight on ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... countenance only by hypocrisy. When people were ashamed of sanitary problems, and refused to face them, leaving them to solve themselves clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the solution arrived at was the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex problems has solved itself by an even worse plague than the Black Death; and the remedy for that is not Salvarsan, but sound moral hygiene, the first foundation of which is the discontinuance of our habit of telling not only the comparatively harmless ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... himself acted as Plushkin's representative! What if these things should reach the Governor-General's ears? He mentioned the matter to one friend and another, and they, in their turn, went white to the lips, for panic spreads faster and is even more destructive, than the dreaded black death. Also, to add to the tchinovniks' troubles, it so befell that just at this juncture there came into the local Governor's hands two documents of great importance. The first of them contained advices that, according ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... spear, and smote the shield of the son of Priam, equal on all sides; and through the glittering shield went the impetuous spear, and was stuck firmly into the deftly-wrought corslet: and the spear pierced right through his soft tunic beside the flank: but he bent sideways, and evaded black death. Next the son of Atreus having drawn his silver-studded sword, raising it, struck the cone[161] of his helmet, but it fell from his hand shivered round about into three or four pieces. And the son of Atreus groaned aloud, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... automatons, nodding and smoking by the doorway. Beyond them, across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... linen corslet, the two sons of Merops of Perkote, that beyond all men knew soothsaying, and would have hindered his children marching to murderous war. But they gave him no heed, for the fates of black death led ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... the keys with ropes round their necks, to submit themselves to him. Six offered themselves, but their lives were spared, and they were honourably treated. Edward expelled all the French, and made Calais an English settlement. A truce followed, chiefly in consequence of the ravages of the Black Death, which swept off multitudes throughout Europe, a pestilence apparently bred by filth, famine, and all the miseries of war and lawlessness, but which spared no ranks. It had scarcely ceased before Philip died, in 1350. His son, John, was soon involved in ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... astern!" roared Black, forgetting himself, but instantly ringing the bell, and the nameless ship moved backwards, faster and yet faster. But the black death-bearer followed her, as a shark follows a death-ship; we seemed even to have backed into its course—it came on as though to strike ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite; for of all diseases known to men it is the deadliest—by far the deadliest. "Fifty-two fresh cases—all fatal." It is the Black Death alone that slays like that. We can all imagine, after a fashion, the desolation of a plague-stricken city, and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of wailing, marking the passing of funerals, here and there and yonder, but I suppose it is not possible for us to realize ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... have coped with it. But from a score of plagues no creature was immune. The man who escaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever. The man who was immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he were immune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague, swept him away. For it was these bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West, that had come down upon China in the ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... difficulty the ground-plan of many houses under the short turf. The early writers do not mention Cottam, and so far I have come upon no explanation for the wiping out of this village. Possibly its extinction was due to the Black Death in 1349. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... overhead!) Lock tight the windows, bar the door! Have done with laughter, sing no more, For fear lays hand upon the throat. (Beneath the stars the airmen float.) Hush, hush, my babe, lest fiends that fly Shall come to still your hunger cry. Let grief not speak its tale aloud! (Black death is racing with a cloud.) Through heav'n's eternal window panes, Far, far above the swift air lanes, God's starlight shines forever more. (How restless glide ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... Black Death, which reduced the number to eight, there are said to have sometimes been ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... knocked up and down this rotten old world all my life, a rolling stone with never enough to bless myself with. And I've gone, at the end, on this wild-goose chase of yours, that's led you and me and all of us to a black death here in the bottom of a damned, fantastic, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... humanity. But the vast conflagration of to-day must not conceal from our eyes the great central fact that war is diminishing, and will one day disappear as completely as the mediaeval scourge of the Black Death. To reach this consummation all the best humanising and civilising energies of mankind will ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... gathering across the sun pours quick destruction over a parterre of flowers, black horror swallowed up Gruyere. The plague called the Black Death, born in the Levant and rushing like a destroying flood with terrifying rapidity over the borders of Switzerland, penetrated even into the mountain-encircled country of Count Pierre. The devils and evil spirits of the caverns and the forests seemed now in the imagination of the Celtic people ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... yet above the juvenile age of its growth, which is the age of feebleness and folly, disease and crime. The imperfect organism of childhood is incapable of resisting either temptation or disease. The twenty-five millions destroyed by the black death, in the fourteenth century, and the countless millions destroyed by war in all centuries, including the present, show how little we have advanced beyond the spirit of savage life. The ferocity of nations is as much the product of their cerebral organization, as the ferocity ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... who came in search of them in 1828, believes that they were carried off bodily by the English after the ravages of the "black death" in England, to repair the waste of human life, citing a treaty of 1433 in which England was charged with abducting Danish subjects for that end. Another theory is that the Frisian king Zichmni carried them off captive. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... English history is more crowded with great events than that of the reign of Edward III. Cressy and Poitiers; the destruction of the Spanish fleet; the plague of the Black Death; the Jacquerie rising; these are treated by the author in "St. George for England." The hero of the story, although of good family, begins life as a London apprentice, but after countless adventures and perils becomes by valor and ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... parlour hearth, seeing that Luckie Dods would make the kitchen too hot for the paist—and so, if Mr. Tirl finds a setter more fitter for his purpose than a pointer, by Cot, I know no law against it, else may I never die the black death." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Mittelalter, at a meeting of the Gesellschaft fuer Soziale Medizin, May 25, 1905), that the modern movement of organized sanitation began. In the thirteenth century the great Italian cities (like Florence and Pistoja) possessed Codici Sanitarii; but they were not carried out, and when the Black Death reached Florence in 1348, it found the city altogether unprepared. It was Venice which, in the same year, first initiated vigorous State sanitation. Disinfection was first ordained by Gian Visconti, in Milan, in 1399. The first quarantine station of which we ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... themselves to hurt their lord and master man,"[2] unless man first poisoned himself with sin; and when, in consequence of this ignorance and this false philosophy, and the inevitable neglect attendant upon them, those fearful plagues known as "the Black Death" could, almost without notice, sweep down upon a country, and decimate its inhabitants—it is not wonderful that these terrible scourges were attributed to the malevolence ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... growth of wealth in the trading classes was fast bringing about a social revolution which tended as strongly as the outrages of the baronage to the profit of the crown. The rise in the price of wool was giving a fresh impulse to the changes in agriculture which had begun with the Black Death and were to go steadily on for a hundred years to come. These changes were the throwing together of the smaller holdings, and the introduction of sheep-farming on an enormous scale. The new wealth of the merchant classes helped on the change. They began to invest ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... three men were concerned at different times in the work. The share of the first of these, Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, being but a slight one, may be briefly dismissed. In 1348-49 a terrible visitation of the black death devastated the country. The bishop, being concerned that many were being interred in unconsecrated ground, purchased three acres of land in West Smithfield outside the city boundaries, known as "no man's land," ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... plague, known as the "Black Death," was the most deadly epidemic ever known. It is believed to have been an aggravated outburst of the Oriental plague, which from the earliest records of history has periodically appeared in Asia and Northern Africa. There had been a visitation of the plague in Europe ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Black Death or the boil-pest, but the English "sweating-sickness." This hitherto unknown disease had first broken out in the same year when the wars of the Roses ended on the field of Bosworth; but it was entirely confined to England, passing neither to Scotland nor ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... are numbered by millions, we are by billions; and that we are made up of far the older and the tougher cells of the two. Except in a few of the most virulent and deadly of fevers, like the famous "Black Death," or bubonic plague, and lock-jaw, or tetanus, ninety-five times out of a hundred when disease germs get into our bodies, it is our bodies that eat up the germs instead of the germs our bodies. Keep away from disease germs all that you reasonably and possibly can; ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... the order, and in 1344 it was further approved by Clement VI. Affiliated societies sprang up in several Tuscan cities; and in 1347, Bernardo Tolomei, at that time General of the Order, held a chapter of its several houses. The next year was the year of the great plague or Black Death. Bernardo bade his brethren leave their seclusion, and go forth on works of mercy among the sick. Some went to Florence, some to Siena, others to the smaller hill-set towns of Tuscany. All were bidden to assemble on the Feast of the Assumption at Siena. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and women accomplished works of pity and holiness, as if they feared the all-powerful God would consume them with fire from heaven."[443] This movement was altogether popular. It broke out again in 1349, in connection with the Black Death. Flagellation for thirty-three and a half days was held to purge from all sin. This was heresy and the flagellants were persecuted. The theory was a purely popular application by the masses of the church doctrine of penance, outside of the church ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... light surrounds this place," said Arden. "It comes from the fires which they burn as though the black death were upon us. Do you hear that groaning?—and there they carry out ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church was corrupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. The social ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the French war had produced a crop of disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availed to retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the social disorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the population was swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up the more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services from villeins which there were not enough villeins ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... died, and the "Black Death," a fearful pestilence, desolated a land already decimated by protracted wars. The valiant old King, after a life of brilliant triumphs, carried a sad and broken heart to the grave, and Richard II., son of the heroic Prince Edward, ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... moral elevation and purport. The scene is laid in Nordhausen, a free city in Thuringia, where the Jews, living, as the deemed, in absolute security and peace, were caught up in the wave of persecution that swept over Europe at that time. Accused of poisoning the wells and causing the pestilence, or black death, as it was called, they ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... unhappy thoughts. You long for death and yet you fear it and wish me to be your companion. But I have less courage than you and even thus accompanied I dare not die. Listen to me, and then reflect if you ought to win me to your project, even if with the over-bearing eloquence of despair you could make black death so inviting that the fair heaven should appear darkness. Listen I entreat you to the words of one who has himself nurtured desperate thoughts, and longed with impatient desire for death, but who has at length trampled the ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... with profits, whether by disease, death, impassable streets, or disabled men. The age of chivalry was also the age of indescribable filth, plague, Black Death, and spotted fever that cost the lives of millions. It would be impossible in the civilized world to duplicate the combination of luxury and filthy, disease-breeding conditions in the midst of which Queen ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... never know How the times away do go; But for us, who wisely see Where the bounds of black death be, Let's live merrily, and thus Gratify ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... The town through its length and breadth was shattered and dilapidated; whole families were homeless and packed like rabbits in hutches; the slaughtered dead, men and beasts, could not be buried quick enough; black death stalked abroad in the guise of what was called hospital typhus—an epidemic fever of some kind. After the French flight, I take it, provisional chief-policeman Wagner had returned to his deputy-registrarship; but his toils were none the lighter for that. He exhausted himself; the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the west coast of Greenland, which were in a very flourishing condition until the middle of the fourteenth century, gradually declined, from the fatal influence of monopoly of trade, by the invasion of the Esquimaux, by the black death which depopulated the north from the year 1347 to 1351, and also by the arrival of a hostile fleet, from what country ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... a prison floor! To him existence was such a game—red life or black death, as the fates ordained. His spirit was contagious, and I found myself smiling through my tears. When he saw his task accomplished, gathering in his coins, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... being unknown, serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the low state of sanitary science, plagues such as those which in the reign of Justinian swept across the civilised world from India to Northern Europe, well nigh depopulating the globe, or the Black Death of 1349, which in England alone swept away more than half the population of the island, were but extreme forms of the destruction of population going on continually as the result of zymotic disease; while wars were ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... shire unvisited by his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not one dead. It is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of historians; but it is at least significant that among all contemporary writers who have made mention of the Black Death—as it has been agreed to call it—the Black Death in the reign of Edward III.—there is little mention of any panic, few ugly tales of desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances of miserable creatures crying that the wells ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... important strategical position of the town in 1260, granted a charter to the townsfolk empowering them to fortify the place with a wall and a moat, but more than a century elapsed before the fortifications were completed. This was partly owing to the Black Death, which left few men in Yarmouth to carry on the work. The walls were built of cut flint and Caen stone, and extended from the north-east tower in St. Nicholas Churchyard, called King Henry's Tower, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... saints, and even to-day there is a yearly festival in her honor. For many years she had lived in a grotto near the city; there, by her godly life and many kind deeds, she had inspired the love and reverence of the whole community. When the pest came in 1150—that awful black death which killed the people by hundreds—they turned to her in their despair and begged her to intercede with them and take away this curse of God, as it was believed to be. Through an entire night, within her grotto, the good Rosalia prayed ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... year 1348, Venice was visited by an earthquake, and this was followed by the plague (the Black Death). In order to complete the roll of the republic's misfortunes in this gloomy year, it may be added that she also lost almost the whole of her Black Sea ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... sanctioned for use in the courts of law; and, as John of Trevisa tells us, has, since the 'furste moreyn' or Great Pestilence of 1349 (which Mrs. Markham has taught nineteenth-century historians to call the 'Black Death'), been introduced into the grammar schools in the translation of Latin exercises, which boys formerly rendered into French. And under these new conditions lexicographical activity at once bursts forth with vigour. Six important vocabularies of the fifteenth ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... lady, though you be younger than I, you have surely heard of the Black Death. Well named was it, for never was pestilence more dire; and the venom was so strong, that the very lips and eyelids grew livid black, and then there was no hope. Little thought of such disease was there, I trow, in kings' houses, and all the fair young lords and ladies, the children ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... O'Kelly, I've heard the Revelly From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore, Hong-Kong and Peshawur, Lucknow and Etawah, And fifty-five more all endin' in "pore". Black Death and his quickness, the depth and the thickness, Of sorrow and sickness I've known on my way, But I'm old and I'm nervis, I'm cast from the Service, And all I deserve is a shillin' a day. (Chorus) Shillin' a day, Bloomin' good pay— Lucky ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... of disease that have afflicted Europe within historic times has wholly spared England. But from the time of the "Black Death" (1349) the country experienced no such suffering from any epidemic as that which fell upon London in 1665. That year the "Great Plague" is said to have destroyed the lives of nearly one hundred thousand people in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... ancient times show their frequency, while the famous description of the plague of Athens given by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by Lucretius, exemplify their severity. In the Middle Ages they raged from time to time throughout Europe: such plagues as the Black Death and the sweating sickness swept off vast multitudes, the best authorities estimating that of the former, at the middle of the fourteenth century, more than half the population of England died, and that twenty-five millions of people ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... under Wyclif in England and John Huss in Bohemia; for the foundation of new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge; for the establishment of guilds in London; for the exploration of distant countries; for the dreadful pestilence which swept over Europe, known in England as the Black Death; for the development of modern languages by the poets; and for the rise of the English House of Commons as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... a hundred years hence will be able to write a book on economic changes brought about by pestilence. There is a very interesting study somewhere of the social and commercial effects of the Black Death in England.) ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... in these parts since the days when the priors and monks raised these churches, and since the countryside was thickly populated. Silk and wool were staple industries here then. Many and various causes have brought about the change. First they say that the Black Death raged more violently here than in any other part of England, and second—— Excuse me!" Major Heathcote broke off suddenly as the butler handed him a telegram. "How did this come ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... celebrated Black Death ravaged the earth, presenting the same symptoms as the cholera, and the same inexplicable phenomena as to its progress and the results in its route. In 1660 a similar epidemic decimated the world. It is well known that ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... should have solved the problem for myself. I almost wish I had. And yet it was not so when I was clinging tooth and nail to the cliff yonder; and these folks would not have died if they could have helped it, neither. There's something ugly in black Death that disinclines man to woo her. This wind bites to the marrow, and I'll go. I've seen Gethin now, and there's an end." He turned, and walked as slowly as the blast would let him toward the gate. "And yet, if it was warmer, and summer-time," continued ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... religion elicited a well-marked religious hate with oft-repeated deadly outbreaks, especially during the period of the crusades, and afterwards when the Black Death was raging (1348-50). Practical consequences like these the Church of course did not countenance; the popes set themselves against persecutions of the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... impassioned way in which he bid me good-bye. I declare, I felt tempted for an instant to say: 'Look here, Mr. Mask; if you love me like that, and if you're absolutely not a fright, take off that ugly, black death's-head you wear, and I'll stay with you always, since I am your wife.' But ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... Dickson, "your son hath had a touch of that illness which terminates so frequently in the black death you English folk die of? We hear much of the havoc it has made to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... worst came to the worst, he demonstrated his courage. When his peaceful home was stormed by the bestialized hordes of Armleder, or the drunken bands of the Flagellants, or the furious avengers of the "Black Death," he did not yield, did not purchase life by disgraceful treason. With invincible courage he put his head under the executioner's axe, and breathed forth his heroic spirit with the enthusiastic cry: "Hear, O Israel, the ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... impeded his career, proved instantly fatal. Stumbling forward with a hideous bellow, the progressive force of his previous motion, rather than any operation of his limbs, carried him up to within three yards of the astonished Lord Keeper, where he rolled on the ground, his limbs darkened with the black death-sweat, and quivering with the last ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Black Death and its Effects.*—During the earlier mediaeval centuries the most marked characteristic of society was its stability. Institutions continued with but slight changes during a long period. With the middle of the fourteenth century ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... Shall see his bloody spoils in triumph borne, With this keen javelin shall his breast be gored, And prostrate heroes bleed around their lord. Certain as this, oh! might my days endure, From age inglorious, and black death secure; So might my life and glory know no bound, Like Pallas worshipped, like the sun renowned! As the next dawn, the last they shall enjoy, Shall crush the Greeks, and end the woes ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... days against hopeless odds; failure of the army dynamos; airships cut off from ground guidance; battleships ripped to pieces by the Chinese disintegrators; and, finally, the great wave of black death that had wiped out two ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... promoting of the welfare of the Church, as he conceived it. The purpose of his two colleges was to remedy the shortness of clergy in his day, and to assist the /militia clericalis/, which had been grievously reduced /pestilentiis, guerris et aliis mundi miseriis/ (an obvious reference to the Black Death). ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... Marblehead. Ah, child, with trembling hand I set my candle at the pane, With fainting heart and choking breath, I heard the dolorous rain— The sea that beat the groaning beach with wild and thunderous shocks, The black death calling, calling from the savage equinox; The flap of sails, the crash of masts, or so it seemed to me, And cries of strong men drowning in the clutches ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... of children, millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness of life—where were they now? Life, innocent human life—the most precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and win our own joys of home and love and food—what Black Death had maddened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be free and ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the villein became a hired labourer is obscure and an attempt was made to check it by the Statute of Labourers at the time of the Black Death. This was followed by the peasant's revolt of 1382, which corresponded to the far worse horrors of the French Jacquerie. Sharply though this was suppressed, the real object of the rising seemed to have been accomplished. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Laing, Heimskringla, i. 147. It has been supposed that the Black Death, by which all Europe was ravaged in the middle part of the fourteenth century, may have crossed to Greenland, and fatally weakened the colony there; but Vigfusson says that the Black Death never touched Iceland (Sturlunga Saga, vol. i. p. cxxix.), so that it is not ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding—the natural and actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly enough as the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure. France suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the end of the Thirty Years' War the older feudal nobility had largely disappeared, while the class of "gentlemen" had been almost exterminated. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... mediaeval farm, but sheep were the source of the farmer's wealth. Large flocks of divers breeds roamed the hills and vales of rural England, and their rich fleeces were sent to Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent for the manufacture of cloth by the Flemish weavers. After the Black Death, a great plague which ravaged the country in 1348, the labourers were fewer in number, and their wages higher; hence the farmers paid increased attention to their sheep, which yielded rich profits, and required few labourers to ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... Made this answer to the suitor: "I will only give my daughter, Give to thee my fairest virgin, Bride of thine to be forever, When for me the swan thou killest In the river of Tuoni, Swimming in the black death-river, In the sacred stream and whirlpool; Thou canst try one cross-bow only, But one arrow from thy quiver." Then the reckless Lemminkainen, Handsome hero, Kaukomieli, Braved the third test of the hero, Started out to hunt the wild-swan, Hunt the long-necked, graceful swimmer, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... of Ibsen's early romantic interest. The original idea for this play, which he had begun in 1850, he found in the folk-tale "The Grouse in Justedal," about a girl who alone had survived the Black Death in an isolated village. Ibsen had with many others become interested in popular folk-tales and ballads. It was from Faye's Norwegian Folk-Tales (1844) that he took the story of "The Grouse in Justedal." His interest was so great that ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... riddle. We would pour out billions of money in the fight if need come. Rich men will spend all they possess rather than die, and see those they love die of it. Nations will do the same. Compromises are not considered; no one talks of reforming the Black Death. Unless it be jettisoned from the Ship of Civilization, progress and enlightenment go by ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the medieval cities, those of our own days mostly being but a continuation of what had grown at that time. The prosperity of the Flemish cities was based upon the fine woollen cloth they fabricated. Florence, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, before the black death, fabricated from 70,000 to 100,000 panni of woollen stuffs, which were valued at 1,200,000 golden florins.(36) The chiselling of precious metals, the art of casting, the fine forging of iron, were creations of the mediaeval "mysteries" which had succeeded ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... of all The Trojans, or of their renowned allies, Could point him out to Menelaus, loved Of Mars; and had they known his lurking-place They would not for his sake have kept him hid, For like black death they hated him. ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... then the next, men sicken and fall like blasted wheat. I heard a bruit of London that it was but a heap of graves—nay, one grave rather, for they flung the bodies into a great trench; there was no time to do otherwise: Black Death ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization of labour was thrown out ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... bloody orgies of the Crusaders had raged far away from the Capital of the Cross. In England, in France, in Germany, the Jew, that scapegoat of the nations, had poisoned the wells and brought on the Black Death, had pierced the host, killed children for their blood, blasphemed the saints, and done all that the imagination of defalcating debtors could suggest. But the Roman Jews were merely pestilent heretics. Perhaps it was the comparative poverty of the Ghetto that made its tragedy one of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the break-up of the ninth century saw the Fens partly drowned, and that after the Black Death something of the same sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that you begin to hear of a necessity for reclaiming them. John of Gaunt had a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still called "Morton's Leam." I say, every defeat ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... Stormannadauen (the Black Death) had raged through Norway, and cut off more than two-thirds of its population, and desolated whole extents of country and large populous districts. In Uldvig's Valley, in Hardanger, a young peasant of the name of Halgrim alone, of all the people who had died there, remained alive. He raised ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... City bounds, as they passed under New Gate, and by and by skirting the fields of the great Carthusian monastery, or Charter House, with the burial- ground given by Sir Walter Manny at the time of the Black Death. Beyond came marshy ground through which they had to pick their way carefully, over stepping-stones—this being no other than what is now the Regent's Park, not yet in any degree drained by the New River, but all quaking ground, overgrown ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Peter's Pence to Rome. There is a record that their contribution, being in kind, namely, walrus teeth, was sold in 1386 by the Pope's agent to a merchant in Flanders for twelve livres, fourteen sous. They kept up communication with their kin across the seas until the Black Death swept through the Old World in the Fourteenth Century; Norway, when it was gone, was like a vast tomb. Two-thirds of its people lay dead. Those who were left had enough to do at ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... now strangling our life, give to our souls to endure as seeing the invisible, and to our right arms the strength of the martyred dead of our people. Have mercy on the poor, the weak, the innocent and defenceless, and deliver us from the body of the Black Death. In a land of light and beauty and love our women are prisoners of danger and fear. While the heathen walks his native heath unharmed and unafraid, in this fair Christian Southland our sisters, wives, and daughters dare not stroll at twilight through the streets or ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... of God, and take thy place With hateful memories of the elder time, With many a wasting plague, and nameless crime, And bloody war that thinned the human race; With the Black Death, whose way Through wailing cities lay, Worship of Moloch, tyrannies that built The Pyramids, and cruel creeds that taught To avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt— Death at the stake to those that held them not. Lo! ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Arvina turned upon his traces, and was almost immediately successful; for there, scarce twenty feet from the spot where he had found the dagger, with his grim gory face turned upward as if reproachfully to the dark quiet skies, the black death-sweat still beaded on his frowning brow, and a sardonic grin distorting his pale lips, lay the dead slave. Flat on his back, with his arms stretched out right and left, his legs extended close together to their full length, he lay even as he had fallen; for not a struggle had convulsed ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... by which labour was rendered less stationary, was immeasurably hastened by the advent of a terrible catastrophe. In 1347 the Black Death arrived from the East. Across Europe it moved, striking fear by the inevitableness of its coming. It travelled at a steady rate, so that its arrival could be easily foretold. Then, too, the unmistakable nature of its symptoms and the suddenness of the death it caused also added ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... of the fourteenth century, after the country had been depopulated by the Black Death, and impoverished by the long war, the feudal lords of these copyholders and tenants began to regret the slackness with which their predecessors had exploited their PROPERTY, the serfs, and to consider that under the new commercial light ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... beginning of the awful plague which travelled from the East to Venice and all Europe and afterward became known by the name of the Black Death. Day by day the number of its victims increased; the hundreds of yesterday were the thousands of the morrow. Soon the graveyards were full, the plague pits, long and deep, were full, and the dead were taken out to sea by shiploads ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... in his native diocese of Mende; thence he removed to Lyons, where we know that he lived for several years, for in 1344 he took part as a canon in a chapter that met in the Church of St. Just in that city. Just when he was called to Avignon we do not know, though when the black death ravaged that city in 1348 he was the body-physician of Pope Clement VI, for he is spoken of in a Papal document as "venerabilis et circumspectus vir, dominus Guido de Cauliaco, canonicus et praepositus ecclesiae Sancti Justi Lugduni, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... into outstretched claws. His head sunk between his shoulders. Of the eyes, only red pin-points showed in the twitching face. I stood stone-still, struck into utter immobility. My brain was trying to urge me to fly, fly! This is the Black Death, Sophy! the Black Death! ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Proud. He was the first to assume the title of Grand Duke of all the Russias; and, acting in that capacity, he graciously confirmed the charter of Novgorod, for which he demanded and obtained payment. Simeon died in 1353 of the "black death," a pestilence which was ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... caries, mortification, corruption, gangrene, sphacelus[obs3], sphacelation[obs3], leprosy; eruption, rash, breaking out. fever, temperature, calenture[obs3]; inflammation. ague, angina pectoris[Lat], appendicitis; Asiatic cholera[obs3], spasmodic cholera; biliary calculus, kidney stone, black death, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague; blennorrhagia[obs3], blennorrhoea[obs3]; blood poisoning, bloodstroke[obs3], bloody flux, brash; breakbone fever[obs3], dengue fever, malarial fever, Q-fever; heart attack, cardiac arrest, cardiomyopathy[Med]; hardening ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Both Chaucer and Dryden had experienced great plagues in London, the Black Death in the fourteenth century and ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... a painted hanging-cloth Of coiled gold serpents ready to make spring, Ignoble Death stood, his convulsive hand Grasping a rapier part-way down the blade To deal the blow with deadly-jewelled hilt— Black Death, turned white with horror of himself. Straight on came he that sang the blithe sea-song; And now his step was on the stair, and now He neared ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the great plague of London, destroyed 7,165 people in a single week, have lost their virulency; gaol fever has disappeared, and our gaols, once each a plague-spot, have become, by a strange perversion of civilisation, the health spots of, at least, one kingdom. The term, Black Death, is heard no more; and ague, from which the London physician once made a fortune, is now a rare tax even on the skill of ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not, and it served me right, one split straw for my craft or my greatness. What a murrain call had I, they said, to mell with old St. Barnabas's? Ruinous the church had been since the Black Death, and ruinous she should remain; and I could hang myself in my new scaffold-ropes! Gentle and simple, high and low—the Hayes, the Fowles, the Fanners, the Collinses—they were all in a tale against me. Only Sir John Pelham up yonder to Brightling bade me heart-up ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... for death. He is the same grim old gentleman, be his mouldy bones naked, or clothed in robes of the most gaudy or brilliant hues. A blue death, a red death or a yellow death is just as grizzly and awe-inspiring as one of any shade of gray. Even a black death excites no emotions not touched by the first name, for it is the dread messenger himself whom we respect and not his fanciful ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... the danger of extra-terrestrial disease-producing organisms being introduced on Earth. He painted a lurid picture, quoting from the history of pre-sanitation epidemics. He wound up with a specific prophecy of something like the Black Death of the middle ages as lurking among the stars to decimate humanity. He was a victim of the well-known authority-trauma which affects some people on television when they think millions of other people are listening to them. They depart madly from their scripts to try to ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... each other for a look or a thought; in war whole cities were put to the sword and fire, as the Black Prince put Limoges. Timor mortis conturbat me! So men shuddered and wailed, but took not the smallest trouble to keep each other alive. The Black Death swept off at least a third of the population of Europe; yet after it things went on exactly as before. If nations had then possessed the technical skill which they have to-day, it is quite on the cards that France in the Hundred Years or Germany ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... and property occasioned by them is but trifling when compared with the awful ruin and desolation wrought by the perpetual and protracted contests of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. Chronic warfare, both private and public, periodic famines, and sweeping pestilences like the Black Death,—these were the things which formerly shortened human life and kept down population. In the absence of such causes, and with the abundant capacity of our country for feeding its people, I think it an extremely moderate statement if we say that by the end of the next ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away, some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act is followed by a train of similar ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... puff before the tempest, the deadly breath of the Black Death—called "influenza," but known of old among the verminous myriads of the East—swept over the earth from East to West. Millions died; millions were yet to perish of it; yet the dazed world, still half blind with blood and smoke, sat helpless and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... think," she said, quietly. "He died a young man, in the first great visitation of the Black Death, over twenty years ago: and my mother survived him twenty years. She married again, and died three ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... keep a light heart within London walls," said he, "must needs be very sure of heaven, as are Master Prynne and Master Philip Stubbes, or very much in love, as am I. It lacks but a covered cart and a bell in every street to make one feel the Black Death is upon us. If you can laugh in such an atmosphere of melancholy, Annis, what will you ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... his sight; for no more bitter pang Smiteth the heart of man than when a son Perishes, and his father sees him die. Therefore, albeit unused to melting mood, His soul was torn with agony for the son By black death slain. A wild cry hastily To Thrasymedes did he send afar: "Hither to me, Thrasymedes war-renowned! Help me to thrust back from thy brother's corse, Yea, from mine hapless son, his murderer, That so ourselves may render to our dead All dues of mourning. If thou flinch ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... entire rebuilding of the church, which extended over many years. The builders began by setting out their aisles as usual, and by the middle of the fourteenth century the south aisle was finished, and the lower courses of the north aisle and the new aisled chancel were built. However, in 1349, the Black Death interrupted the work. The north aisle and chancel were not completed, and the new arcades of nave and chancel were not built until the fifteenth century. In this case there were certainly older, and almost certainly ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... definitively with Denmark. Dissensions resulting in interminable civil wars had, even before the Union, exhausted the resources of the poorest of the three northern realms; and her ruin was completed by the ravages of the Black Death, which wiped out two-thirds of her population. Unfortunately, too, for Norway's independence, the native gentry had gradually died out, and were succeeded by immigrant Danish fortune-hunters; native burgesses there were none, and the peasantry were mostly thralls; so that, excepting the clergy, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... three years later on account of the hostility of the Esquimaux. As for Greenland, not a word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440. Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, which had just killed half the people of Norway. However that might be, the tradition of a "vast land in the distant west" still survived among the people of the Faroe and Iceland, and Colombo must have heard of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... pure air of the enemies' country, and they returned after a few days driving before them 700 horses and 1,000 cattle. He assured Sidney, that with 300 additional men, he could so hunt the rebel, that ere May was passed, he should not show his face in Ulster. But the 'Black Death' returned after a brief respite; and, says Mr. Froude, in the reeking vapour of the charnel-house, it was indifferent whether its victims returned in triumph from a stricken field, or were cooped within their walls by hordes of savage enemies. By the middle of March there ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... amazing." she said, drinking me in once more. "To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot—certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are worse a scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... asks for them. But he was always a poor, fond, silly creature, was Peter, though we are beholden to him for helping to bury our second son Wat, who was a 'prentice to him at Lymington in the year of the Black Death. But who are you, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw him thus long, for there were a dozen kneeling round him in a twinkling—I felt an unwonted pang. It passed, however, in a moment. For I found myself confronted by a ring of angry faces—of men who, keeping at a distance, hissed and cursed and threatened me, calling me Black Death ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... was dead of the strange swift pestilence that was called in 1348 the Black Death. So also were the sexton, the cooper, the shoemaker, and almost all the people of the valley. A ship had come into Bergen with the plague on board, and it spread through Norway like a grass-fire. Only ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... [1] After the Black Death, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, possibly Corpus Christi, Cambridge, Canterbury College and New College, Oxford, were founded, and University (Clare) Hall, Cambridge, was enlarged, partly, at any rate, to repair the ravages the plague ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... most of the great national events of the ensuing centuries. During the war between King John and his barons William Mauduit held Hanslape Castle against the king, until in 1216 it was captured and demolished by Falkes de Breaute. The county was visited severely by the Black Death, and Winslow was one of many districts which were almost entirely depopulated. In the civil war Buckinghamshire was one of the first counties to join in an association for mutual defence on the side of the parliament, which had important garrisons at Aylesbury, Brill ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... maelstrom's power! Above the cavern's arch! see! Ninip[10] stands! He points within the cave with beckoning hands! Ur-Hea cries: "My lord! the tablets[11] say, That we should not attempt that furious way! Those waters of black death will smite us down! Within that cavern's depths we will but drown." "We cannot go but once, my friend, that road," The hero said, "'Tis only ghosts' abode!" "We go, then, Izdubar, its depths will sound, But we within that gloom will whirl around, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... heathen. Master Ulsenius had before now lent them to Ann, and she like a bee from a flower would daily suck a drop of honey from their store. Yet was there one testimony of Petrarca's—who was, for sure, of all lovers the truest—which she loved above all else. In the dreadful time of the Black Death which came as a scourge on all the world, and chiefly on Italy, in the past century, the lady to whom he had vowed the deepest and purest devotion, appeared to him in a dream one fair spring morning as an angel of Heaven. And whereas he inquired of her whether she were in life, she answered ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and writer of poems on classical and religious subjects. Over the eastern side of the cloister was the library, a very fine one, but it perished in the Great Fire. The name "Pardon" applied to burial grounds, was not uncommon, apparently. The victims of the Black Death, in 1348, were buried in a piece of ground on the site of the Charter House, and this ground was known as Pardon Churchyard; and in the register books of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, there are two entries of City magnates buried at different times by "the Pardon Door." Does it indicate ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... bright shield went the ponderous spear, and through the inwrought" (very artfully wrought), [Greek: poludaidalou] "breastplate it pressed on, and straight beside his flank it rent the tunic, but he swerved and escaped black death." Mr. Leaf says, "It is obvious that, after a spear has passed through a breastplate, there is no longer any possibility for the wearer to bend aside and so to avoid the point...." But I suppose that the wearer, by a motion very natural, doubled up ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Englishmen had made up their minds to be English in speech, as they were English to the backbone in everything else. Norman-French had, in fact, become provincial, and was spoken only here and there. Before the great Plague— commonly spoken of as "The Black Death"— of 1349, both high and low seemed to be alike bent on learning French, but the reaction may be said to date from this year. The culminating point of this reaction may perhaps be seen in an Act of Parliament passed in 1362 ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... year 1630 an epidemic known as the "Black Death" raged through the Netherlands, and, as one of the victims to the fell disease, Anna, my wife, was taken from me. I followed her to the grave, and returned to my desolate hearth determined to die also. To this end I shut myself in the room which Anna had lately ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... the woman in league with the devil? The master had brought poison from Gnesen, poison for the rats. The servant's observant eyes had noticed the box on the table, the white box from the chemist's, with the black death's head on it. If now that woman downstairs were to put some of it in master's coffee or among the sifted sugar, of which he loved to pour half a basinful into his cup? ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... the dearth of clergy caused by the Black Death, Wykeham, after the laying-on of hands by his old master, Bishop Edington, became an acolyte in the December of 1361, a sub-deacon in the March following, and priest in the June of 1362. A few years later, when Edington was laid to rest within his cathedral, ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... the English and French, England was visited by the Black Death, a plague that came from Asia and bade fair to depopulate the country. London lost fifty thousand people, and at times there were hardly enough people left to bury the dead or till the fields. This contagion occurred in 1349, and even attacked ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... see her face and be glad; no, though it were a god that rose against her. For she has twelve feet, all fore-feet, and six necks, and terrible heads on them; and each has three rows of teeth, full of black death. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... see the miracle of nations entering the kingdom of God, before we can dismiss the black death of apathy which rests on so many professedly Christian communities, before we can dominate the social structure in righteousness and justice, the Church must be raised nearer to the standards of New Testament efficiency. And New Testament efficiency rested ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... infectious and must be sterilized by boiling as soon as removed from the sick room. The severe epidemics which have occurred from pneumonia have occurred in camps where sanitary conditions are grossly violated. Under such conditions pneumonia has become a most alarming epidemic, sometimes called the black death. In a single house, however, disinfection of the wastes of the patient and a proper care of the personal hygiene of the rest of the family will avoid the spread of the disease, and if the patient has sufficient vitality, sustained by good food and fresh air, he ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... of this system may be attributed to the scarcity of labour brought about especially by the Black Death. When men could not be had in sufficient number, the necessary consequences was the expansion of pasture and the contraction of tillage; and this dual process was assisted by the stampede of labourers to the towns and ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... sanitary movements which are assuming every year greater importance. Two diseases especially have attracted attention, above all others, with reference to their causes and prevention; cholera, the "black death" of the nineteenth century, and consumption, the white plague of the North, both of which have been faithfully studied and reported on by physicians of our own State and city. The cultivation of medical and surgical specialties, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... enlightened sanitary era, have entirely disappeared. In the history of such epidemics the name of Hecker stands out so prominently that any remarks on this subject must necessarily, in some measure, find their origin in his writings, which include exhaustive histories of the black death, the dancing mania, and the sweating sickness. Few historians have considered worthy of more than a passing note an event of such magnitude as the black death, which destroyed millions of the human race in the fourteenth century and was particularly dreadful in England. Hume has given but a ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... meek of face and carriage, Deigning scarce a quicker breath, Comes she to the funeral marriage, The betrothal of black death. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... dreadful monster is she, nor would any look on her gladly, not if it were a god that met her. Verily she hath twelve feet all dangling down; and six necks exceeding long, and on each a hideous head, and therein three rows of teeth set thick and close, full of black death. Up to her middle is she sunk far down in the hollow cave, but forth she holds her heads from the dreadful gulf, and there she fishes, swooping round the rock, for dolphins or sea-dogs, or whatso greater beast she may anywhere take, whereof the deep-voiced Amphitrite ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... know not. For when that fearful being had spoken, as I have told thee, I hid my eyes for very fear. Only once did I raise them and see her like a black death still standing by my couch; but she had grasped thy jewelled dagger which lay upon the table, and held it with outstretched hand towards the ground, and with upturned gaze and frightful calm she seemed to plead an answer ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark, the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and human sacrifice. He has for millions of years looked down upon the ignorance, the misery, the crimes of men. He has been at once the author and the audience ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Poisoner! Nicolo the Black Death! I am coming for the soul you sold me. There is ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston |
