Peasantry Sentence Examples

The Mahratta peasantry possess manly fortitude under suffering and misfortune.

Hundreds of castles and monasteries were destroyed by the frantic peasantry, and some of the nobles were murdered with shocking cruelty.

Lucca too enjoyed good government, and the peasantry were well cared for and prosperous.

In general the attitude of the Albanians in the north-eastern districts towards the Slavonic peasantry may be compared with that of the Kurds towards the Armenians.

The peasantry are impoverished, and in many parts live on the verge of starvation for the greater part of the year.

The peasantry suffer much from pellagra.

The economic and moral condition of the peasantry was little improved by freedom, and in many districts there were signs of positive impoverishment and demoralization.

He followed it up with a number of other works on the condition of the Russian peasantry, on Nihilism, and on the conditions of life in Russia.

Wheat and other cereals are cultivated, with fruits of many kinds, olives, and vines which yield a wine of fair quality; while saffron is largely produced, and some attention is given to the keeping of bees and silkworms. Stock-farming, for which the wide plains afford excellent opportunities, employs many of the peasantry; the bulls of Albacete are in demand for bull-fighting, and the horses for mounting the Spanish cavalry.

It is impermeable to water, and is therefore used in northern countries for roofing, for domestic utensils, for boxes and jars to contain both solid and liquid substances, and for a kind of bark shoes, of which it is estimated 25 millions of pairs are annually worn by the Russian peasantry.

The emperor gave his support to the latter project, and the Russian peasantry accordingly acquired rights and privileges.

Before the introduction of machinery applicable to the spinning of silk waste, the refuse from cocoon reeling, and also from silk winding, which is now used in producing spun silk fabrics, hosiery, &c., was nearly all destroyed as being useless, with the exception of that which could be hand-combed and spun by means of the distaff and spinning wheel, a method which is still practised by some of the peasantry in India and other Eastern countries.

There are some very fertile regions in the level portions of the county, but in the mountainous districts the soil is poor, the holdings are subdivided beyond the possibility of affording proper sustenance to their occupiers, and, except where fishing is combined with agricultural operations, the circumstances of the peasantry are among the most wretched of any district of Ireland.

In Catholic countries (notably in Ireland) great churches are still built out of the savings of a poverty-stricken peasantry; and from this point of view the destruction of churches in the 26th century was probably a benefit to the world.

The services of the peasantry can only be conjectured from what we find in later times.

Thus the dead are believed by the peasantry of many Catholic countries to return to their former homes on All Souls' night and partake of the food of the living.

Among the Castilian peasantry, where education and foreign influence have never penetrated deeply, the national character can best be studied.

Christian had to depend mainly upon hired troops, supported by native levies recruited for the most part from the peasantry on the crown domains.

Even to-day the ignorant peasantry of many European countries, Russia, Galicia and elsewhere, believe that all disease is the work of demons, and that medicinal herbs owe their curative properties to their being the materialized forms of benevolent spirits.

Inferior to this is " cudbear," derived from Lecanora tartarea, which was formerly very extensively employed by the peasantry of north Europe for giving a scarlet or purple colour to woollen cloths.

Three miles south is a fine stone circle, and to the south-east are the wells of Struell, famous as miraculous healers among the peasantry until modern times.

The tyranny of these nobles drove the peasantry and smaller vassals to seek the protection for life and property, the equality of taxation and of justice, which could be found only inside the walled city and under the rule of the archbishop. Thus Milan grew populous, and learned to govern itself.

Opposed to them is the coalition of the orthodox Protestant conservatives, styled antirevolutionaries, supported by the Calvinistic peasantry, and the Catholics, who represent about one-third of the population and have their headquarters in Dutch Brabant, Dutch Flanders and Limburg.

Here is the Dansk Folke museum, a collection illustrating the domestic life of the nation, particularly that of the peasantry since 1600.

That rival was the Swedish peasantry.

Pursuing a policy intended to reconcile the peasantry to Russian rule and to break the power of the Polish nobility, the Russian government promulgated, during the outbreak in 1864, a law by which those peasants who were holders of land on estates belonging to private persons, institutions (such as monasteries and the like), or the Crown were recognized as proprietors of the soil-the state paying compensation to the landlords in bonds, and the peasants having to pay a yearly annuity to the state until the debt thus contracted had been cleared off.

But whereas between 1864 and 1873 the peasantry as a whole purchased, in addition to the land granted to them by the government, 297,000 acres, in the period 1873-1893, they bought 540,000 acres and between 1893 and 1905 as much as 1,620,000 acres.

Forests cover over 21.3% of the surface, of which nearly onethird belong to the Crown, and only 515,000 acres (7.7%) to the peasantry.

The improvements he introduced in the tenures of his peasantry anticipated in some respects the agricultural reforms of the next generation.

Beneath all these, forming the mass of the agricultural population, were the peasantry and the serfs, the latter attached to the land, the former ground down by heavy taxes.

To refuse this claim would have meant the indefinite prolongation of the crisis; to concede it would have been to invite the peasantry of the whole empire to put forth similar demands on pain of a general rising.

They looked on the German schoolmaster as the apostle of German culture, and they looked forward to the time when the feeling of a common Austrian nationality should obscure the national feeling of the Sla y s, and the Slavonic idioms should survive merely as the local dialects of the peasantry, the territories becoming merely the provinces of a united and centralized state.

By these means a large and rapidly increasing revenue is being secured to government; while the condition of the peasantry and people is being greatly ameliorated, an adequate but not excessive income is being secured to the native rulers; and the class of middlemen who lived by extortion and absorbed a great part of the wealth of the country is being abolished.

The Cairenes, or native citizens, differ from the fellahin in having a much larger mixture of Arab blood, and are at once keener witted and more conservative than the peasantry.

Maize in Lower Egypt and millet (of which there are several varieties) in Upper Egypt are largely grown for home consumption, these grains forming a staple food of the peasantry.

The population is generally divisible into I The fellahin or peasantry and the native townsmen.

Their cupidity is mitigated by generosity; their natural indolence by the necessity, especially among the peasantry, to work hard to gain a livelihood.

Ismails exactions from the Egyptian peasantry reacted on the army, causing discontent; and when he was tottering on the throne he instigated military demonstrations against his own government, and, by thus sapping the foundations of discipline, assisted Arabis revolution; the result was the battle of Tell el-Kebir, the British occupation, and the disbandment of the army, which at that time in Egypt proper consisted of 18,000 men.

This tax, which is popular amongst the peasantry, produced in 1906 E.15o,00o, and over 250,000 in 1908.

Officials, and the higher ones were nearly all Greeks, were legion, but the whole system was so judiciously worked that there was little discontent amongst the patient peasantry.

The Mormon apostles for a considerable time made a special raid upon the Danish peasantry and a few hundreds profess this faith.

Unfortunately, too, for Norway's independence, the native gentry had gradually died out, and were succeeded by immigrant Danish fortune-hunters; native burgesses there were none, and the peasantry were mostly thralls; so that, excepting the clergy, there was no patriotic class to stand up for the national liberties.

Whilst Gustavus Vasa had leaned upon the Swedish peasantry, in other words upon the bulk of the Swedish nation, which was and continued to be an integral part of the Swedish body-politic, Christian III.

Yet the number of peasant-proprietors had diminished, while the obligations of the peasantry generally had increased; and, still worse, their obligations were vexatiously indefinite, varying from year to year and even from month to month.

This increase of villenage morally depressed the peasantry, and widened still further the breach between the yeomanry and the gentry.

While the Swedish peasants were well represented in the Swedish Riksdag, whose proceedings they sometimes dominated, the Danish peasantry had no political rights or privileges whatever.

The price of corn continued 1746/730= to fall; the migration of the peasantry assumed alarming proportions; and at last, " to preserve the land " as well as to increase the defensive capacity of the country, the national militia was re-established by the decree of the 4th of February 1733, which at the same time bound to the soil all peasants between the age of nine and forty.

Reactionary as the measure was it enabled the agricultural interest, on which the prosperity of Denmark mainly depended, to tide over one of the most dangerous crises in its history; but certainly the position of the Danish peasantry was never worse than during the reign of the religious and benevolent Christian VI.

The emancipation of the peasantry was now the burning question of the day, and the whole matter was thoroughly ventilated.

The codification of the laws initiated in 1801 was never carried out during his reign; nothing was done to improve the intolerable status of the Russian peasantry; the constitution drawn up by Speranski, and passed by the emperor, remained unsigned.

Vengeance was taken upon Jerusalem, and, on the seventh day of the fifth month, 586 B.C., Nebuzaradan sacked the temple, destroyed the walls and houses, and deported the citizens, only the poorest peasantry of the land being left behind.

However, the peasantry found, in the abjuration, matter contrary to their consciences, and while some recusants were shot out of hand, a girl named Margaret Wilson, with an old woman, Margaret MacLauchlan, were tied to stakes and drowned by the incoming tide, near Wigtown (13th of May 1685).

Carpets with geometrical patterns of the Midas-tomb style are occasionally found at the present time in the houses of the peasantry of the district.

Serious insurrections of the peasantry, especially in Cephalonia, had to be put down by military force, and the parliament passed a resolution in favour of immediate union with Greece.

The supposition that the tree was the source of Christ's crown of thorns gave rise doubtless to the tradition current among the French peasantry that it utters groans and cries on Good Friday, and probably also to the old popular superstition in Great Britain and Ireland that ill-luck attended the uprooting of hawthorns.

When the rebellion was at its height and Thomas Miinzer had sent forth fiery proclamations urging the peasantry "not to let the blood cool on their swords," Luther issued the pamphlet, which casts a stain on his whole life, in which he hounds on the ruling classes to suppress the insurgents with all violence.

The state also makes annual grants directly to owners who are willing to place their plantations under state supervision, for the sale of plants at half price to the poorer peasantry, for making protective or sheltering plantations, and for free transport of marl or loam.

The rack-rented peasantry found no protection in the law courts until 1859, when an act was passed which restricted the landlord's powers of enhancement in certain specified cases.

The industry suffered depression owing to the indigo riots of 1860 and the emancipation of the peasantry by the Land Act of 1859; but in the closing decade of the century it received a much more disastrous blow from the invention of the German chemists.

The most important of villein services is the week-work performed by the peasantry.

But besides all these services into which the regular week-work of the peasantry was differentiated, stood some additional duties.

At that time it was the custom to call up the whole able-bodied population of the manor, with the exception of the housewives for two, three or more days of mowing and reaping on the lord's fields; to these boon-works the peasantry was asked or invited by special summons, and their value was so far appreciated that the villagers were usually treated to meals in cases where they were again and again called off from their own fields to the demesne.

Abandoning all reserve, Vergniaud delivered one of the great orations of his life, depicting the misfortunes of the peasantry in language of such combined dignity, pathos and power that his fame as an orator spread far and wide.

Bulandshahr enjoyed an evil reputation in the Mutiny of 1857, when the Gujar peasantry plundered the towns.

In eastern Europe, so far as the figures can be trusted, this is markedly the case, and the birth-rates range between 39 per mille in Hungary and 49 in Russia, where the tradition of encouraging prolificity amongst the peasantry has not been effaced.

The king's habit of mingling with the peasantry secured for him a large amount of popularity, and probably led many to ascribe to him the authorship of poems describing scenes in peasant life, Christis Kirk on the Grene, The Gaberlunzie Man and The Jolly Beggar.

The thrifty and methodical habits of the French peasantry, and also the system of small holdings which prevails in France, have, there is little doubt, done much to raise the French wine industry to the pre-eminent position which it holds.

His chief work as deputy was an inquiry into the sanitary conditions of the peasantry, and the preparation of the sanitary code adopted by the Crispi administration.

The habits of life of the Assamese peasantry are pre-eminently domestic. Great respect is paid to old age; when parents are no longer capable of labour they are supported by their children, and scarcely any one is allowed to become a burden to the public. They have also in general a very tender regard for their offspring, and are generous and kind to their relations.

The ownership of property being largely in the hands of absentee landlords, the peasantry have little interest in the land, the profits from which go to enrich other provinces.

Since then one-fourth of the peasantry have been enabled to purchase their holdings, more than half a million acres having passed into their possession.

The higher education of the people is provided by people's high schools in the rural districts, especially for the peasantry, maintained by the county councils, agricultural societies and the state, and providing a two years' course both in general education and in special practical subjects according to local needs.

The peasant proprietors, who, under the name of the " Landtmanna" party,' formed a compact majority in the Second Chamber, pursued a consistent policy of class interests in the matter of the taxes and burdens that had, as they urged, so long oppressed the Swedish peasantry; and consequently when a bill was introduced for superseding the old system of army organization by general compulsory service, they demanded as a condition of its acceptance that the military burdens should be more evenly distributed in the country, and that the taxes, which they regarded as a burden under which they had wrongfully groaned for centuries, should be abolished.

His first novel, Jean Marcellin (1885), attracted little attention, but he made his mark as a conteur with a series of tales of the Norman peasantry, Lettres de ma chaumiere (1886).

But its flora is the richest in Europe, and combines with the brilliant sunshine, the vivid but harmonious costumes of the peasantry, and the white or paletinted houses to compensate for any such deficiency.

Large bodies of emigrants, chiefly recruited from the sober, hardy and industrious peasantry of the northern provinces, annually leave Portugal to seek fortune in America.

The peasantry, especially in the north, are closely akin to the Galician and Asturian Spaniards in character, physique and dialect; and these three ethnical groups - Portuguese of the north, Galicians, Asturians - may perhaps be regarded as the purest representatives of the Spanish stock.

In Alemtejo, and still more in Algarve, Arab and Berber types are common; and the influence of these races can everywhere be discerned in the architecture, handicrafts and speech of the peasantry.

The artistic sense of the nation is perhaps greatest among the peasantry, although Portugal has the most illiterate peasantry in western Europe.

Many perished in the burn, and the demoralized fugitives were hunted by the peasantry until they re-crossed the English border.

The rulers of the country were henceforth unable to rely on that numerous sturdy and independent peasantry of which the armies of 'Lizka and the Prokops had mainly consisted.

The peasantry had ceased to be dangerous since the establishment of serfdom; the power of the cities was now thoroughly undermined.

At Bucharest, whither he advanced after some weeks' delay, it became plain that he could not rely on the Vlach peasantry to rise on behalf of the Greeks; even the disconcerting expedient of his Vlach ally Theodore Vladimiresco, who called on the peasants to present a petition to the sultan against Phanariot misrule, failed to stir the people from their apathy.

But Sture's widow, Dame Christina Gyllenstjerna, still held out stoutly at Stockholm, and the peasantry of central Sweden, stimulated by her patriotism, flew to arms, defeated the Danish invaders at Balundsas (March 19th), and were only with the utmost difficulty finally defeated at the bloody battle of Upsala (Good Friday, April 6th).

The Mahommedan zemindars were injured by the reassessment of the land revenue, which was carried through in the interests of the ryots, and the power of the zemindars was formidable, while that of the ryots was negligible; though it must be remembered that the peasantry as a whole gave no assistance to the mutineers.

The gr eat mass of the peasantry was originally free.

Even such a necessary measure as that of moving cultivators to the rich soil of the south was thwarted by the adherence of the northern peasantry to the glebe.

The reforms of Stein and Hardenberg in Prussia, of the French and of their clients in South Germany, opened the way for a gradual redemption of the peasantry.

The creole patois is unsuited to be a medium of instruction, and English is used as far as possible, though its acquisition by the peasantry is that of a foreign language.

Great quantities of paddi are annually sent by river and rail to Bangkok, in return for which cloth and other goods are imported to supply the wants of the agriculturist peasantry.

Associated with petroleum is ozokerite, converted by the peasantry into candles.

There was also a small class of peasant proprietors, called mocheneni in Walachia, resechi in Moldavia, living and working in family communities; but the great mass of the peasantry cultivated the lands of the large proprietors, giving a certain number of days' work to their manorial lord, in addition to a tithe of the raw produce.

The law of emancipation, although passed with the best of motives, did not to any great extent benefit the peasantry.

By the Land Act of 1889, the state domains, amounting to nearly one-third of the total area of Rumania (originally the property of the church and the convents, confiscated by Prince Cuza in 1866), were distributed among the peasantry.

Thus, though the average value of agricultural land increased by 60% between 1870 and 1900, the position of the peasantry is far from satisfactory, and the resultant discontent was the chief cause of the agrarian rising in 1907.

Numbers of the peasantry emigrated, and the population rapidly diminished.

Yet the taxes were continually on the increase, and the hospodar Scarlat Ghica (1758-61), though he tried to win some popularity by the removal of Turkish settlers and the abolition of the vakarit or tax on cattle and horses, which was peculiarly hateful to the peasantry, raised the total amount of taxation to 25,000,000 lion-dollars, about £I,000,000.

The pureblood Ruman population, noble and plebeian, inhabited the cities and towns or larger villages; the peasantry were mostly of Little Russian and Hungarian race, and were in a servile condition.

The franchise was now extended to all citizens, a cumulative voting power being reserved, however, for property, and the peasantry were emancipated from forced labour.

But there was a strong anti-German party in the country, especially among the old boiars and the peasantry.

Their programme for home affairs involved the amelioration of the position of the peasantry and artisan classes, whose progress they considered had been overlooked, the irremovability of the magistracy, and a revision of the communal law in the sense of decentralization.

The most prominent statesman in the new Conservative-Junimist ad- - ministration was P. Carp, who in the spring of 1889 succeeded in passing a bill which authorized the distribution of state lands among the peasantry.

The resident population is increased in summer by an influx of peasantry, of whom during the season 5000 to 6000 are employed in curing tobacco and preparing it for export.

The peasantry, however, are far from dull, and betray much shrewdness where their interests are concerned.

But the peasantry gained on the whole more than they lost, and the trade of Bombay was not permanently injured.

Thirty years of friction followed, while the parliament, and the ruling classes tried in a spasmodic way to enforce the statute, and the peasantry strove to evade it.

The towns would seem to have fared better than the countryside, partly indeed at its expense, for the discontented peasantry migrated in large numbers to the centres of population where newly-developed manufactures were calling for more hands.

The peasantry defended themselves by the simple device of understating the numbers of their families; the returns made it appear that the adult population of England had gone down from 1,355,000 to 896,000 since the poll-tax of 1379.

Though many clerics were found among the rebels, it does not seem that any of them were \Vycliffites, or that the reformers teaching had played any part in eiciting the peasantry at this time.

The marrorial system was already doomed, and the rent-paying tenant farmers, who had begun to appear after the Black Death, gradually superseded the villeins as the normal type of peasantry during the two generations that followed the outbreak that is generally known as Wat Tylers rebellion.

It lingered on in a subterranean fashion among a small class in the universities and the minor clergy, and had some adherents among the townsfolk and even among the peasantry.

His notorious sympathy with the peasantry further alienated the official classes and landed gentry, and his campaign against enclosures brought him into conflict with the strongest forces of the time.

In Sybil were exhibited the social relations of rich and poor (the "two nations") under this regime, and under changes in which, while the peasantry were neglected by a shoddy aristocracy ignorant of its duties, factory life and a purblind gospel of political economy imbruted the rest of the population.

Indian corn is the principal crop, for corncake forms the staple diet of the peasantry, while the grain is also used for feeding pigs, the heads for feeding cattle and the stubble for manure.

The stature and features of the Serbs vary in different regions; but the northern peasantry are generally fairer and shorter than the mountaineers of the south.

Instead, it possesses an army of placemen and officials; but these being mainly recruited from the peasantry, do not disturb the prevailing social equality.

By brilliant generalship he outwitted Henry and succeeded in relieving Paris; but owing to lack of money and supplies he was compelled immediately to retreat to the Netherlands, abandoning on the march many stragglers and wounded, who were killed by the peasantry, and leaving all the positions he had taken to be recaptured by Henry.

This undertaking led to the introduction of a large number of Flemish workmen, who settled in the district, and, in spite of the violent measures adopted by the English peasantry to expel them, retained their ground in sufficient numbers to affect the physical appearance and the accent of the inhabitants to this day.

A modified form of this over-tunic with loose sleeves and made of frieze formed probably the general covering of the peasantry.

Even the costume of the Croatian peasantry, to whom brilliant colours and intricate embroideries are always dear, proclaims their racial identity with the Serbs; their songs, dances and musical instruments, the chief part of their customs and folk-lore, their whole manner of life, so little changed by its closer contact with Western civilization, may be studied in Servia (q.v.) itself.

In both countries rural society was based on the old-fashioned household community, or zadruga, which still survives in the territories that formed the Military Frontier, though everywhere tending to disappear and be replaced by individual ownership. The Croatian peasantry are least prosperous in the riverside districts, where marshfevers prevail, and especially beside the Save.

It has increased in wealth and education, and owing to a good system of land tenure the peasantry are among the most prosperous in Italy.

These highlands, formerly known as the Raigarh Bichhia tract, remained desolate and neglected until 1866, when the district of Balaghat was formed, and the country opened to the industrious and enterprising peasantry of the Wainganga valley.

The most irreconcilable Republicans knew that they could not expect much from popular risings in great towns or from the disaffected and anarchist peasantry iii Andalusia, so they resorted to the old practice of barrack conspiracies, courting especially the non-commissioned officers and some ambitious subalterns.

The growing disposition of the bourgeois and artisan classes, not in the large towns only, to imitate the intellectuals in desiring to live in closer touch with the rest of Europe as regards social, economic, scientific and political progress, embittered the struggle between the forces of Liberalism and those of Catholicism, powerfully entrenched in the affections of the women and the illiterate masses of the peasantry.

He had liberated the Sudanese from the extortions of the Egyptians, but the people soon found that the Mandi's rule was even more oppressive than had been that of their former masters, and after the Mandi's death the situation of the peasantry in particular grew rapidly worse, neither life nor property being safe.

She was associated with Louisa Twining and Florence Nightingale; and in 1877-1878 raised the Turkish compassionate fund for the starving peasantry and fugitives in the Russo-Turkish War (for which she obtained the order of the Medjidieh, a solitary case of its conference on a woman).

His books, The Fourfold State, The Crook in the Lot, and his Body of Divinity and Miscellanies, long exercised a powerful influence over the Scottish peasantry.

This mode of colonization was especially favourable to the peasantry, who seem in Brandenburg to have retained the disposal of their persons and property at a time when villenage or serfdom was the ordinary status of their class elsewhere.

Some opposition was shown, but eventually the estates of both divisions of the mark assented; only, however at the price of concessions to the nobles, predominant in the diet, which thrust the peasantry into servitude.

In Brandenburg he made concessions to the nobles at the expense of the peasantry, and admitted the right of the estates to control taxation.

The most important facts in the internal history of Brandenburg during the 16th century were the increase in the power of the estates, owing chiefly to the continuous pecuniary needs of the electors; the gradual decline in the political importance of the towns, due mainly to intestine feuds; and the lapse of the peasantry into servitude.

The condition of the peasantry, however, during this reign reached its lowest point, and the " recess," or charter, of 1653 practically recognizes the existence of villenage.

The petty bourgeois intelligentsia, which is in every way dependent on the big bourgeois intelligentsia, which is in every way dependent on the big bourgeoisie, obtained the leadership over the peasantry.

When their substance is drained away, the peasantry will be afflicted by heavy exactions.

The peasantry were also called upon as canon fodder in times of war.

The first stage was the popular uprising under Wallace and Andrew Moray, whose backbone was an armed peasantry led by minor gentry.

In rural areas, the new business affected the irrigating peasantry whose traditional and self managed water systems and uses were at risk.

It was the Bolshevik state not the bag traders who acted like a capitalist in its merciless attempts to exploit the peasantry.

He differs from Amos, however, in being more deeply in sympathy with the sufferings of the oppressed peasantry.

In 1891 Lenin passed his Law exam with high honors, whereupon he took to representing the poorest peasantry in Samara.

The voice of the working peasantry was not heard.

To the whole Russian peasantry In struggle you will find your rights!

Evidence against The Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland did little to help the everyday lives of the Irish peasantry.

Thirdly, the poor peasantry must be united against the rural bourgeoisie which currently holds surplus grain stocks.

There is a class war going on in the villages but it is of the poor and middle peasantry against the kulaks.

The old methods of subsistence farming disappeared with the rural peasantry.

He undertook the first serious and sustained attempt to collect the traditional songs of the English peasantry and workers, predominantly in West Devon.

Such a conflict of opinion cannot provide nourishment for other parties within the working class and among the toiling peasantry.

The influence of the Orthodox Church was very great, particularly over the illiterate serfs and peasantry.

Such was the love of the peasantry for the welsh squire of the past.

In Tuscany disorder continued, and although Guerrazzi, who had been appointed dictator, saved the country from complete anarchy, a large part of the population, especially among the peasantry, was still oyal to the grand-duke.

In vain the papal bull was revoked, in vain the king issued a proclamation commanding the peasantry to return to their homes under pain of death.

The consequence is that the peasantry are constantly in a state bordering on destitution, and exposed to the horrors of famine, like those which visited them in 1890 and 1898, and threatened in 1907.

In no sense could it be considered a homogeneous political unit, for in Lithuania the majority of the population were Russian in nationality, language and religion, whereas in Poland the great majority of the inhabitants were Polish and Roman Catholic. Gradually, it is true, the Lithuanian nobles, who possessed all the land and held the peasantry in a state of serfage, adopted Polish nationality and culture, but this change did not secure homogeneity, because the masses clung obstinately to their old nationality and religion, and all the efforts of the Church of Rome to bring them under papal authority proved fruitless.

In the rest of the country they had not been allowed to reside in the villages, because their habits of keeping vodka-shops and lending money at usurious interest were found to demoralize the peasantry, and even in the towns their numbers and occupations had been restricted by the authorities.

On the occasion of the Galician outbreak of 1845, when the Ruthenian peasantry massacred some hundreds of Polish landowners, an outbreak generally attributed to the machinations of the Austrian government, Wielopolski wrote his famous Lettre d'un gentilhomme polonais au prince de Metternich (Brussels, 1846), which caused a great sensation at the time, and in which he attempted to prove that the Austrian court was acting in collusion with the Russian in the affair.

It was not until the French Revolution that any steps were taken to ameliorate their lot, but to-day they no longer form a class, but have been practically lost sight of in the general peasantry.

Kiwewa, refusing to submit to circumcision, was (after reigning three or four months) expelled by the B a-Islamu, who placed another brother, Kalema, on the throne and began a fanatical propaganda, forcing the peasantry to, submit to the hated circumcision.

The farming of exorbitant taxes, coupled as it was too often with dishonest concessions to the tax farmer, made the over-burdened peasantry drink the doubly bitter cup of exploitation and injustice.

More fateful was the attitude of the Orthodox Ruthenian peasantry, who w ere divided from their Catholic Polish over-lords by centuries of religious and feudal oppression.

A wise economy also contributed to reduce the national debt within manageable limits, and in the welfare of the peasantry Frederick IV.

The elaborate system of education, culminating in the reconstituted, or new-founded, universities of Dorpat, Vilna, Kazan and Kharkov, was strangled in the supposed interests of " order " and of orthodox piety; while the military colonies which Alexander proclaimed as a blessing to both soldiers and state were forced on the unwilling peasantry and army with pitiless cruelty.

The sagas teem with references to the inhabitants of the fairy mounds, who play such an important part in the mind of the peasantry of our own time.

Such was the love of the peasantry for the Welsh squire of the past.

Clearly these parties had to lose all support and all influence among the workers and the toiling strata of the peasantry.

The Scottish Clans comprised an agricultural peasantry dominated by a warrior aristocracy.

True to its deeply Russian roots, the costuming was reminiscent of Russian peasantry, with fitted tunics for the men and criss-crossed bodices over fitted blouses for the women, worn over a full, short tutu.

The most popular garb by far is that worn by the peasantry.

They make historical clothing in all eras and do custom work for weddings and other big events, but also have a large selection of beautifully made and reasonably priced costumes for faire, from peasantry to nobility.

In the 17th century the corms were worn by some of the German peasantry as a charm against the plague.

As it is, though a fixed minimum of peasant delegates must be returned, they by no means probably represent the opinion of the peasantry.

The three-field system of cropping a patch of land until its fertility is exhausted, and then allowing it to revert to the primeval condition, is still pursued, and both landowners and peasantry suffer from want of capital and lack of agricultural training.

Recent investigations in the government of Moscow have revealed that 40% of the peasant households possessed no horses, and similar inquiries in 41 governments elicited the fact that 28% of the peasant households were without horses, although of the total number of horses in the country 82% belong to the peasantry.

The reformers of the previous reign had endeavoured to make the emancipated peasantry administratively and economically independent of the landed proprietors; the conservatives of this later era, proceeding on the assumption that the peasants did not know how to make a proper use of the liberty prematurely conferred upon them, endeavoured to re-establish the influence of the landed proprietors by appointing from amongst them " land-chiefs," who were to exercise over the peasants of their district a certain amount of patriarchal jurisdiction.

The new tsar, Alexander III., was an apt pupil of his tutor Pobedonostsev (q.v.), the celebrated procurator of the Holy Synod, for whom the representative system was a modern lie," and his reign covered a period of frank reaction, during which there was not only no question of affected even the stolid and apparently immovable masses of the peasantry.

A great portion of the central plain of Monofatsi, the principal grain-producing district, is lying fallow owing to the exodus of the Moslem peasantry.

The Moslem peasantry now flocked to the fortified towns and civil war began.

The peasantry preserve a grave and quiet demeanour, but they have their humble ideas of gaiety, and hold their gatherings on occasions of births or marriages.

The lord of the manor with his officials and retainers, the peasantry bound to him by ties of personal dependence and mutual rights and obligations, constituted a little world, in which we can watch the play of motives and passions not so dissimilar as we are sometimes led to believe from those of the great modern world.

By the peasantry of its native countries the Norway spruce is applied to innumerable purposes of daily life.

But these beliefs are far from being confined to the uncivilized; Greek philosophers like Porphyry, no less than the fathers of the Church, held that the world was pervaded with spirits; side by side with the belief in witchcraft, we can trace through the middle ages the survival of primitive animistic views; and in our own day even these beliefs subsist in unsuspected vigour among the peasantry of the more uneducated European countries.

Up to this time the rule of the Bhonsla rajas, rough warriors of peasant extraction, had been on the whole beneficent; but, soured by his defeat, Raghoji now set to work to recover some of his losses by a ruthless exploitation of the peasantry, and until the effective intervention of the British in 1818 the country was subjected to every kind of oppression.

Transplanted into this foreign soil, the monarchy became an absolute despotism, unchecked by a proud territorial nobility and a hardy peasantry on familiar terms with their king.

It was feared that the heresy, if suffered to make headway, would spread like wildfire among the ignorant Russian peasantry, and Archbishop Nikon was sent to Athos to threaten the recalcitrant brethren with severe temporal and eternal penalties should they remain obstinate.

The caves are rich in curious kinds of fish, Paraphoxinus Gethaldii, which is unknown elsewhere, Chondrostoma phoximus, Phoxinellus alepidatus and others, which are caught and eaten by the peasantry.

In some parts of Herzegovina the dress, manners and physical type of the peasantry are akin to those of Montenegro.

But as the administration grew stronger, the position of the peasantry became worse.

In Transylvania, however, the common peril evoked by the Turkish incursion and a simultaneous rising of the Vlach peasantry had knit together the jarring interests of Magyars, Saxons and Szeklers, a union which, under the national hero, the voivode Janos Hunyadi, was destined for a while to turn the tide of war.

On the 7th of June 1808 he had sacked Cordova; but while he was laden with its spoils the Spanish general Castanos with the army of Andalusia (30,000), and also a large body of armed peasantry, approached.

Failing to dislodge them, and surrounded by hostile troops and an infuriated peasantry, Dupont capitulated with over Battle of 20,000 men.

Wellington fell back before him down the left bank, ordering up Rowland Hill's force from the Badajoz road, the peasantry having been previously called upon to destroy their crops and retire within the lines of Torres Vedras.

He endeavoured also to rouse the French peasantry against the Allies, but in vain, for Wellington's justice and moderation afforded them no grievances.

The Hussite movement was also a democratic one, an uprising of the peasantry against the landowners at a period when a third of the soil belonged to the clergy.

Estimates, based on a census of the tax-paying peasantry in the years 1494 and 1495, give five millions of inhabitants, a very respectable number, which explains fully the predominant position of Hungary in the east of Europe at that epoch.

The last reserves of the national wealth and strength were dissipated by the terrible peasant rising of GyOrgy Dozsa in 1514, of which the enslavement of the Hungarian peasantry was the immediate consequence.

The same The Tri- spirit of hostility to the peasantry breathed through partitum.

Among successful dramatic pieces may be mentioned the Falu rossza (Village Scamp) of Edward Toth (1875), which represents the life of the Hungarian peasantry, and shows both poetic sentiment and dramatic skill; A szerelem harcza (Combat of Love), by Count Geza Zichy; Iskdriot (1876) and the prize tragedy Tamora (1879), by Anthony Varady; Janus (1877), by Gregory Csiky; and the dramatized romance Szep Mikhal (Handsome Michal), by Maurus Jokai (1877).

Although he had some trouble with the peasantry, the lands and treasures of the church enabled him to propitiate the nobles and for a time to provide for the expenses of the court.

When the anti-clerical policy of the revolutionary powers provoked the rising of the peasantry, of La Vendee, he put himself at the head of the men of his neighbourhood, and came rapidly to the front among the gentlemen whom the peasants took for leaders.

Exclusive of his controversial writings, he left behind him a very voluminous series of practical evangelical books, which have long remained the fireside favourites of the peasantry of French Protestantism.

Florence is the centre of a large and fertile agricultural district, and does considerable business in wine, oil and grain, and supplies the neighbouring peasantry with goods of all kinds.

His most important domestic measure was the chaining of the peasantry to the soil, a measure directed against the ever increasing migration of the down-trodden serfs to the steppes, where they became freebooters instead of tax-payers.

On the contrary, most of its branches can be carried on in the cottages of the peasantry.

As a result of the Polish rebellion of 1830, in which the peasantry, whether Lithuanian, Polish or White Russian, did not take so great a part as the upper classes, the university of Vilna was abolished in 1832, its faculties being transferred in bulk to Kiev and in part to Kharkov and St.

The last remains of it were crushed in Valencia, where the Mahommedans were furiously attacked by the Christian peasantry during the great agrarian revolt known as the Germania, 1520-1521.

The mountainous slopes of Biscay arestudded with the traditional Basque caserio, or farmhouse, in which the peasantry live on the metayer system, dividing theprofits of the soil with absentee landlords.

The first recorded case of the formation of an hermandad occurred in the 12th century when the towns and the peasantry of the north united to police the pilgrim road to Santiago in Galicia, and protect the pilgrims against robber knights.

In Catalonia and Valencia the "germanias" were combinations of the peasantry to resist the exactions of the feudal lords.

The most interesting of these projects was the plan for the emancipation of the peasantry (1818).

The oppressed clergy and peasantry regarded Valdemar as their natural deliverer; but so poor and friendless was he that the work of redemption proved painfully slow.

John Albert's second diet (1496), after granting subsidies the burden of which fell entirely on the towns and peasantry, passed a series of statutes benefiting the nobility at the expense of the other classes.

A fourth endeavoured to bind the peasantry more closely to the soil by forbidding emigration.

There is an artificial air about the idylls of Szymonowicz which makes one feel too keenly that they are productions of the Renaissance; one of their best features is the humane spirit towards the miserable peasantry which they everywhere display.

In 1521 an insurrection of the peasantry against the nobility, whom they massacred, took place in Majorca, and was not suppressed without much bloodshed.

In addition to numerous original works she put into literary form many of the legends current among the Rumanian peasantry.

Giving rein to their ancient antipathy, the revolted peasantry attacked the towns, which were liberal in ideas and republican in sympathies.

Before he left Moscow Prince Kropotkin had developed an interest in the condition of the Russian peasantry, and this interest increased as he grew older.

Boris' most important domestic reform was the ukaz (1587) forbidding the peasantry to transfer themselves from one landowner to another, thus binding them to the soil.

On both sides in Mexico there was an element consisting of honest doctrinaires; but rival military leaders exploited the struggles in their own interest, sometimes taking each side successively; and the instability was intensified by the extreme poverty of the peasantry, which made the soldiery reluctant to return to civil life, by the absence of a regular middle class, and by the concentration of wealth in a few hands, so that a revolutionary chief was generally sure both of money and of men.

In Stuart times all ranks of society believed in her, and referring to her supposed foretelling of the Great Fire, Pepys relates that when Prince Rupert heard, while sailing up the Thames on the 10th of October 1666, of the outbreak of the fire "all he said was, ` now Shipton's prophecy was out.'" One of her prophecies was supposed to have menaced Yeovil, Somerset, with an earthquake and flood in 1879, and so convinced were the peasantry of the truth of her prognostications that hundreds moved from their cottages on the eve of the expected disaster, while spectators swarmed in from all quarters of the county to see the town's destruction.

Forest trees, no less than cereals, have their indwelling spirits; the fauns and satyrs of classical Literature were goat-footed and the tree spirit of the Russian peasantry takes the form of a goat; in Bengal and the East Indies wood-cutters endeavour to propitiate the spirit of the tree which they cut down; and in many parts of the world trees are regarded as the abode of the spirits of the dead.

The important silk industry, however, began to revive about 18go, and dairy farming is prosperous; but the condition of the vilayet is far less unsettled than that of Macedonia, owing partly to the preponderance of Moslems among the peasantry, and partly to the nearness of Constantinople, with its Western influences.

As illustrating the general impoverishment of the Russian peasantry, it may be stated that the arrears of taxation owed by them have increased enormously since 1882, when they a, ounted to £2,854,000, until in 1900 the total amount was put k £15,222,000.

Within recent years, however, some efforts have been made both by the Ministry of Agriculture and by the more enlightened of the zemstvos to improve the education of the peasantry, but the progress achieved has been small.

Under the disguise of doctors, midwives, school teachers, governesses, factory hands or common labourers, they sought to make proselytes among the peasantry and the workmen in the industrial centres by revolutionary pamphlets and oral explanations.

At Belcoo, near Enniskillen, there is a famous well called Daragh Phadric, held in repute by the peasantry for its cure of paralytic and other diseases; and 4 m.

In the spring of 1908 there were agrarian strikes at Parma; the labor contracts had pressed hardly on the peasantry, who had cause for complaint; but while some improvement had been effected in the new contracts, certain unscrupulous demagogues, of whom Alceste De Ambris, representing the syndacalist wing of the Socialist party, was the chief, organized a widespread agitation.