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Contumacy   Listen
Contumacy

noun
(pl. contumacies)
1.
Willful refusal to appear before a court or comply with a court order; can result in a finding of contempt of court.
2.
Obstinate rebelliousness and insubordination; resistance to authority.






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"Contumacy" Quotes from Famous Books



... friends and the opponents of the Minister expected from him a declaration to that effect. To the astonishment of all parties, he concluded by saying that, though he thought it right in Hastings to fine Cheyte Sing for contumacy, yet the amount of the fine was too great for the occasion. On this ground, and on this ground alone, did Mr. Pitt, applauding every other part of the conduct of Hastings with regard to Benares, declare that he should vote in favour ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... benefice was appropriated by himself and the title bestowed on Robert Montgomery, minister of Stirling. The Church at once rose up in arms against this flagrant violation of its authority, put Montgomery on his trial for contumacy, found him guilty, and sentenced him to deposition and excommunication. It was at the instance of Melville, who, in this as in many another crisis in the Church's history in his time, was called to the Moderator's chair, that the Assembly took action ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison

... the cause of their contumacy, we took a young hippopotamus, and kept him without food till he became quite ravenous. Some of the tender herbs were then brought, but he would not touch them, and evinced other symptoms of antipathy, while ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... Gros-Jean, one of the fiercest Chouans of the Fontaine division. Implicated in the affair of the "Chauffeurs of Mortagne" in 1809. Condemned to death for contumacy. [The ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... the authors of persecution previously to reflect, whether they are determined to support it in the last extreme. They excite the flame which they strive to extinguish; and it soon becomes necessary to chastise the contumacy, as well as the crime, of the offender. The fine, which he is unable or unwilling to discharge, exposes his person to the severity of the law; and his contempt of lighter penalties suggests the use and propriety of capital punishment. Through the veil of fiction and declamation we may clearly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather; a penance by which I trust I have propitiated Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy to my father." If the anecdote illustrates the touch of superstition in Johnson's mind, it reveals too that sacred depth of tenderness which ennobled his character. No repentance can ever wipe out the past or ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... more or less the universal humor in the Squirearchy of Brandenburg; not of good omen to Burggraf Friedrich. But the chief seat of contumacy seemed to be among the Quitzows, Putlitzes, above spoken of; big Squires in the district they call the Priegnitz, in the Country of the sluggish Havel River, northwest from Berlin a fifty or forty miles. These refused homage, very many of them; said they were "incorporated with Bohmen;" ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... domains, frequenting grove and river, without once dreaming of paying homage to its tutelary deities. He is, therefore, summoned to their presence, and prompt obedience will insure him forgiveness; but in case of contumacy, let him beware how he again essays either ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... Mrs. Simmons had been the widowed Mrs. Ford. Ford had got a berth as donkeyman on a tramp steamer, and that steamer had gone down with all hands off the Cape: a judgment, the widow woman feared, for long years of contumacy, which had culminated in the wickedness of taking to the sea, and taking to it as a donkeyman—an immeasurable fall for a capable engine-fitter. Twelve years as Mrs. Ford had left her still childless, and childless she remained ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... turns upon the falsest reasoning in the world. So, if a man be imprisoned for stealing a horse, he is hindered from other duties: And, you might argue, that a man who doth ill, ought to be more diligent in minding other duties, and not to be debarred from them. It is for contumacy and rebellion against that power in the church, which the law hath confirmed. So a man is outlawed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... myself that wealth of charity," Charles said, "that would make me love those that by rebellion and contumacy have ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Resistance was to be kept strictly within the constitutional limits, indeed the very year of his junction with this the extreme left of the Repeal party, Smith O'Brien's most violent proceeding was to decline to sit upon a railway committee to which he had been summoned, an act of contumacy for which he was ordered by the House of Commons into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms, and committed to an extemporized prison, by some cruelly declared to be the coal-hole. "An Irish leader in a coal-hole!" ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... within my personal knowledge a few years ago. A local dignitary in a distant province fell under the frown of the Prince Governor, who, actuated by greed, imposed on him a heavy fine for an imaginary offence. The fine was not paid, on which a charge of contumacy was made, and this was punished by the cruel bastinado and imprisonment. The Telegraph-master, notwithstanding the fact of the Governor being a near relative of the late Shah, reported the circumstance in all ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... head, and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the by-standers, and the inclemency of the weather: a penance, by which I have propitiated Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy towards my father."'—Is it not probable that Dr. Johnson himself might have sold for SIXPENCE, a Tusser, which now would have brought a ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... To them the young men congregated for knowledge, and the pupils held their teachers in great respect. They, too, were the judges in public and private disputes: it was they who awarded damages and penalties. Any contumacy in reference to their judgments was punished by exclusion from the sacrifices. This sentence of excommunication was the severest punishment among the Gauls. The men so punished were treated as outlaws, and cut off from all human society, with ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl

... feudal tenure of her estates, the ward of the said Duke of Burgundy, hath fled from his dominions, and from the charge which he, as a careful guardian, was willing to extend over her, and is here maintained in secret by the King of France and by him fortified in her contumacy to the Duke, her natural lord and guardian, contrary to the laws of God and man, as they ever have been acknowledged in civilized Europe.—Once more I pause for your ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... police. "They were to arrest Buquet on the part of the government; if he consented to say where the money was, he was to be given his liberty, and the address of a safe hiding-place; in case of his refusing, the police were to kill him, and they would then be free to draw up a report of contumacy." ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... the execution of the conspirator Targioni, who suffered in the late affair of the Prince Spada, flowers and chaplets, notwithstanding every precaution on the part of the police, were found scattered on his tomb. He has been refused, for his contumacy in his last moments, Christian sepulture, and was buried in a field outside the Porta del Popolo. It is remarkable that, very nearly in the same place, the freedmen of Nero paid a similar tribute of affection to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various

... convent, claiming that murder had been done there, they found no sign. Sister Maddelena had been sent to the parent house of the barefoot Carmelites at Avila in Spain, so the Superior stated, because of her incorrigible contumacy. The old Duke of Castiglione refused to stir hand or foot in the matter, and Michele, after fruitless attempts to prove that the Superior of Sta. Catarina had caused the death, was forced to leave Sicily. He sought in Spain for very long; ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... d'ors and ducats. At one moment there is to be a large army to lay prostrate the liberties of the people; at another moment the militia of Virginia are to be dragged from their homes five or six hundred miles, to tame the republican contumacy of Massachusetts; and that of Massachusetts is to be transported an equal distance to subdue the refractory haughtiness of the aristocratic Virginians. Do the persons who rave at this rate imagine that their ...
— The Federalist Papers

... also informing Augustus of his actions, and that too with exaggeration, and taking care, I know not with what intention, that what he did should not be unknown to the emperor. And at this Caesar soon became more vehemently exasperated, and, as if raising more on high than ever the standard of his contumacy, without any regard to the safety of others or of himself, he bore himself onwards like a rapid torrent, with an impetuosity which would listen to no reason, to sweep away all the obstacles ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus



Words linked to "Contumacy" :   noncompliance, jurisprudence, law, insubordination, rebelliousness, disobedience, contumacious



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