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Battlement   /bˈætəlmənt/  /bˈætəlmɛnt/   Listen
Battlement

noun
1.
A rampart built around the top of a castle with regular gaps for firing arrows or guns.  Synonyms: crenelation, crenellation.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Battlement" Quotes from Famous Books



... across the city of Manator and above the babel of human discords rising from the crowded mass that filled the seats of the stadium below. It called the players for the first game, and simultaneously there fluttered to the peaks of a thousand staffs on tower and battlement and the great wall of the stadium the rich, gay pennons of the fighting chiefs of Manator. Thus was marked the opening of The Jeddak's Games, the most important of the year and second only to ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... a Claude Lorraine, or the pen of a Washington Irving to do it justice. Such hills I never before beheld. Not altogether for size but for beauty. Clad in a garb of the deepest green they towered aloft, like the battlement of two rival fortresses—and while the sun lit up the hills to our right, the shades of mid-day deepened upon the frowning buttresses to our left. Every tree seemed to have a peculiar hue, a certain depth of color completely its own. ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney

... peculiar bitterness of heart and phrase. He was called Flambard, or Firebrand. He was represented as a devouring lion. Still the great edifice grew up, and Gundulf, who lived to the age of fourscore, saw his great keep completed from basement to battlement. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... whole surface of the window becomes divided into a series of panels, the heads of which being arched, are trefoiled or cinquefoiled. In the later windows the transoms at the top are often furnished with a small ornamental battlement, causing the mullions ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath

... Rebecca, "I will trust thee;" and she descended from the verge of the battlement, but remained standing close by one of the embrasures. "Here," she said, "I take my stand. If thou shalt attempt to diminish by one step the distance now between us, thou shalt see that the Jewish maiden will rather trust her soul with God than her ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in many a nightmare—with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was defendre d'afficher), with bits of old battlement at the top, and overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street corners—"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... say so! for they looked but saw nothing—only cliff beyond cliff rising from a white fringed shore. Not a broken tower, not a ragged battlement ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... crying sin in any expense, Should so besotted be, and lost To the fact that now, at public cost, Powder was being day by day Wantonly wasted, blown away);— Yes, he would ask, "with what intent But to perch the Greeks on a battlement From which they might o'erlook the town, The easier to batter it down, Which he had proved must be the case (If it hadn't already taken place): He called on his readers to fear and dread it, Whilst he wrote it,—whilst they read it!" "How ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... the attack continued and was repulsed. Meanwhile, unknown to the Spaniards, the besieged burghers were silently and swiftly building inside the ravelin a solid half-moon shaped battlement. On the 31st of December, the last day of 1572, the great assault was made. "The attack was unexpected, but the forty or fifty sentinels defended the walls while they sounded the alarm. The tocsin bells tolled, and the citizens, whose sleep was not apt to be heavy during that ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... sat by the battlement and the stories were told. They were stories of the small grains lying hid in the dark earth waiting for the golden heat of the sun to draw them forth into life until they covered the tilled fields with ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... sat at a little distance, with her fiery tresses rolled in upright puffs over each temple, and her great horn-comb towering therein like a battlement. A calico gown with very gay colors straggling over it, like honeysuckles and buttercups on a hill-side, adorned her lathy person, leaving a trim foot visible upon a bundle of stalks just within range of uncle Nat's ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... cemented together with white, thus giving them a strange freckled appearance; while in many cases the dust and dew have produced a little soil, upon which a spontaneous growth of shrubbery has sprung up; the flat roofs have usually a collection of little urn-shaped turrets round the battlement, between which are stretched clothes-lines. Here the ebony daughters of Eve, with their bullet-heads and polished faces and necks, may be seen at all hours hanging up washed clothes, their capacious mouths ornamented with long cigars, at which they ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... insidious hint, than, one folding-door of the ancient gate being already closed by the wind, as has been already intimated, honest Caleb lost no time in shutting the other with a clang, which resounded from donjon-vault to battlement. Having thus secured the pass, he forthwith indulged the excluded huntsmen in brief parley, from a small projecting window, or shot-hole, through which, in former days, the warders were wont to reconnoitre ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... battlement She saw some dust that cattle meant. The ordinary story Isn't gory, But a jest. But here's the truth unqualified. The husband wasn't mollified Her head is in his bloody Little study With ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... miles. Like all Persian cities it was enclosed in a mud wall and a moat. Since then the city has so increased that an extension has been made to an outer boundary some ten miles in circumference, and marked by an uneven ditch, the excavated sand of which is thrown up to form a sort of battlement. Twelve gates, opened at sunrise and closed at night, give access to the town. The citadel, the ancient part of the city, contains the principal public buildings, the private residences of high officials, and the Shah's Palace. To the south of this are found the extensive domed ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... the streets, which seemed darker and more miserable than all the rest, we were brought to a full stop by the march of a strong body of the National Guard, which halted in front of an enormous old building, furnished with battlement and bartizan. "Le Temple!" exclaimed my companion, with almost a shriek of exultation. I glanced upward, and saw a light with the pale glimmer which, in my boyish days, I had heard always attributed to spectres passing along the dim casements ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... we, some of us discharging our pieces to add to the uproar, while one man exploded a swivel gun which stood on the seaward battlement. ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... and the rain channel two cubits, and the beams one cubit, and the covering plaster one cubit; and the height of the upper story was forty cubits, and the string course one cubit, and the rain channel two cubits, and the beams one cubit, and the covering plaster one cubit, and the battlement three cubits, and the scarecrow one cubit. Rabbi Judah said, "the scarecrow was not counted in the measurement; but the ...
— Hebrew Literature

... ancient dukes of Ferrara, which is to be found a little farther on, has a fine feudal aspect. It is a vast collection of towers joined together by high walls crowned with a battlement forming a cornice, and which emerge from a great moat full of water, over which one enters by a protected bridge. The castle, built wholly of brick or of stones reddened by the sun, has a vermilion tint which deprives it of its imposing effect. It is too much like ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... And measures their great footsteps to and fro, Hath lifted up into my brain the flow Of this mad tide of blood.—Ay! we are like In foam and frenzy; the same winds do strike, The same fierce sun-rays, from their battlement Of fire! so, when I perish impotent Before the night of death, they'll say of me, He died as mad and ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart

... morning sun On leaguer'd castle wall, When bastion, tower, and battlement, Seemed nodding ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... two equal portions of land. One included the higher part of this enclosure, from the cloudy pinnacle of that rock, whence springs the river of Fan-Palms, to that precipitous cleft which you see on the summit of the mountain, and which, from its resemblance in form to the battlement of a fortress, is called the Embrasure. It is difficult to find a path along this wild portion of the enclosure, the soil of which is encumbered with fragments of rock, or worn into channels formed by torrents; yet it produces noble trees, and innumerable springs ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... fearful din, Where Ocean with his thunder shocks Stuns the green foundation rocks, Through the green abyss that mocks his eye, Oft hath the eerie watchman sent A shuddering look, a shivering sigh, From the edge of the howling battlement! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... Lloyd's,—all are gone out of sight into the forgotten silences of the green underworld. Upon the land we can trace Roman and Celt, Saxon and Norman, by names and places, by minster, keep, and palace. This one gave the battlement, that the pinnacle, the other the arch. But the fluent surface of the sea takes no such permanent impression. Gone are the quaint stern-galleries, gone the high top-gallant fore-castles, gone the mighty banks of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... punishment, and, this being done before sunset this evening, he will yield to you free and uninjured the said M. de Tignonville, and will retire from the lands of Vrillac. But if you refuse"—the man passed his eye along the line of attentive faces which fringed the battlement—"he will at sunset hang the said Tignonville on the gallows raised for Tavannes, and will harry the demesne of ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman

... wasting and triumphant War, Peace, with her sacred olive bough, Can boast of conquests nobler far: Beneath her gentle sway Earth blossoms like a rose— The wide old woods recede away, Through realms, unknown but yesterday, The tide of Empire flows. Woke by her voice rise battlement and tower, Art builds a home, and Learning finds a bower— Triumphant Labor for the conflict girds, Speaks in great works instead of empty words; Bends stubborn matter to his iron will, Drains the foul marsh, and rends in twain the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... the glacier. But the earth-fires that had melted and heaved it, the ice mass that chiseled and shaped it, the wind and rain that corroded and crumbled it, had left plenty of bricks out of that battlement, had covered its face with knobs and horns, had ploughed ledges and cleaved fissures and fastened crags and pinnacles upon it, so that, while its surface was full of man-traps and blind ways, the human spider might still find some ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... Before the fires, Whitehall was a city of palaces reaching far into St. James, with a fleet of royal barges at float below the river stairs. From Scotland Yard to Bridge Street the royal ensign blew to the wind above tower and parapet and battlement. I mind under the archway that spanned little Whitehall Street M. Radisson dismissed ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... battlement and pinnet high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair, So will they blaze, when fate is nigh The lordly line of high ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... important point obscured by the erroneous translation of A.V. Now Moses was on the east side, and obviously the writer to whom the east side was the other side, must himself have been on the west side. The law providing for the battlement on the roof of a new house, xxii. 8, shows that the book contemplates the later settled life of cities or villages, not the nomadic life of tents; and the very significant law concerning the boundary marks which had been set up by "those of the olden time," xix. 14, is proof conclusive that ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... the Governor and the chief people rode out to receive us. Our horses' hoofs soon rang under a ruined battlement, and we entered in state through the dark tunnels. Horses were neighing, sabres were clanking; it was a noisy, confusing, picturesque scene. We tented for the night in the midst of the grand court of ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... gratified the heart of Mrs Radcliffe. Winding stairs lead, in the thickness of the walls, from tower to tower, and the dim corridors and dizzying bartizans are made safe to the most timid of Cockneys by stout wooden banisters, that enable you to stand as securely on a crumbling battlement as on the top of Salisbury plain. We saw the courts and quadrangles, admired the splendid windows, and only wondered at the lowness of the ceilings of some of the principal rooms, as from floor to floor could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... abide In such a mansion, as scarce thought finds words To speak of, better had ye here on earth Been flocks or mountain goats. As down we stood In the dark pit beneath the giants' feet, But lower far than they, and I did gaze Still on the lofty battlement, a voice Bespoke me thus: "Look how thou walkest. Take Good heed, thy soles do tread not on the heads Of thy poor brethren." Thereupon I turn'd, And saw before and underneath my feet A lake, whose frozen surface liker seem'd To glass than water. Not so thick a veil In winter e'er hath Austrian ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... age." Nor should be left unrecorded the high-born Scottish damsel whose tradition still remains at the Castle of Huntingtower, in Scotland, where two adjacent pinnacles still mark the Maiden's Leap. She sprang from battlement to battlement, a distance of nine feet and four inches, and eloped with her lover. Were a young lady to go through one of our villages in a series of leaps like that, and were she to require her lovers to follow in her footsteps, it is to be feared that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... earth, people could be content to live in old England. There, seen through the bright transparent atmosphere, were convent, cathedral, castle, and tower, grouped at the foot of a mountain, glistening with endless tints as it towered up nine thousand feet, wall and battlement running up the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... gesticulating with dramatic gestures into space. This was our Vahtimestari. From his exalted position, with one of the most beautiful panoramas eye could wish lying at his feet—resting on a famous battlement, that had withstood the ravages of love and war—he evolved his magic verse. Truly no scene could be more inspiring, no motive more sublime, for even we humble humdrum matter-of-fact Englishwomen felt almost inspired to tempt the poet's ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... this time crossed the narrow court, and passing beneath a second portcullised door defended on either side by high battlement walls, nearly double as thick as the steps themselves were wide. At the head was an arched door, heavily studded with nails, and opening into the Castle hall, a gloomy, vaulted room, its loop-hole windows, in their mighty depth of wall, affording ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge

... then they went up to the platform above. They fastened one end of the rope to the battlement, having first tied knots ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty

... by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger's eye, Each ivied arch and pillar lone ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... silver paper laid over one another like the shingles on a roof,—the bishops in long gowns, with mitre on the head,—all in the two colors of their respective sides. The four castles were made of pieces of gray sandpaper, glued into cylinder shape, with battlement-shaped strips around the top; when glued on their standards, they ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller

... the hammer. Its ecclesiastical importance begins when John de Villula purchased it of the king, and transferred hither his episcopal stool from Wells (see further, p. 19). In mediaeval days Bath was a walled city, and fragments of its fortifications, crowned by a modern battlement, may still be seen in "Borough Walls"; and two round-headed arches of the old E. gate are visible in a passage behind the Empire Hotel, leading to the river. The battle of Lansdown gives Bath a place in the annals of the Great Rebellion. But the fame ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... fall in a broad green slope from the old Cathedral battlement down to the River Pol. Their long stretches of meadow are scattered with trees, some of the oldest oaks in Glebeshire, and they are finally bounded by the winding path of the Rope Walk that skirts the river bank. Along the Rope Walk in March and April the daffodils first, and the primroses ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole

... departed and went up into an high battlement, and led with her twelve gentlewomen; and when they were above, one of the gentlewomen cried, and said: Ah, Sir Bors, gentle knight have mercy on us all, and suffer my lady to have her will, and if ye do not we must suffer death with ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... black drapery, were lost in the distance on either side. Gradually, Stanley's thoughts became indistinct; the stars seemed to lose their radiance, as covered by a light mist; a dark cloud appearing, in his half dormant fancy, to take the gigantic proportions of a man, hovered on the battlement. It became smaller and smaller, but still it seemed a cloud, through which the moonlight gleamed; but a thrill passed through him, as if telling of some impalpable and indefinable object of dread. With a sudden effort he shook off the ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... of the sacred hall You hear the trumpet's call, At dawn upon the silvery battlement, Re-echo through the deep And bid the sons of God to rise from sleep, And with a shout to hail The sunrise on the city of the Grail: The music that proud Lucifer in Hell Missed more than all the joys that he forwent. You hear the solemn bell At vespers, when the oriflammes are furled; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various

... rampart!" Klingsor persists. Kundry wrings her hands. "Woe! Woe! Have I waked for this? Must I, indeed?... Must I?" At which first intimation of weakening, Klingsor ceases to press his authority, and adopts a different method of persuasion. Climbing to the battlement, he describes the approaching figure: "Ha! He is beautiful, the boy!" "Oh! Oh!" ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... time was beginning in such a world. There was a massive purple battlement on the sea, at a great distance, the last entrenchment of night; but a multitude of rays had stormed it, poured through clefts and chasms in the wall, and escaped to the Windhover on a broad road that was newly laid from the ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... do ye know That Kaad, King Mark's old stable groom, beheld St. George leap from the battlement where wall And rock drop off an ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... all-fours. The Indian was not in sight. He squirmed within a low battlement of serrated stone guarding the crack, and let himself down into what appeared to be the mouth of a cave. The opening was so low as to be invisible just outside the serrated breastwork. He found himself in a room of rock, irregularly hollow above, with a candle ...
— Marianson - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... cord, which he procured some days before from the turnkey, and fastening the stone firmly to one end, threw that end over the wall. Now the wall had (as walls of great strength mostly have) an overhanging sort of battlement on either side; and the stone, when flung over and drawn to the tether of the cord to which it was attached, necessarily hitched against this projection; and thus the cord was as it were fastened to the wall, and Tomlinson was enabled by it to draw himself up to the top of the barrier. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hulls belched their broadsides of yellow flame now. From battlement and casemate of forts rolled the thunder of their batteries, sending their heavy shots smashing into ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... cat-like delicacy over the stones. They skirted large pools and tall rocks seaweed covered. Along a road broad enough for twelve chariots to have driven on it abreast, slowly they came to the great gate of the castle. And as they got nearer, they saw at every window heads leaning out; every battlement, every terrace, was crowded with figures. And when they were quite near, by throwing their heads very far back, so that their necks felt quite stiff for quite a long time afterwards, the children could see that all those people seemed quite young, and seemed to have very odd and delightful clothes—just ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit

... turret-tops was splash'd the yellow foam. And, like a horse unbroken when first he feels the rein, The furious river struggled hard, and toss'd his tawny mane, And burst the curb, and bounded, rejoicing to be free, And whirling down, in fierce career, battlement, and plank, and pier, Rush'd headlong ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education



Words linked to "Battlement" :   wall, crenel, merlon, fort, fortress, rampart, bulwark, crenellation, crenelle, crenelation



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