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Fief

noun
1.
A piece of land held under the feudal system.  Synonym: feoff.



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"Fief" Quotes from Famous Books



... century, Malcolm I obtained Strathclyde (see map, Ontario Public School History of England, p. 27) as a fief from Edmund of England. His grandson, Malcolm II, was invested with Lothian, before this a part of the English earldom of Northumbria. These fiefs are the basis of all claims afterwards made by English kings as ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... The fief of Aumale (q. v.) was granted by the archbishop of Rouen to Odo of Champagne, brother-in-law of William the Conqueror, who erected it into a countship. On Odo's death his son Stephen succeeded not only to the countship of Aumale, but to the lordships of Holderness, of Bytham in Lincolnshire, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... born in 1694 the son of a lawyer named Arouet. There are doubts as to the origin of the name he has made so famous; whether it was derived from a fief possessed by his mother, or from an anagram of AROUET LE JEUNE. At any rate, the name was adopted by the young poet, at his own fancy, a case not without parallel in the eighteenth century. [Footnote: As in the case of D'Alembert. For Voltaire's ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... proprietors to that land which would be planted and inhabited within twenty-one years. The political jurisdiction of the area was still under the Virginia government. The laws of the colony were to remain operative, and in effect the grant was "to create a subordinate fief or proprietorship within Virginia." But considerable confusion prevailed over the retroactive recognition of grants, and many landholders sought confirmation of their ownership. "Besides there are many other grants," stated Governor William Berkeley, "in that patent ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.

... distinguished himself under the Peshwah in the famous campaigns of 1737-8 against the Mogul emperor, Mohammed Shah: and on the cession of Malwa to the Mahrattas in 1743, he received the government of that province as a jaghir or fief, which he transmitted at his death to his son Mahdajee. The life of this daring and politic chief would be almost identical with the history, during the same period, of Central and Upper India, in which he attained such a degree of authority as had not been held ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... not reasonless: below there In the vale, had been her home; the nook might hold her even yet, And the downlands were her father's fief; she still might come and go there; - So ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy

... contrast which history can supply. It has been truly remarked, that, in estimating mere areas, Attica, containing on its whole surface only seven hundred square miles, shrinks into insignificance if compared with many a baronial fief of the Middle Ages, or many a colonial allotment of modern times. Its antagonist, the Persian empire, comprised the whole of modern Asiatic and much of modern European Turkey, the modern kingdom of Persia, and the countries of modern Georgia, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... and the gentleman who had addressed me came and embraced me, not in the least offended. The joke was explained to me. His name was Casalnovo, not Casanova, and he was duke and lord of the fief of that name. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... Germans were among them, holding dominion with the bayonet and the bullet; and finally, six weeks later, I saw how they behaved when substantially all their country, excluding a strip of seaboard, had been reduced to the state of a conquered fief held and ruled ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... at its end Makrisi followed the troubadour to his regranted fief of Vaquieras. This was a chill and brilliant night, swayed by a frozen moon so powerful that no stars showed in the unclouded heavens, and everywhere the bogs were curdled with thin ice. An obdurate wind swept like a knife-blade across a world ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... alliance with the Susianians and Chaldaeans. Susiana was the last country which Assyria had conquered, and could remember the pleasures of independence. Chaldaea, though it had been now for above half a century an Assyrian fief, and had borne the yoke with scarcely a murmur during that period, could never wholly forget its old glories, or the long resistance which it had made before submitting to its northern neighbor. The overtures of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson

... whatsoever to indicate that the coast was under European protection or dominion. Notes were exchanged between the Cabinets of Madrid and London, and Spain relinquished for ever her claim to the Borneo fief of Brunei. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur above Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of Luni. This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and still in the possession of the Marquis of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... "is twenty-five. His mother was my sister. She married his father when she was seventeen. He was twenty years older than she, but they were awfully happy. The blood's pure English, although the title's Italian. The fief of the duchy goes with it. They were given to Piers' great-grandfather—he was a diplomat—for services rendered. A recent attempt to dispossess the boy mercifully failed." She looked round about her. "By the way, I thought ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... partly minatory and partly coaxing. William had to show what he was made of. A conspiracy was formed against him in the heart of his feudal court, and almost of his family. He had given kindly welcome to his cousin Guy of Burgundy, and had even bestowed on him as a fief the countships of Vernon and Brionne. In 1044 the young duke was at Valognes; when suddenly, at midnight, one of his trustiest servants, Golet, his fool, such as the great lords of the time kept, knocked at the door of his chamber, crying, "Open, open, my lord duke: fly, fly, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... The marshal was alive in 1212, but he probably died soon afterwards, without returning to France, (Ducange, Observations sur Villehardouin, p. 238.) His fief of Messinople, the gift of Boniface, was the ancient Maximianopolis, which flourished in the time of Ammianus Marcellinus, among the cities of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... judicious Colbert, jealous always for the power of the monarchy, had clipped this ancient feature from Canadian feudalism, and given absolute military control of the country to the Governor at Quebec. The seigneur's judicial powers varied according to the importance of his fief. Barons were empowered to erect gallows and pillories, but the ordinary judicial powers of a Canadian seigneur were confined to Middle and Low justice, which ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... power, made common cause with their arms, and a practised Norman warrior, Robert Guiscard, appeared as Duke of Apulia and Calabria 'by grace of God and of S. Peter and, under his protection, of Sicily also in time to come'![11] The Pope gave him lands in fief, which had hitherto belonged to the Greek Empire, and which the Germans had been unable to conquer; he promised, in return, to defend the prerogatives of S. Peter. Between the hierarchy which was striving to perfect its supremacy, and the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... landright, very different from the copyhold so frequent in England. Every alienation or sale of landed property must be made in the shape of a feudal conveyance, and the party who acquires it holds thereby an absolute and perfect right of property in the fief, while he discharges the stipulations of the vassal, and, above all, pays the feu-duties. The vassal or tenant of the site of the smallest cottage holds his possession as absolutely as the proprietor, of whose ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... to king Ferdinand, he wrote on the subject to Louis XI; his letter is dated the 9th December, 1474. Ferdinand terms Christopher Columbus a subject of Louis; it was because, as is known, Columbus was a Genoese, and Louis was sovereign of Genoa; although that city and Savona were held of him in fief by the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... Duchatel, by the gift, as her marriage portion, of a tract of land adjoining the seigniory of Mainville, and at present the property of Andre Duchatel; but which, at the nuptials, would be added to the Montigny manor, as a sort of arriere fief, and so gratify the craving of the elder Montigny for territorial aggrandizement. The splendid person of Claude had long ago caught the slight affections of Seraphine, who in her visits to Mainville, would hang upon him, much to his distaste, and persist to make him her reluctant ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... successor of Severin gave it in fief to Norbert, a younger son of the house of Normandy, in consideration of an annual quit-rent of sixty sous, and on the condition that the city of Beaumont and its church should remain free and unincumbered. It was in this way that Norbert I became the head of the Marquesses ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola

... the old form of Anversa, Antwerp. All versions that I have seen call Gautier Comte d'Angers or Angiers, the translators, who forgot or were unaware that Antwerp, as part of Flanders, was then a fief of the French crown, apparently taking it for granted that the mention of the latter city was in error and substituting the name of the ancient capital of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... started on his journey accompanied by only two esquires. Four-and-twenty days after his departure his brother John sickened and died—not without suspicions of foul play—and Louis of Bavaria, then possessing the empire, presented the electorate to his own eldest son as a vacant fief of Germany. The change was quietly effected; but in 1345 a man suddenly appeared as from the dead, proclaiming himself the missing Voldemar, and demanding the restoration of his rights. He was of about the same age as the elector would ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... The real causes of war were mutual jealousies, and passion for military glory. The assigned causes were, that Charles did not respect the claims of Francis as king of Naples; and, on the other hand, that Francis had seized the duchy of Milan, which was a fief of the empire, and also retained the duchy of Burgundy, the patrimonial ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... Holger Carlson (Gere), and Thure Jenson (Roos) in West-Gothland, all three councillors of state, were still in arms for Christian. That the first-named nobleman joined the party of Gustavus before the end of the year we know from his letter of thanks for a fief of which he received the investure. Both the latter were proclaimed in 1523 to be enemies of the realm, as also was the archbishop Gustavus Trolle. He had repaired to Denmark two years before, in order to obtain, by his personal instances ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... King had been for seven full years in Spain, so runs the chronicle; castle and keeper alike had gone down except Saragossa, the mountain town, where King Marsil held his court, surrounded by 20,000 Mohammedan nobles. At their council it was agreed to accept Spain as a fief from the emperor, and ten knights set out with golden bridles and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... youngest son, Philip the Hardy, Duke of Touraine, as a reward, it is said, for the valour he displayed in the battle of Poictiers. The county of Burgundy, generally known as Franche-Comte, was not included in this donation, for it was an imperial fief; and it fell by inheritance in the female line to Margaret, dowager Countess of Flanders, widow of Count Louis II, who was killed at Crecy. The duchy and the county were soon, however, to be re-united, for Philip married Margaret, daughter ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... dug at dawn a grave Beneath the hemlocks brown, And to the desert's keeping gave The lord of fief and town. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... and load them with their packs and place upon them water and provisions, ready for setting out as soon as he should come up with the camels. Now this Badawi was a base born churl, a highway thief and a traitor to the friend he held most fief, a rogue in grain, past master of plots and chicane. He had no daughter and no son and was only passing through the town when, by the decree of the Decreer, he fell in with this unhappy one. And ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... "your reply is just. But you are ignorant that Belle-Isle is a fief of M. Fouquet's, and the ancient kings gave the right to the seigneurs of ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... caught a glimpse of another tankette rushing up on his port side. He glanced at it, saw its graceful handcrafting, and knew it for one of the League's own. He could even see the insigne; the mailed heel trampling a stand of wheat; Harolde Dugald, of the neighboring fief. Geoffrey was on coldly polite terms with Dugald—he had no use for the other man's way of treating his serfs—and now he felt a prickle of indignant rage at this attempt to usurp a share of his glory. He saw Dugald's turret begin to traverse, and hastily ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry

... kingdom, the archbishopric of Rheims. The young Count Herbert, driven from his county, commended himself to William. He became his man; he agreed to hold his dominions of him, and to marry one of his daughters. If he died childless, his father-in-law was to take the fief into his own hands. But to unite the old and new dynasties, Herbert's youngest sister Margaret was to marry William's eldest son Robert. If female descent went for anything, it is not clear why Herbert passed by the rights of his two ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman

... plans to settle his great fief. Working in his brain no doubt were dreams of a feudal domain, of a seigniorial chateau looking out across the great river, of respectful tenants paying annual dues to their lord in labour, kind, and money, of a parish church in ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong

... power sufficient to dispense with them, and, in the year 866, he celebrated the Emperor's attainment of his majority by having himself named sessho. The appointment carried with it a sustenance fief of three thousand houses; the privilege of being constantly attended by squadrons of the Right and Left Imperial guards, and the honour of receiving the allowances and the treatment of the Sangu, that is ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... supreme within our Canton here. "Who is the owner of this house?" he asked, With mischief in his thoughts, for well he knew. With prompt decision, thus I answered him: "The emperor, your grace—my lord and yours, And held by one in fief." On this he answered, "I am the emperor's viceregent here, And will not that each peasant churl should build At his own pleasure, bearing him as freely As though he were the master in the land. I shall make bold to put a stop to this!" So saying he, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... brothers, having assumed the habit of the order, lived and died in the performance of acts of charity and devotion. His lands, to which no one asserted any claim, lay waste until they were reassumed by the emperor as a lapsed fief, and the ruins of the castle, which Waldeck had called by his own name, are still shunned by the miner and forester as haunted by evil spirits. Thus were the miseries attendant upon wealth, hastily attained and ill employed, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... uncle, on the death of Isabella's father, determined to seize the duchy for himself, instead of allowing it to descend to Isabella, the proper heir, who, being but a woman, was looked upon with very little respect. "Lorraine," he said, "was too noble and valuable a fief to descend in the ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... protection more and more from the thegn beside him. The freeman "commended" himself to a lord who promised aid, and as the price of this shelter he surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a fief laden with conditions of military service. The principle of personal allegiance which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended to widen into a theory of general dependence. From AElfred's day it ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... aside, and my uncle, El Zagal, usurped my birthright. Amidst open war and secret treason I wrestled for my crown; and now, the sole sovereign of Granada, when, as I fondly imagined, my uncle had lost all claim on the affections of my people by succumbing to the Christian king, and accepting a fief under his dominion, I find that the very crime of El Zagal is fixed upon me by my unhappy subjects—that they deem he would not have yielded but for my supineness. At the moment of my delivery from my rival, I am received with execration ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... followed my Duke ere I was a lover, To take from England fief and fee; But now this game is the other way over— But now England ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling

... of the century the one English pope, Hadrian IV., was a courageous and capable occupant of the papal throne, and upheld its dignity against Frederick Barbarossa; though he could not maintain the claim that the empire was held as a fief of the papacy. But the strife between the spiritual and temporal powers issued on his death in a double election, and an imperial anti-pope divided the allegiance of Christendom with Alexander III. It was not till after Frederick had been well beaten by the Lombard League ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years' War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact, her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings. France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe. England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... his fief of Ivanhoe," said De Bracy, who, having discharged his part honourably in the tournament, had laid his shield and helmet aside, and again mingled with the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... "law of the land," which is the same everywhere and for all persons, is an ideal to be realised in England alone of medieval states. Elsewhere the king's law is a supplement, a postscript; the privilege of the free man is to live under the law of his province, his lord's fief or his ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... the bloodthirsty, and yet blood-drunken ruffians who were pouring along the road from smoking Beziers, to do to Carcassonne as they had done there. Pedro, king of Aragon, interfered; he appeared as mediator in the camp of the Crusaders. Carcassonne was held as a fief under him as lord paramount. He pleaded the youth of the viscount, asserted his fidelity to the Church, his abhorrence of the Albigensian heresy; it was no fault of his, he argued, that his subjects had lapsed into error, and he declared that the Viscount had authorised him to place ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... great friends. We had also both of us the pleasure of being acquainted with some highly-cultured people, the families of the physician, of the minister, and of the schoolmaster in the neighbouring Protestant village, which was as yet still a fief of the Empire.[25] My friend the tutor was a young man quite out of the common, with an actively inquiring mind; especially fond of making plans for wide-stretching travel, and comprehensive schemes of education. Our intercourse and our life ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... against it. That Henry V. had left special orders against his liberation, served to increase the wistful pity with which he was regarded. And when, in defiance of all contemporary virtue, and against express pledges, the English carried war into their prisoner's fief, not only France, but all thinking men in Christendom, were roused to indignation against the oppressors, and sympathy with the victim. It was little wonder if he came to bulk somewhat largely in the imagination of the best of those at home. Charles le Boutteillier, when (as ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a fief of the Niger, we enter a sea of grass. Paddling being no longer possible, my Bosos crew, leaning heavily upon bamboo poles, push the boat vigorously through the grass, which, parting in front, closes together behind us with loud rustling and crackling. We are no ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... argued for him out of the Feudal Law, by which all Inheritances of Fiefs descend to the Male Issue only, and not to the Female, who are not admitted to them. And when there happens a Want of Heirs Males in that Line or Branch wherein the Fief is lodged, then the Feudum or Fief returns back to the other Stock or Branch: which was the very Case at that Time. But such Fiefs as thro' a Depravation of the Law, are convey'd down to Women, cannot properly be called Feuda, but Feudastra, as in other of our Writings ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman

... France, had been vanquished by Charles Martel, who derived that humble but glorious surname from the event we are now to record. Charles had left Eude the enjoyment of his dukedom, provided that he held it as a fief from the crown; but blind with ambition and avarice, Eude adopted a scheme which threw Christianity itself, as well as Europe, into a crisis of peril which has never since occurred. By marrying a daughter with a Mahometan emir, he rashly began an intercourse with the Ishmaelites, one of whose ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... ages, centuries ago, it was not an uncommon thing for a prince or nobleman to secure his domain against seizure or conquest by transferring it nominally to the Pope, from whom he thenceforth held it as a papal fief. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... Citadel and works adjacent—The greater part acquired by purchase from individuals, and partly by conquest, of the old French Works, &c., an annual ground rent of L1 17s. 0d., is payable on part of this land to the Fief ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... and conscious of his inability to rescue the crown from the united forces of the Hungarian partisans of Stephen, and from the Turks, condescended also to send a message to the sultan, offering to hold the crown as his fief and to pay to the Porte the same tribute which John had paid, if the sultan would support his claim. The imperious Turk, knowing that he could depose the baby king at his pleasure, insultingly rejected ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... To whom the Emperor delegates his power, As judge supreme within our Canton here. "Who is the owner of this house?" he asked, With mischief in his thoughts, for well he knew. With prompt decision, thus I answered him: "The Emperor, your grace—my lord and yours, And held by me in fief." On this he answered, "I am the Emperor's vice-regent here, And will not that each peasant churl should build At his own pleasure, bearing him as freely As though he were the master in the land. I shall make bold to put a stop to this!" So saying, he, with menaces, rode off, And left me ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... theory was that all the lands belonged to the king, of whom they were held by the high chiefs in fief; i. e., on condition of rendering him tribute and military service. Each of these district chieftains divided up his territory among an inferior order of petty chiefs, who owed to him the same service and obedience that he owed to ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs

... its arms became for a short time the most powerful state in the north; when the Teutonic knights, the conquerors of Prussia, were compelled to acknowledge its protection; and when not only were Livonia and Courland, the one a component part of the Polish kingdom, and the other a Polish fief, but even the ancient Smolensk and the venerable Kief, the royal seat of Vladimir, and the Russian provinces adjacent to Galicia, all were subjugated by Poland. We speak of this kingdom as it was at the time of its first partition between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Of the four or five millions ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson

... Innocent VIII., having quarrelled with King Ferrante, invited Charles VIII. to invade Naples, and offered him the investiture of this important fief of the Church. But at that time the French monarch had no leisure to think of a foreign expedition. He was already engaged in war with Maximilian, King of the Romans, and in a fierce quarrel with the States of Brittany over the regency of that province ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... sunflower constantly turning toward Royalty. Great excuses are to be made for this, the last male descendant, whose father in his youth had been an Imperial page, and who had been nursed in the conception that Italy (or at least Lombardy) was a natural fief of Austria, allied by instinct and by interest to the holders of the Alps. Count Serabiglione mixed little with his countrymen,—the statement might be inversed,—but when, perchance, he was among them, he talked willingly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... had built nearly a hundred years before—new trouble threatened him, as word came that King Henry of France, the "suzerain," or overlord of Normandy, deeming his authority not sufficiently honored in his Norman fief, had invaded the boy's territories, and with a strong force was besieging the border castle of Tillieres,[H] scarce ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... John had enrolled himself among the crusaders; and yet they had not scrupled to violate the privileges which all Christian nations had granted to the champions of the cross. Lastly, England was become the fief of the holy see; and they could not be ignorant that if the king had the will, he had not at least the power, to give away the rights of the crown, without the consent of his feudal superior. He was therefore bound to annul the concessions which ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... drawn by two black horses with long tails and hairy feet, a tram one and a leader. Though the job shook my nerves, I could not refuse to give them a hand down the stair with the coffin, which had a fief-like smell of death and saw-dust; and we got it fairly landed in the cart, among clean straw. I saw the clodhapper of a ploughman aye dighting his een with the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... however, for his own use the revenues! This solemn act bears the date of the year 1478, and is entitled, "Conveyance of Louis the Eleventh to the Virgin of Boulogne, of the right and title of the fief and homage of the county of Boulogne, which is held by the Count of Saint Pol, to render a faithful account before the image ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... of Confolens, Chabanes, Chateaumorant, Lombert, ceded to a captain for a ridiculous price; now it's the fief of Fontaine Milon, of Angers, the fortress of Saint Etienne de Mer Morte acquired by Guillaume Le Ferron for a song; again it's the chateaux of Blaison and of Chemille forfeited to Guillaume de la Jumeliere who never has to pay a sou. But look, there's ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... of a female vassal. This may appear to exist as a contradiction both of the civil and canon laws, which declare that marriage shall be free, while the feudal or municipal jurisprudence, in case of a fief passing to a female, acknowledges an interest in the superior of the fief to dictate the choice of her companion in marriage. This is accounted for on the principle that the superior was, by his bounty, the original granter of the fief, and is still interested that ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... lord of that city—Guarino Guarini by name, whose blade was the longest, the oftenest out, and the cleanest cutter, as himself was the lightest heart, and most trenchant carver of men in Borso's fief. The good captain carried his loyalty to the edge of his simplicity, and left it there for Olimpia to handle. "By the cheeks of the Virgin, my dear, I know what I know. My young master has an eye which, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... of the children be weakened. So far as appears but one voice was raised for a more liberal policy. Mr. Y. Kamada maintained that "patriotism in Japan was the outcome of foreign intercourse. Patriotism, that is to say, love of country—not merely of fief—and readiness to sacrifice everything for its sake, was a product of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... Chantre de), of a Norman family dating from the crusade of Philippe Auguste, but which had fallen into obscurity by the end of the eighteenth century; he owned a small fief between Caen and Saint-Lo. M. le Chantre de la Chanterie had amassed in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand crowns by supplying the royal armies during the Hanoverian war. He died during the Revolution, but before the Terror. [The Seamy ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... were, a touch of the old Baron's temperament; but we never could learn that she actually kicked her husband. She brought him a very pretty fortune in chains, watches, and Saracen ear-rings; the barony, being a male fief, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... continuing, "agreed with the Champignelles family to give a receipt for the legal dower of Mademoiselle Philiberte (this was necessary in those days); but in return, the Champignelles, who were allied to many of the great families, promised to obtain the erection of the little fief of la Chanterie into a barony; and they kept their word. The aunt of the future husband, Madame de Boisfrelon, the widow of a parliamentary councillor, promised to bequeath her whole ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac

... nation, and the vassals all were bound to appear before the "Court of the King." This court was not only a great council, but also a court of justice; the great vassals had the right to demand a trial by their equals, or peers, and in this case the court became the Court of Peers. The fief, held from the suzerain, could not be diminished or impaired in any way—just as the modern tenant has no right to damage his landlord's property; at the death of the vassal, the suzerain inherited, and in case he left infant children, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... were true sons of their house — grafts of the parent stock. The Gascon peasants looked at them with pride, and murmured that the day would come when they would show the world the mettle of which they were made. Those were stirring times for Gascony — when Gascony was a fief of the English Crown, sorely coveted by the French monarch, but tenaciously held on to by the "Roy Outremer," as the great Edward was called; the King who, as was rumoured, was claiming as his own the whole realm of France. And Gascony, it must be remembered, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... occasion by a scheme to capture the place and oust the intruders. This—it is a cruel story—was when he summoned its governor, his own half-brother, Sir Pierre Arnaut, to Orthez, under pretense of desiring a visit. Sir Pierre was holding Lourde stoutly in fief for the English prince, and was in considerable doubt about going, for he knew his man and had suspicions; however, "all thynges consydred, he sayd he wolde go, bycause in no wyse he wolde displease the erle." He left the castle with his brother Jean under strict injunctions, and proceeded to ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... parishes. The Flemish tradition then gives place to that of Brittany, which is authenticated by documents. One Olivier Guinemer gave a receipt in 1306 to the executors of Duke Jean II de Bretagne. He held a fief under Saint-Sauveur de Dinan, "on which the duke had settled tenants contrary to agreements." The executors, to liquidate the estate, had to pay immense sums for "indemnification, restitution and damages," and took care to "take receipts from all those to whom their commission obliged them ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux

... time that Lucrezia withdrew to her convent her brother Gandia was the recipient of further honours at the hands of his fond father. The Pope had raised the fief of Benevento to a dukedom, and as a dukedom conferred it upon his son, to him and to his legitimate heirs for ever. To this he added the valuable lordships of ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... than it." Then said the Chief, "How camest thou to bring it for sale to the place whence thou stolest it?" "I will not tell my tale save to the Sultan, for that I have a profitable counsel wherewith I would fief bespeak him." "Name it!" "Art thou the Sultan?" "No!" "I'll not tell it save to himself." Accordingly the Wali carried him up to the Sultan and he said I have a counsel for thee, O my lord." Asked the Sultan, "What is thy counsel?" And the thief said, "I repent and will deliver into thy hand ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... enfolding hills and forests; but of neighbors in importance equal to that of the owner of Tallwoods there were few or none in that portion of the state. The time was almost feudal, but wilder and richer than any feudal day, in that fief tribute was unknown. The original landlord of these acres had availed himself of the easy laws and easy ways of the time and place, and taken over to himself from the loose public domain a small realm all his own. Here, almost in seclusion, certainly in privacy, a generation had been spent ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough

... saved from the flames. Only a few of the outer buildings have been destroyed; but I undertake to repair the house and to redeem your fief from the creditors who claim it. As to your uncles . . . you are probably the sole heir of a name that ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... Cyclops[29] and his crew. At the present moment they menace our friend Wolf, who certainly is no kitten, with ignominious execution, because he also dared to land on the translation island which they have received from Father Neptune in private fief, and to bring with him a readable Aristophanes. It is written, "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord," but still more blessed are they who go mad over ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... sons of his elder brother Gruffydd—Owain the Red, Llywelyn, and David. For some years they held together, because Henry III. opposed the accession of any of them, claiming the Principality as a lapsed fief under a treaty made with the last prince, David ap Llywelyn. But after a time the king accepted the homage and recognised the rights of the sons of Gruffydd. Being thus freed from direct hostility of ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little

... pontificate from passing to one of his children, as this would have re-established a Theban dynasty which might have soon proved hostile to that of Bubastis. To avoid this, Osorkon I. made over the office and fief to his own son Sheshonq. The latter, after a time, thought he was sufficiently powerful to follow the example of Painotmu and adopt the royal cartouches; but, with all his ambition, he too failed to secure the succession to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... ordered existence internally. The feudal system had then reached its fullest development, and the laws established by Rollo were properly administered. With the accession of Hugh Capet to the throne of France, Normandy had become a most loyal as well as powerful fief of the crown. The tenth century witnessed also an attempt on the part of the serfs of the Duchy to throw off something of the awful grip of the feudal power. These peasants were the descendants of Celts, of ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... of the Royal Revenues in Jersey drawn up in the year 1331 by Robert de Norton and William de la Rue, commissioners specially appointed for the purpose. In this Extent we find that William de Barentin held the manor and fief of Rozel by homage; that this fief owed sixty sols one denier relief; and that whenever the King of England paid a visit to this island, the seigneur of this fief was bound to meet his sovereign on horseback in the sea, to the depth of the girths of the saddle; ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley

... up a bit before caging the lion for a dinner where everybody will bore the poor wretch to death by quoting his worst lines at him. As for Warner there is no question that he writes even better than before he went to the dogs, and that, to my mind, is proof that he holds his gifts in fief from the devil not from ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... during the rebellion against Rome. In the market-place at Hebron, Hadrian sold numbers of Jewish slaves after the fall of Bar-Cochba, in 135 C.E. In the twelfth century Hebron was in the hands of the Christian Crusaders. The fief of Hebron, or, as it was called, of Saint Abraham, extended southwards to Beer-sheba. A bishopric was founded there in 1169, but was abandoned twenty ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... incorporeal hereditaments; acres; ground &c. (earth) 342; acquest[obs3], messuage, toft[obs3]. territory, state, kingdom, principality, realm, empire, protectorate, sphere of influence. manor, honor, domain, demesne; farm, plantation, hacienda; allodium &c. (free) 748[obs3]; fief, fieff[obs3], feoff[obs3], feud, zemindary[obs3], dependency; arado[obs3], merestead[obs3], ranch. free lease-holds, copy lease-holds; folkland[obs3]; chattels real; fixtures, plant, heirloom; easement; right of common, right of user. personal property, personal estate, personal ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... The lay abbot took his recognized rank in the feudal hierarchy, and was free to dispose of his fief as in the case of any other. The enfeoffment of abbeys differed in form and degree. Sometimes the monks were directly subject to the lay abbot; sometimes he appointed a substitute to perform the spirtual functions, known ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... punished or rebuked by the Senate for this outrage at the time of its commission. He seems, indeed, to have been afterwards at peace with the church, for we find him ambassador at Rome, and invested with the fief of Val di Marino, in the march of Treviso, and with the title of count, by Lorenzo, Count-bishop of Ceneda. For these facts my authorities are Sanuto, Vettor Sandi,[363] Andrea Navagero,[364] and the account of the siege of Zara, first ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... brave champion! What you did for your Emperor and his best work, the peace of the country, deserves a rich reward and, thanks to the saints, I have something which will discharge my debt. The Swabian fief of Reichenbach became vacant. It has a strong citadel, from which we command you to maintain the peace of the country and overthrow robber knights. This fief shall be yours. You can enjoy it with your dear wife. It must belong to your children and children's children forever; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... engaged at this time in the apparently desperate undertaking of making his title good against the Duke of Burgundy, who, with little right, but great power, was seizing upon and overrunning this rich Duchy, which he laid claim to as a male fief. And to conclude, while the aged king on one side beheld his dethroned daughter in hopeless despair, and on the other his disinherited grandson, in vain attempting to recover a part of their rights, he had the additional misfortune ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various

... fight the sea by building dikes which shall hold the rushing water in check and make dry land of the tide-swept area. Mephistopheles enters readily into his plans. They help the Emperor to win a critical battle, and by way of reward Faust receives a vast tract of swampy sea-shore as his fief. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... of straw, or a stick, was formerly used as a symbol of investiture of a feudal fief. According to some authors the breaking of the straw or stick was a proof that the vassals renounced their homage; hence the allusion of Moliere. The breaking of a staff was also typical of the voluntary or compulsory abandonment ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere

... Harfleur, but the command was subsequently delegated to his brother, the Duke of Bedford. Proclamation was publicly made in the city by order of the king, dated the 28th May, that all and singular knights, esquires and valets holding any fief or annuity from the king should proceed to Southampton by the 20th June, armed each according to his estate, for the purpose of joining the expedition.(774) In 1417 France was rendered weak by factions, and Henry seized the opportunity for another attack. On the 1st February ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... cried hoarsely. "Leon, listen to me," he said, turning round suddenly. "Do you realize what sort of a position you are asking me to keep? Do you realize how it makes me the fief of a Rabbinate that is an anachronism, the bondman of outworn forms, the slave of the Shulcan Aruch (a book the Rabbinate would not dare publish in English), the professional panegyrist of the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... custom was attenuated, and it became customary for the bride to let the ring fall in front of the altar and then stoop at her husband's feet to pick it up.[323] Feudalism carried on, and by its military character exaggerated, these Teutonic influences. A fief was land held on condition of military service, and the nature of its influence on marriage is implied in that fact. The woman was given with the fief and her own will ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... reviewed the history of the Arcis elections for the last twenty years. While approving the constant election of Francois Keller, he said the moment had now come to shake off the yoke of the house of Gondreville. Arcis ought to be no more a fief of the liberals than a fief of the Cinq-Cygnes. Advanced opinions were arising in France of which the Kellers were not the exponents. Charles Keller, having become a viscount, belonged to the court; he could ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... was Anand Rao Punwar, a descendant of the great Paramara clan of Rajputs who from the 9th to the 13th century, when they were driven out by the Mahommedans, had ruled over Malwa from their capital at Dhar. In 1742 Anand Rao received Dhar as a fief from Baji Rao, the peshwa, the victory of the Mahrattas thus restoring the sovereign power to the family which seven centuries before had been expelled from this very city and country. Towards the close of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... it was a scene as ignominious as the first surrender before Pandulf, when Pope Innocent accepted the homage of King John as the price of supporting him against his barons, and the wretched King, before the altar of St. Paul, ceded his kingdom as a fief of the Holy See. The Archbishop of Canterbury protested both privately and publicly ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham

... king's son, the freight of the harness sent after him being charged in the Pipe Roll. Clad in that harness he led the men of Cork when Dermot MacCarthy, prince of Desmond, was put to the sword, John rewarding his services with lands in Limerick and with the important fief of Arklow in the vale of Avoca, where he made his Irish seat and founded an abbey. Returning to England he accompanied his uncle Randulf to France, both witnessing a charter delivered by the king at Chinon when near ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... death (in which to gratify him I willingly acquiesced), he left at my disposal the rents of a great proportion of his estates, and especially all those, which, having belonged to your mother, reverted to him as a male fief. In this he may have thought that he was acting with extreme generosity, while, in the opinion of all impartial men, he will only be considered as having fulfilled a natural obligation, seeing that, in justice, if not in ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... councils were held of the nobles, of high priests, and of neighbouring and friendly kings. Some advised one thing, some another, and the end of it was hesitation and folly. Ah! had Montezuma but listened to the voice of that great man Guatemoc, Anahuac would not have been a Spanish fief to-day. For Guatemoc prayed him again and yet again to put away his fears and declare open war upon the Teules before it was too late; to cease from making gifts and sending embassies, to gather his countless armies and smite the foe ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... the English king, that, in spite of his crushing defeat, David reaped the advantages of victory. Peace was made in April, 1139, by the Treaty of Durham, which secured to Prince Henry the earldom of Northumberland, as an English fief. The Scottish border line, which had successively enclosed Strathclyde and part of Cumberland, and the Lothians, now extended to the Tees. David gave Stephen some assistance in 1139, but on the victory of the Empress Maud[37] at ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait

... Salle had already provided the necessary material, and a few days sufficed to complete his preparations. On the tenth of August, he embarked again for the Illinois. With him went his lieutenant, La Forest, who held of him in fief an island, then called Belle Isle, opposite Fort Frontenac. [Footnote: Robert Cavelier, Sr. de la Salle, a Francois Daupin, Sr. de la Forest, 10 Juin, 1679, MS.] A surgeon, ship-carpenters, joiners, masons, soldiers, voyageurs, and laborers completed his company, twenty-five men in all, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... come and was bending over him. "I'm a fief," he whispered. "A fief—like ve men in the pwison. But I'll tell now, I tookt ... I tookt ve 'parkle cwown when the man that came left it in ve hall. I bwoke ve paper and ve little bwown box, and it looked shiny, and I tookt it to play wif, and ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... off at a swinging pace, and we soon reached Sinopoli—new Sinopoli; the older settlement lies at a considerable distance. Midday was past, and the long main street of the town—a former fief of the terrible Ruffo family—stood deserted in the trembling heat. None the less there was sufficient liveliness within the houses; the whole place seemed in a state of jollification. It was Sunday, the orphan explained; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... the Count of Poictesme, and explained to him as between old friends how the matter stood, and that afternoon the high Count was confessed and decapitated. Poictesme being now a vacant fief, King Ferdinand ennobled Manuel, and made ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... legend, from Scota, daughter of Pharaoh. What gives this legend especial interest is, that when Edward I. laid claim to the country as a fief of England, he pleaded that Brute, the British king, in the days of Eli and Samuel, had conquered it. The Scotch, in their defence, pleaded their independence in virtue of descent from Scota, daughter of Pharaoh. This is not fable, but sober ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... and to make the descent of land hereditary, instead of being divisible among all the sons of the former owner. Nor need I relate how they won and held the fair provinces of northern France—whether as a fief of the French Crown or not, is an open question. But I should wish you to bear in mind their affinity to the ANGLO-SAXONs, to the Danes, and to the Norwegians, the family of Sea Robbers, whose ravages ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher

... Anne, and one of its massive towers, the "Qui qu'en grogne" is a memorial of her dauntless spirit. Twice crowned Queen of France, she was the only one of her line worthy of the ducal crown. The Bishop of St. Malo was temporal lord of the town, and maintained he held it direct from the Pope, as a fief of the Church, because it was built upon land where a convent formerly stood; and consequently the Duke of Brittany had no authority over it, either spiritual or temporal. Duke John V. began to build a castle, but the Bishop opposed himself to its construction, and the contest lasted ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... Subedar Major, 215th Indurgurh [Todd's] Rajputs, now at Lyndhurst, Hampshire, England, this letter is sent to Madhu Singh, Sawant, Risaldar Major [retired] 146th [Dublana] Horse, on his fief which he holds under the Thakore Sahib of Pech at Bukani by the River, near Chiturkaira, Kotah, Rajputana, written in the fifth month of the year ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling

... Fourteenth in descent from him came Thien-Yi, better known as Khang Thang, or Thang the Successful, who dethroned the last descendant of the line of Hsia, and became the founder of a new dynasty. We meet with him first at a considerable distance from the ancestral fief (which, however, gave name to the dynasty), having as his capital the southern Po, which seems correctly referred to the present district of Shang-khiu, in the department of Kwei-teh, Ho-nan. Among the twenty-seven sovereigns who followed ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... extent of their power. Six other Catholic cities also ranged themselves with Fribourg, and war seemed so imminent that the matter was taken before the Diet, when, with the aid of the French ambassadors and a summons from the emperor Charles V to respect the independence of his imperial fief, Count Michel was able to retain the freedom of Gruyere, but compelled like his father to admit Berne's authority over his possessions in the Pays de Vaud. In the support which Francois I gave to Count Michel, he followed not so much his predilection for a courtier whom he had invested ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... how kind to all The vassals of this ancient hall And feudal fief! To foes how stern a foe was he! And to the valiant and the free ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... rebel, Robert the would-be king, the daring opposer of my sovereign, Gloucester can have naught in common. My liege, as a knight and gentleman, I have done my duty fearlessly, openly; as fearlessly, as openly, as your grace's loyal liegeman, fief, and subject, in the camp and in the court, in victory or defeat, against all manner or ranks of men, be they friends or foes; to my secret heart I am thine, and thine alone. In proof of which submission, my royal liege, lest still in your grace's judgment Gloucester be not cleared from treachery, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... the Conqueror's ferriery department; and long after the earldom was founded his descendants continued to bear on their coat of arms the six horse-shoes indicative of their origin.[19] William also gave the town of Northampton, with the hundred of Fackley, as a fief to Simon St. Liz, in consideration of his providing shoes for his horses.[20] But though the practice of horse-shoeing is said to have been introduced to this country at the time of the Conquest, it is probably of an earlier date; as, according to Dugdale, an old Saxon tenant in capite of Welbeck ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... visible. Scratch a Japanese of the most advanced ideas, and he will show a samurai. The great inheritance of honor, of valor and of all martial virtues is, as Professor Cramb very fitly expresses it, "but ours on trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the generation to come," and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to bate one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to widen its scope as to apply it in all walks ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... Gloss Lat. tom. i. p. 297.) His antagonist Muratori reduces the popes to be no more than the exarchs of the emperor. In the more equitable view of Mosheim, (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 264, 265,) they held Rome under the empire as the most honorable species of fief or ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... matter of the murder is hushed up If you consent to yield his Holiness Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate.— It needed all my interest in the conclave To bend him to this point; he said that you 5 Bought perilous impunity with your gold; That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded Enriched the Church, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... and not altogether ill. He gave his confederates the third of Italy, in fief under himself as king, and for fourteen years (not without the help of a few more murders) he kept some sort of rude order and justice in the wretched land. Remember him, for, bad man as he is, he does represent a principle. He initiated, by that ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet, whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course necessary to ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... Ghibelline. The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us of the advent of the despots. It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and sculpture. Only here and there a Fe.D., with the cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio once became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy. S. Ubaldo, who gave his name to this duke's son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the cathedral is dedicated—one low enormous vault, like a cellar or feudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic arches. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... which had fallen to the Lacies and the De Courcies, had been wholly recovered by the Irish. The Lacies had become extinct. The De Courcies, once Earls of Ulster, had migrated to the south, and were reduced to the petty fief of Kinsale, which they held under the Desmonds. The Celtic chieftains had returned from the mountains to which they had been driven, bringing back with them, more intensely than ever, the Irish habits and traditions. Old men, who were alive in 1533, remembered a time when ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... vallees, dont le sol lui etoit sur-abaisse de 3 ou 400 toises, a sa base calcaire. Sur cette premiere assise repose une couche volcanique, ensuite une autre tranche volcanique calcaire, a laquelle succede un sommet forme d'une lave dure. Une autre montagne aupres du fief de la Copodia, egalement conique, est toute volcanique, a l'exception d'une couche de pierre calcaire dure et blanche, qui la tranche a moitie hauteur parallelement a sa base. Quelques montagnes ou les couches volcaniques ou calcaires sont plus ou moins nombreuses. La montagne ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... me that folio—my usurper's title! Fallopius reigning, vice—nay, not so: Successor, not usurper. I am dead. My throne stood empty; he was heir to it. Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste, Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing, Won back for man that ancient fief o' the Church, His body? Who flung Galen from his seat, And founded the great dynasty of ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... brother's daughter Maria, claimed the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico Gonzaga, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... prejudice,—I view it differently. There are duties due from an individual, duties due from a nation, duties due from a family; as my ancestors thought, so think I. They left me the charge of their name, as the fief-rent by which I hold their lands. 'Sdeath, sir!—Pardon me the expletive; I was about to say that if I am now a childless old man, it is because I have myself known temptation and resisted. I loved, and denied ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... figured cloth of the finest Egyptian linen made by the Copts, with creases like folded scrolls, ending in a waist slender past all power of imagination; based upon back parts like a hillock of blown sand, that force her to sit when she would fief stand, and awaken her, when she fain would sleep, even as saith of her and describeth her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... among the dukes of Bavaria, and the Guelfs were, in general, supporters of the Papacy and this ducal house, whereas the Waiblingen (Ghibellines) received their name from a castle in Swabia, a fief of the Hohenstaufen enemies of the Pope. It was under a famous emperor of the House of Swabia that the struggle between Papacy and Empire, "the two swords," gained attention from ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... said the King, "What hath betided thee, O Shimas, that thou seekest admission unto me?" He answered, "This long while have I not looked upon the face of my lord the King and indeed I longed sore for thee; and now, behold, I have seen thy countenance and come to thee with a word which I would fief say to thee, O King stablished in all prosperity!" Quoth the King, "Say what seemeth good to thee;" and quoth Shimas, "I would have thee bear in mind O King, that Allah Almighty hath endowed thee with learning and wisdom, for all the tenderness of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... a sailor of the sea, a rover, and he saw the rest of his existence passed with her, aboard their faithful little schooner. They would have the whole round world as their playground; they held the earth and the great seas in fief; there was no one to let or to hinder. They two belonged to each other. Once outside the Heads again, and they swept the land of cities and of little things behind them, and they two were left alone once more; alone in ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... this modified form of the feudal system into Canada, when he constituted, in 1627, the whole of the colony as a fief of the great fur-trading company of the Hundred Associates on the sole condition of its paying fealty and homage to the Crown. It had the right of establishing seigniories as a part of its undertaking to bring four thousand colonists to the province and furnish them with subsistence for three ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... hour, a war was going on between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, in which the Prince Consort himself was much interested. It was a question as to whether Schleswig-Holstein should be permitted to join the German Federation. Holstein was a German fief, Schleswig was a Danish fief; unfortunately an old law linked them together in some mysterious fashion, as indissolubly as Siamese twins. Both wanted to join the Federation. Holstein had a good legal claim to do as it ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... Final, heritiere Du fief dont Witikind a trace la frontiere; L'orpheline n'a plus pres d'elle que l'aieul. L'abandon sur Final a jete son linceul; L'herbe, dont par endroits les dalles sont couvertes, Aux fentes des paves fait des fenetres vertes; Sur la route ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... are the adjectives employed, and a nice cloak of legality is thrown over the naked facts as they are ushered into history. Contemporary criticism did occasionally make itself heard, especially from the emperor, who declared that the Netherland provinces must come to him as a lapsed imperial fief. For a time Philip denied that any links existed between his domain and the empire, but in 1449 he finally found it convenient to discuss the question with Frederic III. at Besancon; still he never came to ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... no just argument can be deduced for the settlement of this question from the exercise of the rights of sovereignty over the fief of Madawaska and over ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson

... some other business. But the Baron would not listen to such a proposal for an instant. On the contrary, he used to have a perverse pleasure in boasting that the barony of Bradwardine was a male fief, the first charter having been given at that early period when women were not deemed capable to hold a feudal grant; because, according to Les coustusmes de Normandie, c'est l'homme ki se bast et ki conseille; or, as is yet more ungallantly expressed by other ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... that the Nawab Faiz Muhammad Khan of Jhajjar was deeply implicated in this murder, though no proof of it could be found. He died soon after the execution of Shams-ud-din, and was succeeded in his fief by his eldest son, Faiz Ali Khan.[21] This fief was bestowed on the father of the deceased, whose name was Najabat Ali Khan, by Lord Lake, on the termination of the war in 1805, for the aid he had given to the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls, though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... squire was threescore and fifteen years old, his wife nigh about his age; that her husband was now their only child; that he was descended from a son of the great Earl John, killed at the Bridge of Chatillon, that he held the estate of Bridgefield in fief on tenure of military service to the head of his family. She did not know how much it was worth by the year, but she must pray the good ladies to excuse her, as she had many preparations to make. Volunteers to assist her in packing her mails were ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... dead, and his young son Pepin was king of France. Bego of Belin was his dearest friend, and to him he had given all Gascony in fief. You would have far to go to find the peer of the valiant Bego. None of King Pepin's nobles dared gainsay him. Rude in speech and rough in war, though he was, he was a true knight, gentle and loving to his friends, very tender to his wife and children, ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin

... may have been Assistant to the deceased Cannabich, and was now out of work, says: "I had not the least thought of profiting by this vacancy; but what happened? The Herr Graf von Werthern, at Schloss Beichlingen, sent his Steward [LEHNSDIRECTOR, FIEF-DIRECTOR is the title of this Steward, which gives rise to obsolete thought of mill-dues, road-labor, payments IN NATURA], his Lehnsdirector, Herr Kettenbeil, over to my LOGIS [cheap boarding quarters]; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... Ralph, Gelduin, and Savaric FitzSavaric. Ralph FitzSavaric having died without heirs, on the death of his uncle Savaric, Franco, the son of Gelduin, laid claim to his vast possessions in England and the fief of Bohun in Normandy. It is believed that Gelduin had married within the forbidden degrees, without dispensation, and that this was the reason that Ralph de Arderne put forward his mother's claims. Henry II. decided in his favour at a court at Caen in 1187. But on the accession of Richard ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes

... itself too sensible of the enormity to give its sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal throne, he vehemently claimed that his action had made England a fief for ever of the Holy See! Gregory VII and Innocent III are the two greatest and most sincerely religions of the medieval Popes, and they carried the power of the Papacy to a height which excites the amazement of the modern historian. But they were at the same time the most militant of the ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... Nile, and of Hilborough in the county of Norfolk, with remainders: and the second, that Lord Viscount Nelson had been permitted, by his Majesty's warrant, dated 7th January 1801, to adopt, for himself and heirs, the title of Duke of Bronte, with the fief of the Dutchy annexed thereto; and, also, to receive the Great Cross of the Order of St. Ferdinand and of Merit, all conferred on him by Ferdinand IV. King of ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... I should rather say the Marchioness of Boscofolto, since the Duke has just bestowed on her the fief of that name, is impatient to make your acquaintance; and since you doubtless remember the saying of the Marquis de Montesquieu, that to know a ruler one must know his confessor and his mistress, you will perhaps be glad to seize both opportunities ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... enlarged again to its former extent, because in 1080 at Emilia's death, Pope Gregory VII excommunicated the Colonna because they insisted upon retaining the Praenestine territory which had been given as a fief to Stefania, and which upon Emilia's death should ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin

... been asserted by Henry as early as 1524; Scotland was only to be included in the peace negotiations of that year as "a fief of the King of England"; it was to be recognised that supremum ejus dominium belonged to Henry, as did the guardianship of James and government of the kingdom during his minority (Sp. Cal., ii., 680). For the assertion of supremacy in 1543 see the present writer's England under Somerset, ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... anchovies; and I am told, there is actually a count at Villefranche, whose father sold macaroni in the streets. A man in this country may buy a marquisate, or a county, for the value of three or four hundred pounds sterling, and the title follows the fief; but he may purchase lettres de noblesse for about thirty or forty guineas. In Savoy, there are six hundred families of noblesse; the greater part of which have not above one hundred crowns a year to maintain their dignity. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... them to some other one of his followers upon the same terms. It often happened that upon the death of an earl or baron his son was granted the lands which his father had held, Finally, in many counties, it grew into a custom, and the oldest son took possession of his father's fief, but not without first going to the king and swearing homage ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet

... who had ridden out of Stuttgard with Ebbo had told him that it was no wonder that this had been his reception, for not only was Schlangenwald an old intimate of the Markgraf, but Swabia was claimed as a fief of Wurtemburg, so that Ebbo's direct homage to the Emperor, without the interposition of the Markgraf, had made him ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... kingdom, cited by Imbert, in his Judicial Practice; all those cited by Monstrelet, in 1459, against the witches of Artois; the decrees of the same parliament, of the 13th of October 1573, against Mary Le Fief, native of Saumur; of the 21st of October 1596, against the Sieur de Beaumont, who pleaded, in his defence, that he had only sought the aid of the devil for the purpose of unbewitching the afflicted and of curing ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... buildings, viz., the provinces of Satsuma and Osumi and half the province of Hyuga, only imposing as a condition that the present reigning prince should retire in favor of his son, and that he should hold his fief as a grant from the emperor. Thus ended one of the most memorable of the campaigns which Hideyoshi had up to this time undertaken, and with this also closed a series of events which exerted a permanent influence on the ...
— Japan • David Murray

... detail in these thick-waisted women's lives; some hours, a day perhaps, and they were stooping in the fields again. And the children early put shoulder to the wheel; those too small for the fields begged food in the streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... Bakalar", is probably not an historical personage, but the hero of a separate legend. Evidence of this is seen in the fact that he calls himself an exile, though he is Etzel's mightiest vassal, with castles and lands in fief. He may have been introduced, as Wilmanns ("Anz." xviii 101) thinks, to play a role originally assigned to Dietrich, who is also an exile. Mullenhoff considered him to have been a mythical person. Bechelaren, or Pechlarn, lies at the junction of the Erlach with the Danube. (4) "hast ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown

... comes upon a mud-hut, where the custom-house officials lie in wait for him. This house without land (for the bulk of the estate is really in Guerande) derives an income from the marshes and a few outlying farms of over ten thousand francs a year. Such is the fief of Les Touches, from which the Revolution lopped its feudal rights. The paludiers, however, continue to call it "the chateau," and they would still say "seigneur" if the fief were not now in the female line. When Felicite ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... the more admiration the cause of all this anxiety rolling on his big legs, with his big smiling face, apparently unarmed, and certainly unattended, through the hostile town. The Red Douglas, pot-bellied Kuma, having perhaps heard word of the debauch, remained upon his fief; his vassals thus came uncommanded to the feast, and swelled the following ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he replied, "in a city of a thousand families, or in a secondary fief, [11] he might be charged with the governorship; but I ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... be of most benefit to the settlement. Each seigneur with his tenants under him, trained as they were in the use of arms, formed a military force exactly as they had done in the middle ages, the farmer holding his fief upon condition that he mustered when called upon to do so. Hence the old officers of the regiment of Carignan, and the more hardy of the settlers, had been placed along the line of the Richelieu, which runs at right angles to ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... passed; and with it the delivery of O'Mino, and the crisis in the affairs of Densuke approached. Now Geishu[u] Sama[7] was a fourth month daimyo[u]. Hence with the iris blossoms he took his departure from Edo to the government of his fief in Aki province. The Sakuji Machibugyo[u], one Takahashi Daihachiro[u], plead illness on this occasion of the exodus. As unable to accompany his lord he remained in Edo. On plea of convenience he established ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... of the ambitious Marpha, and the patriotic associations she awakened, the Novgorodians expelled the officer of the Grand Prince; possessed themselves of some land that belonged to him in right of his fief; and, to confirm their revolt against his authority, submitted themselves, by treaty, to Casimir, Prince of Lithuania. In this position of affairs, Ivan wisely resolved to leave Vyatka to its own course, confining his attention solely ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... any terms which he chose to dictate, has, while he has been negotiating, been collecting an army; and when the emperor finally agreed to his conditions, that he was at the conclusion of the peace to be assured a royal title and the fief of a sovereign state, he had an army ready to his hand, and is now on the point of entering ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty

... hath always profited skillfully of its having guaranteed the treaty of Munster; which hath given it a constant pretense to thrust itself into the affairs of the empire. When France got Alsace yielded by treaty, it was very willing to have held it as a fief of the empire; but the empire was then wiser. Every power should be very careful not to give the least pretense to a neighboring power to meddle with the affairs of its interior. Sweden hath already felt the effects of the Czarina's calling herself Guarantee of its present ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... his word, and when she had her own again, Beatrix gave him a third share of her broad lands, to hold in fief to Gilbert Warde, though he had no rightful claim; and because he had saved her life, he was called Dunstan Le Sauveur, because he had saved her and many; and he had favour of King Henry and fought bravely, and was made a knight, and ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... of Urbino. Blood more illustrious than hers could not be found in Italy. When she was four years old, her parents betrothed her to Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, a boy of the same age, the only son of the Marchese di Pescara. In her nineteenth year the affianced couple were married at Ischia, the fief and residence of the house of D'Avalos. Ferrante had succeeded to his father's title early in boyhood, and was destined for a brilliant military career. On the young bride's side at least it was a love-match. She ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... defective in the vigilance of a policeman; and in the very place which perhaps Austria thought it quite needless to guard, the restless and indomitable spirit of free thought entered. It was in Tuscany, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, reigned over by a family set on the grand-ducal throne by Austria herself, and united to her Hapsburgs by many ties of blood and affection—in Tuscany, right under both noses of the double-headed eagle, as it were, that a new literary ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... attacked me, and done his best to slay me or deliver me over to the English. He fell yesterday by my hand at Stirling, and I hereby declare forfeit the land which he held in the county of Lanark, part of which he wrongfully took from Sir William Forbes, and his own fief adjoining. Other broad lands he owns in Ayrshire, but these I will not now touch; but the lands in Lanark, both his own fief and that of the Forbeses, I, as Warden of Scotland, hereby declare forfeit and confiscated, and bestow them upon my good friend, ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty

... control; he had gained for ever for the Church one of her most cherished tenets, the absolute independence of the Pope's election by the College of Cardinals; and he had even partially reduced the Western Empire into a fief of the Church itself. The former of Gregory's great objects, the freedom of election, still remains intact after an interval of more than eight hundred years; the latter attempt, though long struggled for and apparently with success at times, has, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan



Words linked to "Fief" :   demesne, estate, land, acres, landed estate



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