United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The small towns of Huttweil and Willisan present nothing worthy of remark; but Sursee is a neat town, and the lake of Sempacli adds greatly to the cheerful appearance of the country, which it waters to a considerable extent. The town of Sempach is noted in history for the defeat of Leopold, Duke of Austria, in 1386, by the forces of the Swiss confederation.
These things were done and finished in the year of the Lord 1386 on the Friday before Palm Sunday, and a year and a half after the death of the aforesaid Master Gerard. Concerning the names of the first Brothers and their labours. These are the names of those first Brothers, the devout men who began to build the House of Mount St. Agnes and to dwell there.
An immense concourse of people assemble here for prayer every Friday; the mosque in arrangement is very similar to the congregational mosques of Cairo. The Kalun Musjid, usually called Black Mosque, dates from 1386. It is of peculiar construction, having two stories, and is somewhat Egyptian in appearance.
In 1386, Charles VI., under guidance of his uncles, declared war on England, and exhausted all France in preparations; the attempt proved the sorriest failure. The regency of the Dukes became daily more unpopular, until in 1388 Charles dismissed his two uncles, the Dukes of Burgundy and Berri, and began to rule.
During the month of October, 1386, he sat in Parliament at Westminster as one of the Knights of the Shire for Kent, where we may consequently assume him to have possessed landed property.
On the top stood the fortress of the routiers, calling themselves English, under a Captain Chennel, from 1378 to 1386, when he was caught, conveyed to Paris, and broken on the wheel.
He was a busy, practical worker, Comptroller of the Customs in 1374, of the Petty Customs in 1382, a member of the Commons in the Parliament of 1386. The fall of the Duke of Lancaster from power may have deprived him of employment for a time, but from 1389 to 1391 he was Clerk of the Royal Works, busy with repairs and building at Westminster, Windsor, and the Tower.
In the Treasury of the church of Douai there is mention of three cushions made of high loom tapestry presented in 1386 by "la demoiselle Englise." It is not known who this young lady may have been. France and Flanders made the most desirable tapestries in the fourteenth century. In Italy the art had little vogue until the fifteenth.
But the most important of the alliterative poems was the Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools.
And how in that same year Duke Albrecht met with a bloody end, such as befell no King or Emperor of the Germans before or after him, at the hands of Duke John, his nephew, whose inheritance he had kept back, and other conspirators; and what vengeance overtook the murderers; and how Duke John, escaping in the habit of a monk into Italy, was no more heard of, but became a shadow forever, like the rest of them; and how, eight years afterwards, came the expedition of Duke Leopold of Austria against the Waldstätte, and the fight at Morgarten, where the Swiss, thirteen hundred mountaineers in all, Wilhelm Tell among them, routed twenty thousand of the well-armed chivalry of Austria, dating from that heroic Thermopylae of theirs the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy, as, larger and perhaps not less resolute, we see it to-day, ready to defy, if need be, single-handed, the greatest military nation of the earth; and how, thirty years afterwards, the men of Schwyz and Uri go forth, nine hundred strong, among them Tell, and Werner Stauffacher, now bent with years, to the aid of Bern, threatened by the nobles roundabout; and how, in 1332, was formed the league with Lucerne, whereby the beautiful lake gets its name as the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons; and how, one sultry July day in 1386, the men of Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden, together with other Swiss, some of them armed with the very halberds with which their fathers defended the pass at Morgarten, fought again their hereditary enemy, Austria, by the clear waters of the little Lake of Sempach; how, when they saw the enemy, they fell upon their knees, according to their ancient custom, and prayed to God, and then with loud war-cry dashed at full run upon the Austrian host, whose shields were like a dazzling wall, and their spears like a forest, and the Mayor of Lucerne with sixty of his followers went down in the shock, but not a single one of the Austrians recoiled; and how at that critical, dreadful moment, for the flanks of the enemy's phalanx were advancing to encompass them, there suddenly strode forth the Knight Arnold Strutthan von Winkelried, crying, "I will make a path for you! care for my wife and children!" and, rushing forward, grasped several spears and buried them in his breast, a large, strong man, he bore the soldiers down with him as he fell, and his companions pushed forward over his dead body into the midst of the host, and the victory was won, and another book was added to the epic story of the men of Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden; and how Duke Leopold fell fighting bravely, as became his house, and six hundred and fifty nobles with him, so that there was mourning at the Court of Austria for many a year, and men said it was a judgment upon the reckless spirit of the nobles; and how Martin Malterer, standard-bearer, of Freyburg in the Breisgau, happening to come upon Leopold as he was dying, was as one petrified, and the banner fell from his hands, and he threw himself across the body of Leopold to save it from further outrage, waiting for and finding his own death there; and how this ruinous contest between Switzerland and Austria was not finally closed till the time of Maximilian, in 1499, when first the right of private war was abolished in Germany; and how, through the various fortunes of the succeeding centuries, the character of the Swiss has remained for the most part the same as in the earlier time: these things one may read at large elsewhere; but we hasten to the conclusion.
Word Of The Day