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Updated: May 2, 2025
`Whiz! went the matchlock balls of the Arabs past our ears; `whir-r-ir' sliced away their scimitars right and left in the air, with the regularity of so many flails at work on a barn-floor; but we did not mind them a bit, for the `phit phit phit! of the bullets from our Martini rifles pattered amongst the bronze-coloured rascals like hail, deadening the whiz of their longer-barrelled weapons, while ever and anon the Maxim of the second cutter grunted out a fusillade of grape, making a noise like that of an old man with a bad cough on a winter's night going up to bed in the cold.
At this juncture a report reached the camp that the rustics of the marshes near Axbridge had risen in defence of the Protestant religion, had armed themselves with flails, bludgeons, and pitchforks, and were assembling by thousands at Bridgewater. Monmouth determined to return thither, and to strengthen himself with these new allies.
The scouts may meet with some of those horrid Flemings who fight with flails and scythes; you kill one thousand of them, and the last cuts you in two or disfigures you. No, Henri; if you will die, let it be a more glorious death than that." "My brother, grant me what I ask, I beg; I promise you to be prudent, and to return here." "Well, I understand." "What?"
Guid kens how long it took him, but he sowed his hill grasses with his corn, and the seeds came, as we say, and he cut it and threshed it with the flails; and after that he had hay-stacks in his yard, and his beasts were well done by, so that at the fair he got great prices both for stots and back-calvers.
A little beyond the village I passed a party of threshers, men and women two rows of them facing each other like dancers; the figures bending and straightening in unison, and all the. flails whirling together in the air. They had spread a large cloth upon the ground, and were thrashing out the grain upon it.
Living, unwounded men lay under those screaming shells with the panting hearts of toads under the beat of flails. Wounded men crawled back over No Man's Land, and some were blown to bits as they crawled, and others got back.
In secret, as he had first gone there, Luther returned to the Wartburg, and now set to work with his 'True Admonition for all Christians to abstain from turbulence and rebellion. He had before his eyes the danger of an insurrection, involving the lives of all the priests and monks who opposed reform, and one in which the common people, in revenge for their many grievances, might fall to laying about them with clubs and flails, as the 'Karsthans' threatened.
To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers' operations, which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick oak, black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion.
Upon this gate sate, quite unmoved and apathetic, a tall ceorl, or labourer, while behind it was a gazing curious group of men of the same rank, clad in those blue tunics of which our peasant's smock is the successor, and leaning on scythes and flails. Sour and ominous were the looks they bent upon that Norman cavalcade.
He used, when he did not go out shooting, to wear a dressing-gown from morning till dinner-time and at dinner. He would look through plans of some sort, or go round to the stables or to the threshing barn, and joke with the peasant women, who, to be sure, in his presence wielded their flails in leisurely fashion.
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