"Circumvallation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... capture of Caen by Edward, in 1346, the inhabitants resolved upon fortifying the town anew, the abbeys of St. Stephen and of the Trinity, both of which lay in the suburbs, were excluded from the line of circumvallation; and the consequence was their exposure to insults and pillage. The monks and nuns were therefore obliged to look to their own defence; and, upon King John's coming to Caen, eight years afterwards, they obtained from him ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... which is mob. "The war," he says, "has introduced abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns." Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the instances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of 'em for them, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers 'tis to it is, as does ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... thereof is secur'd by the Sea; and the other by a strong Fortification call'd Monjouick. The Place is of so large a Circumference, that thirty thousand Men would scarce suffice to form the Lines of Circumvallation. It once resisted for many Months an Army of that Force; and is almost at the greatest Distance from England of any Place belonging to ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... railing, and seeks a quarrel after the German fashion, to disengage himself from a wit that presses too hard upon him: and a last man sees nothing into the reason of the thing, but draws a line of circumvallation about you of dialectic clauses, and the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the life of Lady Harman was Sir Isaac. Indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her position, it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a circumvallation. There wasn't a direction in which she could turn without immediately running up against him. He had taken possession of her extremely. And from her first resignation to this as an inevitable fact she had come, she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition to regard this large and various universe ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... herself with a triple wall of mental resolves against Dr. Harrison's advances. But when the doctor came again, a night or two after Thanksgiving, there did not seem to be much that she could do—or hinder. The doctor's lines of circumvallation were too skilfully drawn for an inexperienced warrior like Faith to know very well where to oppose him. He was not in a demonstrative mood at all; rather more quiet than usual. He had just pushed an advanced work in the shape of his golden cake; and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... assailing fortified towns in the time of the Peloponnesian war was to build a double wall round them sufficiently strong to check any sally of the garrison from within or any attack of a relieving force from without. The interval within the two walls of the circumvallation was roofed over, and formed barracks, in which the besiegers posted themselves, and awaited the effects of want or treachery among the besieged in producing a surrender; and in every Greek city of those ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... rebellion. One of the buttresses of the walls of York is the Red Tower, so called from the red brick of which it is built. These walls and gates are full of interesting relics of the olden time, and they are still preserved to show the line of circumvallation of the ancient walled city. But the chief glory of York is its famous minster, on which the hand of time has been lightly laid. When King Eadwine was baptized in the little wooden church hastily erected ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... were within the circle of the camp, the four friends did not exchange one word; besides, they were followed by the curious, who, hearing of the wager, were anxious to know how they would come out of it. But when once they passed the line of circumvallation and found themselves in the open plain, d'Artagnan, who was completely ignorant of what was going forward, thought it was time to demand ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... prevailed of encircling a city by a whole army, which buried itself in lines of circumvallation and contravallation. These lines cost as much in labor and expense as the siege itself. The famous case of the lines of Turin, which were fifteen miles in length, and, though guarded by seventy-eight thousand French, were forced by Prince Eugene with forty thousand men in 1706, is enough ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini |
