Word Finder - kinsmen

definition

A male relative.

Their kinsmen and dependents were equally welcomed.

When the association of kinsmen failed, the voluntary associations - gilds - appeared as substitutes.

In the year 871 these two gallant kinsmen fought no less than six pitched battles against the invaders.

It was regarded as a universal duty to afford protection to one's kinsmen, to assist them in the redress of wrongs and to exact vengeance or compensation in case of death.

The natives are Micronesians, and are darker and shorter than their kinsmen, the Caroline Islanders.

The natives, who are Micronesian hybrids of finer physique than their kinsmen of the Pelew Islands, have a comparatively high mental standard, being careful agriculturists, and peculiarly clever boatbuilders and navigators.

Duarte sailed with his wife and children, and many of his kinsmen, to take possession of his new colony, and landed in the port of Pernambuco.

As the grandson of St Ladislaus, Manuel had Hungarian blood in his veins; his court was the ready and constant refuge of the numerous Magyar malcontents, and he aimed not so much at the conquest as at the suzerainty of Hungary, by placing one of his Magyar kinsmen on the throne of St Stephen.

The separatist movement was strongest in the south, where the Rumans were in touch with their kinsmen in Walachia and Moldavia, the Serbs with their brethren in Servia, and the Croats intent on reasserting the independence of the" Tri-une Kingdom."

Ivan Gundulic and the brilliant group of poets that gathered round him at Ragusa in the early 17th century, reflected in their writings the little Slav Republic's intimate connexion with its kinsmen of Serbia and Bosnia.

The system of "compositions" or fines, paid in many cases with the help of kinsmen, finds its natural place in the ancient, tribal period of English history and loses its vitality later on in consequence of the growth of central power and of the scattering of maegths.

Thus a privileged land-tenure was createdbookland; the rules as to the succession of kinsmen were set at nought by concession of testamentary power and confirmations of grants and wills; special exemptions from the jurisdiction of the hundreds and special privileges as to levying fines were conferred.

In their previous travels in Syria they had gained the confidence and friendship of a young sheikh whose family, though long settled at Tadmur, came originally from Nejd, and who was anxious to renew the connexion with his kinsmen by seeking a bride among them.

Murder can be expiated by the payment of diya or bloodmoney, if the kinsmen of the murdered man consent; they may, however, claim the life of the murderer, and long and troublesome blood feuds often ensue, involving the relatives of both sides for generations.

The latter had besides 20, 000 of his own south Shammar tribesmen, the whole strength of the Harb Bedouins, some io,000 men, and an additional support of r000 mounted men from his kinsmen, the northern Shammar from the Euphrates, while the Muter and Ateba tribes took part with the allies.

Directly, this arrangement prevented an Athenian empire; indirectly, it caused the sacrificed cities and their kinsmen on the islands to look upon Athens as their protector.

Step by step, and in spite of the efforts of the emperors at Constantinople, the great imperial officials became landowners, the owners of land - kinsmen or at least associates of these officials - intruded on the imperial administration, while the necessity for providing for the defence of the imperial territories against the Lombards led to the formation of local militias, who at first were attached to the imperial regiments, but gradually became independent.

Other South Arabs, and especially the Sabaeans, doubtless also planted settlers on the northern trade routes, who in process of time united into one community with their North-Arab kinsmen and neighbours.

Keane, is that the Negritos, still found in the Philippines, are the true aborigines of Indo-China and western Malaysia, while the Melanesians, probably their kinsmen, were the earliest occupants of eastern Malaysia and western Polynesia.

Rumours of the war of extermination conducted against their kinsmen, the wild Prussians, by the Knights, first woke the Lithuanians to a sense of their own danger, and induced them to abandon their loose communal system in favour of a monarchical form of government, which concentrated the whole power of the state in a single hand.

Confirmatory evidence of this is to be found, not only in the character of their constructions, but in the circumstance that a tribe closely akin to the Mayas (the Huastecos) still occupies a retired mountain valley of Vera Cruz, entirely separated from their kinsmen of the south, and that a dialect of the Maya language is still spoken in northern Vera Cruz.

Ancestor-worship has its parallels in Christian cults of the dead and of the saints; it must be remembered, however, that a saint is not as a rule an ancestor, and that his cult is not based upon family feeling and love of kinsmen, nor tends to stimulate and encourage the same.

These plans were artfully fostered by the Savoyard kinsmen of Eleanor, daughter of Raymond Berenger, count of Provence, whom he married at Canterbury in January 1236, and by his half-brothers, the sons of Queen Isabella and Hugo, count of la Marche.

The people of the district to which the candidate belonged were called together; his qualifications for the privileges about to be conferred upon him were inquired into; and, if he were deemed fitted and worthy to receive them, his chief, his father, or one of his near kinsmen presented him with a shield and a lance.

Now begin the dealings of Dionysius with Italy, where the Rhegines, kinsmen of Naxos and Catana, planned a fruitless attack on him in common with Messana.

Yet, among these and other elements of confusion, Manfred succeeded in setting up again the kingly power, first for his kinsmen and then for himself.

Her kinsmen, the Guises, fell from power, and were no longer to be feared by England, so that Elizabeth need not abandon her favourite, Lord Robert Dudley, in the hope of securing Scotland by her marriage with Arran.

We are attracted to Beltrees and his kinsmen less by their craftsmanship than by the fact that they supplied the leaders of the vernacular revival of the 18th century with many subjects and versemodels, and that by their treatment of these subjects and models, based on the practice of an earlier day, they complete the evidence of the continuity of the domestic popular type of Scots verse.

Though organized on similar lines, with a citizen population divided into three Dorian tribes (and one containing other elements), with a class of Perioeci (neighbouring dependents) and of serfs, the Argives had no more constant foe than their Lacedaemonian kinsmen.

The central position and military security of the city naturally tended to raise it to a commanding position among the Boeotians, and from early days its inhabitants endeavoured to establish a complete supremacy over their kinsmen in the outlying towns.

Society may have at one time been matrilinear in the communities that become the historic Hellenes; but of this there is no trace in the worship of Zeus and Hera.18 In fact, the whole of the family morality in Hellas centred in Zeus, whose altar in the courtyard was the bond of the kinsmen; and sins against the family, such as unnatural vice and the exposure of children, are sometimes spoken of as offences against the High God.I" He was also the tutelary deity of the larger organization of the phratria; and the altar of Zeus c Pparpcos was the meetingpoint of the phrateres, when they were assembled to consider the legitimacy of the new applicants for admission into their circle.20 His religion also came to assist the development of certain legal ideas, for instance, the rights of private or family property in land; he guarded the allotments as Zein KAdpcos,2' and the Greek commandment " thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark " was maintained by Zeus " Opcos, the god of boundaries, a more personal power than the Latin Jupiter Terminus.22 His highest political functions were summed up in the title IIoXtfin, a cult-name of legendary antiquity in Athens, and frequent in the Hellenic world.23 His consort in his political life was not Hera, but his daughter Athena Polias.

In 1833 and 1834 the youthful queens Donna Maria of Portugal and Isabella of Spain were the representatives and the hope of the constitutional party in those countries - assailed and hard pressed by their absolutist kinsmen Don Miguel and Don Carlos, who were the representatives of the male line of succession.

The revolutionary movement of 1848 extended from the Rumans of Hungary and Transylvania to their kinsmen of the Transalpine regions.

It was probably forgotten at the time (though Lord Kimberley afterwards publicly stated it) that one of the chief reasons why the Gladstone government had granted the retrocession of the Transvaal after Majuba, was the fear that the Cape Colonial Dutch would join their kinsmen if the war continued.

The effect of these engagements at the very outset of the war, occurring as they did within Cape Colony, was to offer every inducement to a number of the frontier colonial Boers to join their kinsmen of the republics.

The camps of the Danes were stormed, their fleet was destroyed in the river Lea in 895, and at last the remnant broke up and dispersed, some to seek easier plunder in France, others to settle down among their kinsmen in Northumbria or East Anglia.

But this first conquest of the region beyond Humber had to be repeated over and over again; time after time the Danes rebelled and proclaimed a new king, aided sometimes by bands of their kinsmen from Ireland or Norway, sometimes by the Scots and Strathclyde Welsh.

It is notable that when, after Edreds death, there was civil strife, owing to the quarrel of his nephew Edwy with some of his kinsmen, ministers and bishops, the rebels, who included the majority of the Mercians and Northumbrians, set up as their pretender to the throne not a Dane but Edwys younger brother Edgar, who ruled for a short time north of Thames, and became sole monarch on the death of his unfortunate kinsman.

At the moment of his premature death his nearest kinsmen were his worthless brother John, and the boy Arthur of Brittany, the heir of Geoffrey, the third son Accession of John.

Piers was given the royal title of earl of Cornwall, and married to the kings niece; when Edward went over to France to do homage for Gascony, he even made his friend regent during his absence, in preference to any of his kinsmen.

All her male kinsmen had been exterminated in the Wars of the Roses.

There was a lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen.

Burke was a gambler, they hint, in Indian stock, like his kinsmen Richard and William, and like Lord Verney, his political patron at Wendover.

The connexion with Tyrrhenians which began with Hellanicus, Herodotus and Sophocles becomes confusion with them in the 3rd century, when the Lemnian pirates and their Attic kinsmen are plainly styled Tyrrhenians, and early fortress-walls in Italy (like those on the Palatine in Rome) are quoted as "Arcadian" colonies.

Practically, however, this revolutionary aspect of the notion was kept for the most part in the background; the rational law of an ideal community was not distinguished from the positive ordinances and customs of actual society; and the " natural " ties that actually bound each man to family, kinsmen, fatherland, and to unwise humanity generally, supplied the outline on which the external manifestation of justice was delineated.

They had colonized the west in the viking times; they had " fought at Hafursfirth," helping their stay-at-home kinsmen against the centralization of the great head-king, who, when he had crushed opposition in Norway, followed up his victory by compelling them to flee or bow to his rule.

The unit of Icelandic politics was the homestead with its franklin-owner (buendi) its primal organization the hundredmoot (thing), its tie the gooorc5(godar) or chieftainship. The chief who had led a band of kinsmen and dependants to the new land, taken a " claim " there, and parcelled it out among them, naturally became their leader, presiding as priest at the temple feasts and sacrifices of heathen times, acting as speaker of their moot, and as their representative towards the neighbouring chiefs.

But though Loigaire refused to desert the faith of his ancestors we are told that a number of his nearest kinsmen accepted Christianity; and if there be any truth in the story of the codification of the Brehon Laws we gather that he realized that the future belonged to the new religion.

St Columba's kinsmen, the northern Hy Neill, took up the quarrel, and attacked and defeated the king at Culdreimne in 561.

This heterogeneous population was called Gallgoidel or foreign Irish (whence the modern name Galloway), and like their northern kinsmen they betook themselves to the sea and practised piracy.