Sabine Baring-Gould Quotes

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

The serfs of princes, nobles, ministerials, and churches shall no be admitted to our cities

The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons into servitude.

The First World War, and especially the latest one, largely swept away what was left in Europe of feudalism and of feudal landlords, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the South East generally.

The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.

Thank goodness we don't live in medieval times, when people fought wars over ideas.

In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.

The Normans came over, lance in hand, burning and trampling down every thing before them, and cutting off the Saxon dynasty and the Saxon nobles at the edge of the sword; but the right of petition remained untouched.

In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords … to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth … declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

Lords of the land and the lash

The stability of medieval society depended on the fixity of all of its parts, as that of modern society is on their mobility.

it would be impossible to liberate the serf otherwise than by endowing him with land.

For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land

I'm really enamored with the idea of a reformed society, and I've always been fascinated with the Dark Ages as well as the power vacuum that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

Moreover, in Russia there was an enormous amount of landed property to be divided, large estates, crown lands, government land, and the estates held by the monasteries.

Britain's legal structure is basically the same as in feudal times: laws are written for the elite.

The other classes of which society was composed were, first, freemen, owners of small portions of land, independent, though they sometimes voluntarily became the vassals of their more opulent neighbors, whose power was necessary for their protection.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

As things stand now the feudal lords are content to look on while the Shogunate carries on in a highhanded manner. Neither the lords nor the Shogun can be depended upon, and so our only hope lies in grass-roots heroes.

There are no slaves in Russia, only peasants attached to the land.

William the Conqueror had so great an abhorrence of the English language, that he commanded all the laws and law-proceedings to be in French; and even the children in school were taught the first elements of grammar and letters in French and not in English.