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He was kind enough to entertain me for awhile, and showed me something of country life in Kentucky. A farm in that part of the State depends, and must depend, chiefly on slave labor. The slaves are a material part of the estate, and as they are regarded by the law as real property being actually adstricti glebae an inheritor of land has no alternative but to keep them.
These are the truly noble, the real noblesse of the world. The others are serfs and go with the soil glebae adscripti. Of course, I am here referring to those who have not only the courage, but also the call, and therefore the right, to order the head to quit the service of the will; with a result that proves the sacrifice to have been worth the making.
Somehow he had always in his thoughts regarded Sir John and Lady Bellamy, when he thought about them at all, as possessing indeed individual characters and tendencies, but as completely "adscripti glebae" of the neighbourhood of the Abbey House as that house itself. He would as soon have expected to see Caresfoot's Staff re-rooted in the soil of Madeira, as to find them strolling about Funchal.
The free peasant has, indeed, the advantage that he can go off and seek his fortune in the wide world; whereas the serf who is attached to the soil, glebae adscriptus, has an advantage which is perhaps still greater, that when failure of crops or illness, old age or incapacity, render him helpless, his master must look after him, and so he sleeps well at night; whereas, if the crops fail, his master tosses about on his bed trying to think how he is to procure bread for his men.
I was born and bred a west-country man, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular "Angular Saxon," the very soul of me adscriptus glebae.
"Well," continued the Antiquary, "I would bet a trifle there was not a kolb kerl, or bondsman, or peasant, ascriptus glebae, died upon the monks' territories down here, but John of the Girnel saw them fairly and decently interred." "Ay, but if it like your honour, they say he had mair to do wi' the births than the burials. Ha! ha! ha!" with a gleeful chuckle.
The Celtic race, for the most part impoverished in mind and estate by the penal laws, became rooted to the soil, for, as we have seen, they had, on account of the repression of industries, no alternative occupation, and so became, in fact, if not in law, adscripti glebae.
And this creature, rooted to one spot through life and death, was in its infancy a free swimming animal, hovering from place to place upon delicate ciliae, till, having sown its wild oats, it settled down in life, built itself a good stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a glebae adscriptus, for ever and a day.
When an alteration of the law settlement has released from parish bondage and vegetation those adscripti glebae agricultural labourers, the advantage of our network of railways will be still more felt.
And thus indeed you shall attain to Virgil's character which he gives to ancient Italy: Terra potens armis atque ubere glebae. And therefore out of all questions, the splendor and magnificence, and great retinues and hospitality, of noblemen and gentlemen, received into custom, doth much conduce unto martial greatness.
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