"Serf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... break-up of this rigid system came in England the emancipation of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the beginnings of peasant agriculture. That personal gravitation which always draws together men of similar ambitions and tasks now began to work significant changes in the economic order. The peasantry, more or less ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... the Gordon Dane order, he suspected. And it was not too soon to begin laying those unseen foundations—to think the thought that must come before the thing. He was veritably a king, yet for a time must he masquerade as a wage-slave, a serf to Breede, and an inferior of Bulger's, considered as a ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... do, do, with a purpose all your own, That makes a man a man, whether born a serf or king; And it's loaf, loaf, loaf, lolling on a bench or throne That makes a being thewed to act a ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... gun and ammunition, with furs and with clothing appropriate to his position, with special gifts whenever he or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye had rested. Therefore the [vc]if[vc]ija would lose the last shadow of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement, with little wooden ploughs ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... Russian country! People of lord and serf you are— Farewell, salute, bent knee and ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... food; on the contrary, it is decidedly its inferior. There, as in love, the apprentice is the master. The proof of this is decisive. Poland can raise wheat with ease at fifteen or twenty shillings a quarter, while England requires fifty. The serf of the Ukraine would make a fortune on the price at which the farmer of Kent or East Lothian would be rendered bankrupt. The Polish cultivators have no objection whatever to a free competition with the British; but the British anticipate, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... much bread: So the man's life serves under the beast's law, And things whose spirit lives in mouth and maw Share shrieking the soul's board and soil her bed, Till man's blind spirit, their sick slave, resign Its kingdom to the priests whose souls are swine, And the scourged serf lie reddening from their rod, Discrowned, disrobed, dismantled, with lost eyes Seeking where lurks in what conjectural skies That triple-headed ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer, Could Nature's equal scheme deface; New birth of our ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the unhappiness of the nineteenth. Seated in the centre of the seesaw, which he knew so well how to balance by his own weight, he contemplates at one end of it the fanatic ignorance of a lay brother, the apathy of a serf, the shining armor on the horses of a banneret; he thinks he hears the cry, "France and Montjoie-Saint-Denis!" But he turns round, he smiles as he sees the haughty look of a manufacturer, who is captain in the national guard; the elegant carriage of a stock broker; the simple ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... jellyfish—a crushed worm—a mere serf and vassal! She's frightened to death of her sister, in my opinion, and hardly dare call her soul her own. She'd be nice enough to Gipsy if Poppie'd ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... profit by each other's wisdom instead of remaining in isolated ignorance. They, too, were the great witnesses against feudal caste. With them was neither high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor: worth was their only test; the meanest serf entering there might become the lord of knights and vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes. Men may talk of democracy—those old monasteries were the most democratic institutions the world had ever till then seen. 'A man's ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of the Fiscus, uttered a generality which Louis le Hutin reiterated: "Seeing that every human creature who is formed in the image of our Lord, ought, generally speaking, to be free by natural right,—no one ought to be a serf in France." In the eighth and ninth centuries serfs were sold to Jews who sold them to Mohammedans. Montpelier carried on a slave trade with the Saracens. The clergy joined in this trade in the twelfth century, and it is said to have lasted until the fifteenth century.[854] The Romance of Hervis ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... thoughts—how can she be the same That once, long years agone, on Colchis' strand Trod, free and happy, 'neath these very stars, As pure, as mild, as free from any sin As new-born child upon its mother's breast?" Where goes she, then? She seeks the peasant's hut To comfort the poor serf, whose little crops Were trampled by her father's huntsmen late, And brings him gold to ease his bitter heart. Why trips she down the forest-path? She hastes To meet her brother who is waiting there In some green copse. Together then they wend Homeward ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... their sins. They are dying of a terrible plague which is in the air, in the earth, in the very meat and drink which God has given us, in the heat of the day, and in the chill of night—a plague which is no respecter of persons, but slays lord and serf, rich and poor alike; which will visit you, too, if not to-day then to-morrow, which will destroy a tenth part of your households, which will search you out wherever you are, in the forest, in the fields, within your cottages, though you were to slay instantly every gentleman in the ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be willed away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as carefully as ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... laid in the earth to rest! Oh, everything has an end, even misery. Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant. That was the hardest trial that befell our father, that the husband of a daughter of his should be a miserable serf, whom the proprietor could mount on the wooden horse for punishment! I suppose he is under the ground now. And thou, Ida? Alas, alas! it is not ended yet, wretch that I am! Grant me that I ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... was everywhere. And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the novel offices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy—the morning sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was over—dew-drenched garments—the serf lying at his ease at last: the artists, then so [62] numerous at the place, caught what they could, something, at least, of the richness, the flexibility of the visible aspects of life, from all this. With ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... most cheaply extract a given quantity of gold or silver ore from the pits and adits beneath the ground. Thousands of peones were impressed into this forced labour; armed soldiers were stationed at the entrances of these labyrinths to see that each wretched serf deposited his sack of rock, under the load of which he had toiled up fathoms of notched pole, or ladder, from the infernal regions below, panting, sweating, expiring, and presently driven down again by the brutal taskmasters, jealous lest he might enjoy too much of the light ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... servant, formerly a serf of my mother's, Yegor, by name. He was a quiet, honest fellow; I had known him from a child, and ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Galitzine estate, about 12 miles from Moscow. The members of the party were met by the Prince and went with him to a part of the park where a deputation of peasants awaited them. Leader of the peasant group was the mayor of the neighboring village, an emancipated serf, who presented Fox with bread and salt—traditional symbols of Russian hospitality—on a silver salver ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... ginerosity an' lock th' dure an' Cubia goes home, free an' hopeless. D'ye think so? Well, I don't. Be hivins, Hinnissy, I think th' time has come whin we've got to say whether we're a nation iv Beets. I am no serf, but I'd rather be bent undher th' dispotism iv a Casteel thin undher th' tyranny iv a Beet. If I've got to be a slave, I'd rather be wan to a man, even a Spanish man, thin to a viggytable. If I'm goin' to he opprissed be ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... of all, a thing to accomplish which superhuman courage is required, is to exercise the most complete control over the ass of which Sterne speaks. This ass ought to be as submissive as a serf of the thirteenth century was to his lord; to obey and be silent, advance and stop, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... false pretences and arrogant pride, The follies of fashion he loved to deride; But acknowledged true merit wherever 'twas shown, By a serf in his hut, or a king on ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... among the Jews, as we see in the book of Ruth, Chapter III, v. 4, and Chapter IV, vv. 7 and 8). St. Vladimir the Great asked in marriage the daughter of Prince Rogvold; as Vladimir's mother had been a serf, the princess proudly replied that she 'would not uncover the feet of a slave.' At the present time in the east of Russia when a young girl tries to find out by divination whom she will have as a husband the traditional formula is 'Come and take my stockings ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a passport. Their sons might not be educated to anything but agriculture; their daughters could not be married without paying a fine to the master. Worse things than these are told of some, for of course the condition of the serf largely depended on the disposition ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... she, "be as firm as the Public Prosecutor on the bench. Keep a tight hand on her, be a Bartholo! Ware Auguste, Hippolyte, Nestor, Victor—or, that is gold, in every form. When once the child is fed and dressed, if she gets the upper hand, she will drive you like a serf.—I will see to settling you comfortably. The Duke does the handsome; he will lend—that is, give—you ten thousand francs; and he deposits eight thousand with his notary, who will pay you six hundred francs every quarter, for I cannot trust ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Him: "Do unto others as You would that others should do unto You." I have a right to think; I cannot control my belief; my brain is my castle, and if I don't defend it, my soul becomes a slave and a serf. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... distributed unjustly, the bulk of real and personal estate in the Territory being vested in the Church and its directors, between whom and the mass of the population there exists a difference in social welfare as wide as between the Russian nobleman and his serf. In brief, the Mormons no longer claim to be a Christian sect, but assert, and truly, that their religion is as distinct from Christianity as that is from Mahometanism. Many of the doctrines whispered in 1847 only to those who had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... And, indeed, good cause existed for his sorrow; for, but a few days previously, he had lost his wife. They had buried the countess at midnight, as was the custom of the family, in the old, ancestral vault of the castle. Vassal and serf had waved their torches over the black throat of the grave, and the wail of women had gone up through the rocky arches. Still the count had been seen to shed no tear. An old warrior, schooled in the stern academy of military ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... the table. (It was a blessed death, I think, to die for his Lord Christ.) And so he fell down upon the floor with contorted features, and hands and feet quivering with agony. Every one was struck dumb with horror at such a death; but the knight laughed loudly, and cried, "Ha! thou base-born serf, I shall teach thee how to liken thy feudal lord to a brute," and striding over his quivering limbs, he spat upon ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... nation was in relation to the object only less dear to him than the liberation of Poland: that of the serfs. With time the Polish peasant had sunk to the level of those in neighbouring countries, although the condition of the serf in Poland was never as deplorable as, for instance, that which obtained in Russia. France had only just effected the relief of her lower classes—and this by an orgy of revolt and ferocity. Kosciuszko now came forward with his reforms. The forced labour of the peasant ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... choice and will. And Maitre Chesnel had known the delights of such high friendship; the Marquis had raised him to his own level. The old noble looked on the good notary as something more than a servant, something less than a child; he was the voluntary liege man of the house, a serf bound to his lord by all the ties of affection. There was no balancing of obligations; the sincere affection on either side put them ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... this poetry he read to himself, and it calmed him; but as Mahmoud did not know about this poetry, Smith got bored with it, and, his irritation increasing, he wrote more poetry, showing Mahmoud to be a villain and a serf, and showing himself, Smith, to be ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... Your son shall be my serf; your woman my chattel! Ha, that woman! She has already fought me, like one of these strange woods-beasts you have made us kill! See! My hair is burned and my flesh blistered with her fire-beating! But when I hold her in ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Overshadowed by an immense personality—in the presence of the irresponsible and the infinite, the individuality of man is lost, and he falls prostrate in the very dust of fear. Beneath the frown of the absolute, man stands a wretched, trembling slave—beneath his smile be is at best only a fortunate serf. Governed by a being whose arbitrary will is law, chained to the chariot of power, his destiny rests in the pleasure of the unknown. Under these circumstances what wretched object can he have in lengthening out ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... doubt was the trade of the particular ancestor of the old valet who passed from a state of serfdom to one of burgher dignity, until some unknown misfortune had again reduced his present descendant to the condition of a serf, with the addition of wages. The whole history of Flanders and its linen-trade was epitomized in this old man, often called, by way of euphony, Mulquinier. He was not without originality, either of character or appearance. His face was triangular in shape, broad and long, ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... said the trembling serf, "Ulf is to visit his castle of Niflheim. He goes there alone, as you, my liege, came hither, to receive his bride. But he will never return the way he came, for Bur and Harald, your friends, my prince, have vowed to slay him there, and at one blow rid the land of a tyrant ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... for the belfry, but only as a partial type of an ulterior creature, a sort of elephantine Helot, adapted to further, in a degree scarcely to be imagined, the universal conveniences and glories of humanity; supplying nothing less than a supplement to the Six Days' Work; stocking the earth with a new serf, more useful than the ox, swifter than the dolphin, stronger than the lion, more cunning than the ape, for industry an ant, more fiery than serpents, and yet, in patience, another ass. All excellences of all God-made creatures, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Here are seen the old fossil prints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to make every family a barony, a monarchy, or a despotism, of which the husband is the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the dependent, the serf, or slave. That this is not always the fact, is not due to the law, but to the enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow limits of its rules; for if the husband choose, he has his wife as firmly in his grasp and dominion, as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the gates of Bregenz Just as the midnight rings, And out come serf and soldier To meet the news ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... Charles, and cunning as was the policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left France, though advanced, miserable. For these monarchs had not cut the root of the evil. The French nobility continued practically a serf-holding nobility. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... years of the reign of Alexander II. have to be kept in mind, in order to understand that humanitarian motives were not the ruling ones in the final adoption of the Serf Emancipation measure. On his death-bed, Nicholas is stated to have said to his son:— "Thou hast two enemies—the nobility and the Poles. Emancipate the serfs; and do not allow the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... stones and seeds, and all good products of the Sekhet Hemat. And this Sekhti journeyed to the south unto Henenseten; and when he came to the lands of the house of Fefa, north of Denat, he found a man there standing on the bank, a man called Hemti—the workman—son of a man called Asri, who was a serf of the High Steward Meruitensa. Now said this Hemti, when he saw the asses of Sekhti, that were pleasing in his eyes, "Oh that some good god would grant me to steal away the goods of Sekhti ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... none shall meet; Suppressed shall be each journal-sheet; And every serf beneath my feet ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... The serf upon whom Ivan was about to exercise his dexterity was a man of five or six-and-thirty, red of hair and beard, a little above average height. His Greek origin might be traced in his countenance, which even in its expression of terror had preserved ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... world, from which quarter he looked for the regeneration of humanity, because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class. In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel oppressor the nobleman, he believed he could trace a substratum of simple- minded brotherly love, and that instinct which leads animals to hate the men who hunt them. In support of this idea he cited the childish, almost demoniac delight ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... White Man's burden— No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper— The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living, And mark ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... for him, but to become an official. The fat actresses, who were in the dressing-room, made themselves pleasant to the officials—respectfully and flatteringly. (L. expressed her delight that P., so young, had already got the Star.) They were old, respectable house-keepers, serf-women, whom the masters honored with ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him,—the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who, 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief?[57]—and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... very foundation of our theories and our institutions. It is simply, —Shall the course of the Republic be so directed as to subserve the interests of aristocracy or of democracy? Shall our Territories be occupied by lord and serf, or by intelligent freemen?—by laborers who are owned, or by men who own themselves? The Republican Party has no need of appealing to prejudice or passion. In this case, there is a meaning in the phrase, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the beck and call of bullies that stand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess of pottage—a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being wronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret chambers ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... looked what he was, the superb brute—the brute reckless of all save the instant satisfaction of his desires. He came of a family of colliers, the most debased class in a lawless district. Jack's father had been a colliery-serf, legally enslaved to his colliery, legally liable to be sold with the colliery as a chattel, and legally bound to bring up all his sons as colliers, until the Act of George III. put an end to this incredible ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... was not only a change in policy as to the method of stopping the migration of the blacks to the North, but a change in the economic policy of the South. Southern business men and planters soon found out that it was impossible to treat the negro as a serf and began to deal with him as an actual employe entitled to his share of the returns from his labor. It was evident that it would be very much better to have the negroes as coworkers in a common cause than to have them ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... the South is right. No impartial foreigner could fail to draw this conclusion under the circumstances of this war. But is it right; we do not say as a thing of the past, and of a rapidly vanishing serf-system, but as an institution of the progressive present? Witness the words of G. BATELLE, a member of the Western Virginia Constitutional Convention,—as we write, in session at Wheeling,—and who has published an address to that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bidding, however humiliating this may be. The shipper, realizing that the manager's displeasure or good will toward him finds practical expression in his daily freight bills, finally loses, like the serf, all self-esteem in his efforts to propitiate an overbearing master. He is intimidated to such an extent that he never speaks openly of existing abuses, lest he lose the special rates which have been given him, or, if ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... isle, Queen of the sea? Where hath her smile So stirred man's inmost nature? Where Are courage firm, and virtue fair, And manly pride, so often found As in rude huts on English ground, Where e'en the serf who slaves for hire May ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... were private grounds. Free now to the poorest serf. Well, there's something century-gained. Some people say the world's growing worse all the time. ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... omnipotent bureaucracy, the old capital herself the first to be dispossessed of her autonomy and subjected to prefects. Outside of the cities the monarch, whose private fortune was identical with the state finances, possessed immense domains managed by intendants and supporting a population of serf-colonists. The army was composed largely of foreign mercenaries, professional soldiers whose pay or bounty consisted of lands on which they settled. All these features and many others caused the Roman empire to assume the likeness of ancient ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... me! Behold, I am founding a New Movement! Observe me. . . . I am in Revolt! I revolt! Now persecute me, persecute me, damn you, persecute me, curse you, persecute me! Philistine, Bourgeois, Slave, Serf, Capitalist, Respectabilities that you are, Persecute me! Bah! You ask me, do you, what am I in revolt against? Against you, fool, dolt, idiot, against you, against everything! Against Heavy, Hell and punctuation . . . against Life, Death, rhyme and rhythm . . . Persecute me, now, persecute ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... carry on profitable allied manufacturing industries. Monopolistic farms cannot then successfully compete. With demonstrations, such as we are making here to-day, springing up by hundreds and thousands in each county and state, during the next thirty years, what may we expect? The last remaining serf will have been emancipated. The hopeless tenant and the landless farmer can no longer be found. No one can be induced to toil, for owners of the monopolistic farm. The owners will not and cannot work themselves. The experience of a few unprofitable years will urge them to sell their ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... made his escape. This Vasili was his stirrup-bearer, one of those serfs over whom the boyard on whose land they were born possessed absolute power. That power was often abused, but the instinctive faithfulness of the serf towards his master could hardly be shaken, even by the most savage treatment, and a well- treated serf viewed his master's family with enthusiastic love and veneration. Vasili accompanied his master's flight through the birch ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious things, and been listened to with abject submission. Its empire has been no less extensive than deep-seated. The serf to custom points his finger at the slave to fashion—as if it signified whether it is an old or a new thing which is irrationally conformed to. The man of letters despises both the slaves of fashion and of custom, but often runs his ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... rang over the grave of Waldemar Daa. No schoolboys sang when the former lord of Borreby Castle was laid in his grave. Well, everything must have an end, even misery! Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant, and this was her father's sorest trial. His daughter's husband a miserable serf, who might at any moment be ordered the punishment of the wooden horse by his lord. It is well that the sod covers him now, and you too, Ida! Ah yes! ah yes! Poor me! poor me! I still linger on. In Thy ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... moreover, was already provided. Muscovy had never been governed otherwise than by irresponsible and irresistible authority. That authority had been inactive and not deeply felt. Now the same authority interfered to alter almost everything, except the subjection of the serf to the landowner. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... was aggressive—bitterly, fiercely aggressive. For once at least I could make this woman understand what my real feelings toward her were. My soul was filled with a hatred as bestial as the love against which it was a reaction. It was the savage, murderous passion of the revolted serf. I could have taken the crutch from her side and beaten her face in with it. She threw her hands up, as if to avoid a blow, and cowered away from me into the ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she said. "Many generations have come and gone since the wonderful pages of history were opened to us. And during all these years how much nearer have the serf and the aristocrat come together? Nay, have they not rather drifted apart?... But listen! This is the great chorus. We ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... used to stand at the altar and join in the responses with the deacons, and when the serf-girls were brought together to dance and sing choruses, he would join in their songs too, and beat time with his feet, and pinch their cheeks.... But he soon went back to Petersburg, leaving my stepfather practically in complete control ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... race, settled captives, or quondam slaves, tied to the soil they cultivated and sold with the estate but capable of possessing land and property of their own. There is little trace of serfs in Babylonia, unless the muskinu be really a serf. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... travellers who had perished within call, in wreaths and drifts of snow. One night the stove within, and the cold outside, awakened childish associations long forgotten, and I dreamed I was in Russia—the identical serf out of a picture-book I had, before I could read it for myself—and that I was going to be knouted by a noble personage in a fur cap, boots, and earrings, who, I think, must have come out of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... he nor any of his predecessors ever kept any accounts, it is rather difficult to ascertain their exact condition. So long as he has money enough in his pocket to pay his labourers and buy a little stock, my father, like every British farmer, is content. The fact is, he is a serf as much as his men, and until we get rid of feudalism he will ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the woman he loved, realizing that it could never occur to her that he, a Mid-Middle, would presume to think in terms of wooing her. That even in her supposed scorn of rank, privilege and status, she was still, subconsciously perhaps, a noble and he a serf. Evolution there was in society, and the terms were different, but it was still a world of class distinction and she was of the ruling class, and he the ruled, she a ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... means of the Law of Parochial Settlement, as Thorold Rogers repeatedly points out,[110:2] they "consummated the degradation of the labourer"; and made him, as it has left him, what the same impartial authority well terms "the most portentous phenomenon in agriculture, a serf without land." By means of their Financial Policy they rid themselves of the duties which originally accompanied the privilege of land-holding, viz. to provide the necessary public revenues for all defence purposes, and converted ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... a peasant and of peasant family," sighed the tramp. "My mamma was a house serf. I don't look like a peasant, that's true, for such has been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in the master's house. She petted ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... not one-tenth part of the most cruel of all gossip—the gossip of country-houses—is worthy of credence; and although, when I first made Madame's acquaintance, she had living with her in the house a clerk named Mitusha, who had been promoted from a serf, and who, curled, pomaded, and dressed in a frockcoat of Circassian pattern, always stood behind his mistress's chair at luncheon, while from time to time she invited her guests to admire his handsome eyes and mouth, there was nothing for ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... we meet, to be separated forever again? Why did not Fate allow me to be born as a poor serf upon one of thy estates, giving to thee the right to possess me, to me the sweet duty of loving thee? O Heaven, why art thou an enemy of my country, or why am I a German? Men call me happy; they envy me my father's wealth; ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf, knecht, thrall, slave, villain, peasant, and laborer, to artisan and working-man—there is a vision of progress as bright as the light which fell upon Saul of Tarsus as ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster(c) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... p. 418) says that 'he was more detested than any man alive, as a shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants and dependants.' Lord Albemarle (Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 70) describes the 'bad Lord Lonsdale. He exacted a serf-like submission from his poor and abject dependants. He professed a thorough contempt for modern refinements. Grass grew in the neglected approaches to his mansion.... Awe and silence pervaded the inhabitants [of Penrith] when the gloomy despot traversed their streets. He ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Swede and Dane, Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, Arab, Armenian, and Mantchoo, Would ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... make our preparations without delay; but if we commit any imprudence, we are lost without escape. In this city there is an artisan who cuts and carves wonderful images: there is no land where he is not known for the figures which he has shapen and carved and made. John is his name, and he is a serf of mine. No one could cope with John's best efforts in any art, however varied it might be. For, compared with him, they are all novices, and like a child with nurse. By imitating his handiwork the artisans of Antioch and Rome have learned all they know how to do—and besides ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... but anon, in such muddy driblets, {850} Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle, And genially floats me about the giblets. I'll tell you what I intend to do: I must see this fellow his sad life through— He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall. My father was born here, and I inherit His fame, a chain he bound his son with; Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it, But there's no mine to blow up and get done with: {860} So, I must stay till the end of the chapter. For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... serf who spoke no word of any language but his own. Although of a brutal, almost idiotic type, he was loudly eulogized by his master as the model of fidelity and usefulness. Bourgonef treated him with gentleness, though with a certain ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... ago than last night at the 'Pied Merlin,'" the clerk answered, recognizing the escaped serf who had been so ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... joined by an old house-serf, who had once been his nurse. The money-lender had deprived this old man of his monthly allowance, and driven him off the estate; since then his refuge had been a corner in a peasant's hut. Misha had been too short a time in possession of his estate to have left ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... never reached his resting-place for the night without paying his first visit to the church. Wherever he went, crowds of every rank poured out to meet him, and he never sent them away without the full Church service, and a sermon; nay, more—each poor serf might come to him, pour out his troubles, whether temporal, or whether his heart had been touched by the good words he had heard. Above all, Wulstan delighted in giving his blessing in Confirmation, and would ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... night. Our present is its dawn. Our future shall be its perfect day. Think of that night from which we have emerged—a chaos of contending forces, a world in which might was the measure of right, a civilization of scepter and sword, of baron and serf, of master and slave. That, we have left behind us. Think of the grey dawn that our civilization has reached—the dawn of a public conscience, of individual liberty, of collective welfare, of the sacredness ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... where the causeway crossed it, he saw two men standing, that from their dress seemed to be great chiefs. Behind them, with his hands bound, and attached by a rope held in the hand of one of the chiefs, was a young man of a wild and fierce aspect, in the dress of a serf, a rough tunic and leggings. His head was bare, and he looked around him in dismay, like a beast in a trap. Behind, at the edge of the clearing, stood four soldiers silent, with bows strung and arrows fitted to the string. Over the whole group there seemed to be the shadow of a stern ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dignity of human privilege. I would have been as proud—I was as proud when the day came—to vote for the President of the United States as he could have been to take his oath of office. I do not believe that any poor serf, escaped from the tyranny of Russia, ever saw the American shore with a more grateful eye than I looked to the prospect of being admitted, with the citizens of Utah, into the ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... candlestick and knew that he must use it, his heart sank within him again. He was as a ghost, all whose power of wandering free through these upper regions ceases at cock-crow; or rather he was the opposite of the ghost, for till cock-crow he must again be a serf. And would that be all? Could he trust himself to come down to breakfast a free man in ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of one of the huge, dirty tenements in Vosnesenski Prospekt brought to the police office notice of the fact that the Pole, Kasimir Bodlevski, had left the city; and the housekeeper of the late Princess Chechevinski informed the police that the serf girl Natalia Pavlovna (Natasha) had disappeared without leaving a trace, which the housekeeper now announced, as the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... landlord, and straightway the deposit, converted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. It is surely not very great Radicalism to affirm that a state of things so anomalous ought not to exist—that the English tenant should be a freeman, not a serf—and that he ought not to be bound down by a weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience of his own. The simple principle of 'No lease, no vote,' would set all right; and it is a principle which so ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... protector in troublous times. The social structure of the Middle Ages accordingly assumed the hierarchical form which we speak of as the Feudal system. In this thorough-going application of the principle of authority every man, in theory, had his master. The serf held of his lord, who held of a great seigneur, who held of the king. The king in the completer theory held of the emperor who was crowned by the Pope, who held of St. Peter. The chain of descent was complete from the Ruler of ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... know what to do," began Raissa: "the doctor has prescribed something for father, and I must go to the apothecary's'; and our serf" (Latkin had still one serf left) "has brought us some wood from the village, and also a goose. But the landlord has taken it away. 'You are in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... to the republic demand that men shall not be born as rulers, nor born as serfs. The serf is the person who is born in poverty, with no right to a standing place, and whom society has left to the education of the street or of the coal mine, growing up without knowledge, without industrial skill—knowing nothing but to sell ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... precisely the same state of ignorance. On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Helene, fascinatingly ugly in her serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria's jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs. Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the unseen ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... bad or disagreeable things were used quite differently originally. The word villain is, perhaps, the most expressive we can use to show our opinion of the depths of a person's wickedness. Yet in the Middle Ages a villain, or "villein," was merely a serf or labourer bound to work on the land of a particular lord. The word in Saxon times would have been churl. As time went on both these words became terms of contempt. The lords in the Middle Ages were certainly often ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... with the request: the maids, with the simple familiarity of the Russian serf, taking their dismissal reluctantly. But Madame Dravikine held them all in awe, and before her they did not dare the protest that their Princess might have listened to. When the sisters were alone, they crossed the room together and seated themselves on a great sofa upholstered in ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... feudal ages, between baron and retainer, established at first upon principles of individual safety and the public weal, soon degenerated into that of noble and serf. That which at first was but an honorable distinction between knight service on the one hand, and protection and patronage on the other, became, in the course of time, the baser relation of haughty assumption and oppression on the one hand, and the most abject servitude on the other. Descended ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-warmed and sun-scented night, where black slaves fanned the sultry air with fans of peacock plumes, while from afar, across the palm and fountains, drifted the roaring of lions and the cries of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... serf, and was a most devoted and assiduous man, excessively economical in managing his master's affairs, and constantly worried himself over the increase of his master's property at the expense ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... executive blunder left wholly to the master class, with the startling result at its close that, whereas Negro slavery had been abolished, Negro serfdom reappeared in every instance as the industrial basis of the reconstructed States, and that a serf power was about to take the place of the slave power in the newly restored Union more dangerous than the old slave power to free industrialism than five is greater than three in federal numbers. For, while ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... view, he was fool enough to set the detective police after me—me, who could snap all their noses off! For he saw how your heart was all set on one thing, and expected to have you his serf forever, by the simple expedient of hanging me. The detectives failed, as they always do. He also failed in his overtures ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the knowledge that they were simply getting payment for what they delivered would make them more independent and more energetic. I believe the result would be a greatly increased fishery in the islands, and the throwing over of that serf spirit which exists at present among so many of the tenants in ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... from the eyes of men; only when the evening was come, and all things sought their rest, he prayed the peasant and other mean folk of that country, of their charity to grant him shelter for the night. From the serf he gathered tidings of the King. These gave again to him what they, in turn, had taken from some outlawed knight. Thus Tristan learned that when Pentecost was come King Mark purposed to hold high Court at Tintagel, and keep the feast with pomp and revelry; moreover that thither would ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... the towns began rapidly to develop the elements of popular force. In 1120, a Flemish knight who might descend so far as to marry a woman of the plebeian ranks incurred the penalty of degradation and servitude. In 1220, scarcely a serf was to be found in all Flanders. The Countess Jane had enfranchised all those belonging to her as early as 1222. In 1300, the chiefs of the gilden, or trades, were more powerful than the nobles. These dates ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... within sight of Dublin, were included in de Lacy's original grant. None of these fortresses could have been more than a few miles distant from the next, and once within their thick-ribbed walls, the Norman, Saxon, Cambrian, or Danish serf or tenant might laugh at the Milesian arrows and battle-axes without. With these fortresses, and their own half-Irish origin and policy, the de Lacys, father and son, held Meath for two generations in general subjection. But the banishment of the brothers in 1210, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... hat, Marcus, when I am gone. This fits me again like a shell does one of the old white snails, and makes me feel like a soldier and a man again, instead of a herdsman and a serf." ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... hardly stand fire at the present day. The investigation of Paul Vinogradoff and others have conclusively established that there was not a real difference in status between the so-called villein regardant and villein in gross, and that in any case the villein was not properly a slave but rather a serf.[5] Moreover, the Statute of Tenures deals solely with tenure and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... Woman is held politically to have no existence; (2) civilly, she is a minor; (3) in marriage she is a serf; (4) in labor she is made inferior and robbed of her earnings; (5) in public instruction she is sacrificed to man; (6) out of marriage, answers to the faults committed by both; (7) as a mother is deprived of her right to her children; (8) she is only deemed equally responsible, intelligent ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... as a noble in medival society it was, in general, necessary to be the holder of land for which only such services were due as were considered honorable, and none of those which it was customary for the peasant or serf to perform. The noble must, moreover, be a free man and have at least sufficient income to maintain himself and his horse without any sort of labor. The nobles enjoyed certain privileges which set them off from ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... better general picture of society in England during this period can be found than that presented by Sir Walter Scott's novel, "Ivanhoe." There every class appears. One sees the Saxon serf and swineherd wearing the brazen collar of his master Cedric; the pilgrim wandering from shrine to shrine, with the palm branch in his cap to show that he has visited the Holy Land; the outlaw, Robin Hood, lying in wait to strip rich churchmen and other travelers who were on their ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... privileges of a Welsh tribesman or Cymro, as regards location on land, until after many generations. But if they married Welshwomen, and held land from generation to generation, the greatgrandsons became fully privileged tribesmen.(158) Similarly if a stranger voluntarily assumed the position of serf to a Welshman, and his descendants did not choose to depart, but remained in that position to the descendants of the Welshman, the greatgrandsons of the Welshman became proprietors of ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... courts recognized, because they could not help it, as a sort of tenant right, calling it a customary tenancy by base service. A century later these services in kind had been pretty frequently commuted into a fixed rent paid in money, and the serf had become a freeman, and a rather formidable freeman, too. For it was largely from among these technical serfs that Edward III recruited the infantry who formed his line at Crecy in 1346, and the archers of Crecy were not exactly the sort ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... by wealthy Russian nobles to the diplomatic corps were by no means so frequent or so lavish as of old. Two reasons were assigned for this, one being the abolition of the serf system, which had impoverished the nobility, and the other the fact that the Emperor Alexander III had set the fashion of paying less attention to foreigners than had ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... these great personages must have been the treatment they met with. For Tycho was no respecter of persons. His humbly-born wife sat at the head of the table, whoever was there; and he would snub and contradict a chancellor just as soon as he would a serf. Whatever form his pride may have taken when a youth, in his maturity it impelled him to ignore differences of rank not substantially justified, and he seemed to take a delight in exposing the ignorance of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... covers roughly an area the size of Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and Maryland combined, and supports a population of possibly twelve thousand, which includes about forty-five hundred Tuareg, four thousand Negro serf-slaves, and some thirty-five hundred scorned sedentary Haratin workers. The balance of the population consists of a handful of Enaden smiths and a small number of Arab shopkeepers in the largest of the sedentary ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... you enter on a realm where all— Use, custom, morals—are untried and strange, In Poland here reigns freedom absolute; The king himself, although in pomp supreme, Must ofttime be the serf of his noblesse; But there the father's sacred power prevails, And in the subject finds ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer a slave but a serf. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... ruthless tax-collector; he is shut off from the world by enormous distances over impracticable roads. When the famine comes, and come it assuredly will, the moujik has no alternative but to stay where he is and starve. Since Alexander II. of philanthropic memory made the Russian serf a free man, the blessings of freedom have been found to resolve themselves chiefly into a perfect liberty to die of starvation, of cold, or of dire disease. When he was a serf this man was of some small value to some one; now ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... the common man toiled a serf without wages, for his master; while in Paris itself, the centre of gayety and fashion, the fruit of his toil was expended by ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... am thy priest and thy poet, I am thy serf and thy king; I cure the tears of the heartsick, When I come near they ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... themes unexposed to foreign influence. It is true the Church has altered the application of many by dressing up afresh pagan observances in Christian costumes. There are several, but one of the songs of the Russian serf to his prattling offspring illustrates this statement. Before reading it, it should be borne in mind that Ovsen is the Teutonic Sun God who possessed a boar, and that the antiquity of the song belongs to a time when the Russian peasant's forefathers worshipped ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... boast of our national freedom, and we talk about universal suffrage, the 'Home of the Free,' etc. Yet the serfs in Russia were freed in March, 1861, just before our Civil war began. They freed their serfs without any war, and each serf received some acres of land. They freed twenty-three millions, and we freed four or five millions of blacks; and all of us, who are old enough, remember that one of the fears in freeing the slaves was the number ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... the Bourbonnais, in the Nivernais, in Burgundy, in Franche-Comte, there are none, or very few domains, no signs remaining of ancient servitude. . . . A good many personal serfs, or so constituted through their own gratitude, or that of their progenitors, are still found."[1228] There, man is a serf, sometimes by virtue of his birth, and again through a territorial condition. Whether in servitude, or as mortmains, or as cotters, one way or another, 1,500,000 individuals, it is said, wore about their necks a remnant of the feudal collar; this is not surprising ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the period was of three kinds: the leibeigener or serf, who was little better than a slave, who cultivated his lord's domain, upon whom unlimited burdens might be fixed, and who was in all respects amenable to the will of his lord; the hoeriger or villein, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... he asked and Asano made him explain. The Chinese spectre had vanished. Chinaman and European were at peace. The twentieth century had discovered with reluctant certainty that the average Chinaman was as civilised, more moral, and far more intelligent than the average European serf, and had repeated on a gigantic scale the fraternisation of Scot and Englishman that happened in the seventeenth century. As Asano put it; "They thought it over. They found we were white men after all." Graham turned again to the view and his ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... for three months had been beautifying the final weeks, This more than wise woman now came to nurse poor Hattie, came to companion her back to health, came as a revelation to this mistaken and wearied one, of a better way. After forty-five years of the playless life of a serf to blighting seriousness, the wonder is that sourness had not entered to hopelessly curdle all ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... said gutturally, and in a sepulchral profundity, "he does not understand himself. I haff nefer said it before. But he serfs Der Master because he despairs, andt he will cease to serf Der Master when he hopes. And I—I serf Der Master because I hope, andt I will cease to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... tremendous, like a powerful spring that has been held down, or like an explosive which is the more destructive in proportion as it is more confined. People newly made free go to the opposite extreme. Emancipate a serf and he becomes insolent, he does not know how to use his freedom, and becomes violent. The great majority of the people are smarting from the old land laws, which have left a bitter animosity against English rule, which ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... never overlooked what was inherently believed the patriotic duty of combining a display of loyalty to their sovereign with a proportionate degree of disloyalty to the captain and owner who were responsible for supplying them with food that even a Russian serf might have felt justified in complaining about. So a doggerel verse was composed and sung fervently to a modified form of the National Anthem by way of intimating their grievance forcefully to the notice of their commander. Relevancy did ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... record of days, until three weeks or thereabout passed, and then she lost track of time. It dragged along, yet looked at as the past, it seemed to have sped swiftly. The change in her, the growing old, the revelation and responsibility of serf, as a woman, made this experience appear to ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... had tired of this hunt, as he had tired of many other hunts in the past. Hunting the savage khada, he thought resentfully, might be an amusing sport for the nobles. But to a serf, it was hard, lung-bursting work at best. At worst, it meant agonizing death beneath trampling hoofs and ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... The serf or villein was attached to the glebe or soil, and could not be severed from it, deprived of his family, or sold to another as a chattel; being retained as part of the indivisible feudal community. But the chattel ...
— Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible? • Isaac Allen |
