Explore "The Great House" by Stanley J. Weyman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Within twenty-four hours there were signs that Bosham's brush with his lordship and the show of feeling outside Hatton's Works had set a sharper edge on the fight. Trifles as these were, the farmers about Riddsley took them up and resented them. The feudal feeling was not quite extinct. Their landlord was still a great man to them, and even those who did not love him believed that he was fighting their battle. An insult to him seemed, in any case, a portent, but that such a poor creature as Bosham-Ben Bosham of the Bridge End-should insult him, went beyond bearing.
Moreover, it was beginning to be whispered that Ben was tampering with the laborers. One heard that he was preaching higher wages in the public houses, another that he was asking Hodge what he got out of dear bread, a third that he was vaporing about commons and enclosures. The farmers growled. The farmers' sons began to talk together outside the village inn. The farmers' wives foresaw rick-burning, maimed cattle, and empty hen coops, and said that they could not sleep in their beds for Ben.