Arthur Conan Doyle,
Sir Nigel — Chapter I
(1906)
“ All through the winter the dead rotted by the wayside for want of some one to bury them. In many a village no single man was left alive. Then at last the spring came with sunshine and health and lightness and laughter—the greenest, sweetest, tenderest spring that England had ever known—but only half of England could know it. ”
Arthur Conan Doyle,
Sir Nigel — Chapter I
(1906)
“ Therefore the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later which left the English peasant the freest of his class in Europe.But there were few so far-sighted that they could see that here, as ever, good was coming out of evil. At the moment misery and ruin were brought into every family. The dead cattle, the ungarnered crops, the untilled lands—every spring of wealth had dried up at the same moment. ”
Arthur Conan Doyle,
Sir Nigel — Chapter I
(1906)
“ Men died, and women and children, the baron of the castle, the franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the villein in his wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek and all died the same death of corruption. ”
