The Serf

_This is the history of a man who lived in misery and torture, and was held as the very dirt of the world. In great travail of body and mind, in a state of bitter and sore distr...

In the fifth volume of an instructive work by Le Grand d'Aussy, who was, in his way, a kind of inferior Dean Swift, there is an interesting story, one of a collection of "Fablia...

While Cerdic and Hyla sat in the field weaving their design to completion, Lord Geoffroi, Lord Fulke, Lady Alice, and Brian de Burgh, the squire, set out after forest game. They...

In the early Middle Ages, no less than now, men and women believed in ominous happenings to those about to die. Strange things were known to occur in monasteries when a priest w...

How fresh the morning air was in the wood! A million yellow spears flashed through the thick leaves and stabbed the undergrowth with gold. A delicious smell of leaves and forest...

There is always and forever a haven we can win. In all the chances and turmoils of this life, howeversomuch we are tossed upon the seas of circumstance, somewhere, without doubt...

"Surely," said a monk of Bec, "God has made the evening beautiful and full of lights, so that we may think on Him at that time, and as we watch the very gates of heaven in the s...

They buried Geoffroi de la Bourne, the day after his murder, in a pit dug in the castle chapel, under the flags. The bell tolled, the tapers burnt, the pillars of the place were...

The chapter-house at Icomb was a low, vaulted chamber divided into three compartments by rows of pillars bearing arches. A stone seat ran all round it for the monks, and the pri...

"At the sight therefore, of this river, the Pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went with them said, 'You must go through, or you cannot come at the gate.'"

"Not before they have tasted of hell in Hilgay," and the speaker went on to enumerate with much spirit and vividness the several tortures to which the captives would be subjecte...

"Through the gray willows danced the fretful gnat, The grasshopper chirped idly from the tree, In sleek and oily coat the water-rat, Breasting the little ripples manfully Made f...

There is a wonderful steadfast courage about men of Hyla's breed. Even though the object they pursue has lost its value, they go on in a dogged relentless "following up" from wh...

"So, some time, when the last of all our evenings Crowneth memorially the last of all our days, Not loth to take his poppies, man goes down and says: '_Sufficient for the day we...

"Ye have had a shrewd shog, Lisolé, in the news that Hyla brought, and he also has gone hardly of late. Let us rest a day and eat well, and talk withal. There is a bottle of cla...

"In that same conflict (woe is me!) befell, This fatall chaunce, this dolefull accident Whose heavy tidings now I have to tell. First all the captives which they here had hent W...

"So when this corruptible shall have put on in corruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality; then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swal...