United States or Vanuatu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Strasburg was visited by the "Dancing Plague" in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there, as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behaviour, and then by their constantly following swarms of dancers.

Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague in 1418, and it was here that the plague assumed the name of St. Vitus's dance. St. Vitus was a Sicilian youth who, just at the time he was about to undergo martyrdom by order of Diocletian, in the year 303, is said to have prayed to God that He might protect all those who would solemnize the day of his commemoration and fast upon its eve.

Disembarking in July 1417 with an army of forty thousand men near the mouth of the Touque, he stormed Caen, received the surrender of Bayeux, reduced Alençon and Falaise, and detaching his brother the Duke of Gloucester in the spring of 1418 to occupy the Cotentin made himself master of Avranches and Domfront.

Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague, or St. Vitus' dance, in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers.

If we consider the rates between the current price of land and the tax, there is a record, dated 1418, which shows that the tax levied by a temple Myoko-ji was twenty per cent, of the market price of the land. But it would seem that the ratio in the case of Government taxation was much smaller, being only one and a half per cent, of the market value.

Still, for three years they made head against their foes; till in 1418 the Duke of Burgundy's friends opened Paris's gates to his soldiers, and for the time the Armagnacs seemed to be completely defeated; only the Dauphin Charles made feeble war from Poitiers.

Thick walls, deep ditches, and formidable towers, a great many turrets, bastions, casemates, and fortified gates, made Rouen an important place, before the revolution: omitting the different sieges, which it had to sustain from the Normans, we must notice in 949 those by Otho, emperor of Germany, Louis IVth, king of France, and Arnould count of Flanders; that in 1204 by Philip-Augustus, 1418, by Henry Vth king of England; that in 1449, after which, Charles VIIth retook the town from the English; lastly, that of 1591, by Henry IVth.

About the year 1418, when Prince Henry first began his plan of discovery, Cape Nun, in latitude 28° 40', was the limit of European knowledge on the coast of Africa. With this part of the coast, the Portuguese had become acquainted in consequence of their wars with the Moors of Barbary.

The fact that in their very title they confounded rhetoric with poetry and the drama indicates the meagre attainments of these early "Rederykers." In the outset of their career they gave theatrical exhibitions. "King Herod and his Deeds" was enacted in the cathedral at Utrecht in 1418.

The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in 1418, and in 1425 was colonised by Prince Henry, who appointed as Governor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whose daughter was afterwards to become the wife of Columbus. So much for the outposts of the Old World.