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Fosse   /fɑs/   Listen
Fosse

noun
1.
Ditch dug as a fortification and usually filled with water.  Synonym: moat.






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"Fosse" Quotes from Famous Books



... Hoan, governor of the two cities, was strengthening their works and vigorously repelling every assault of his foes. The city was surrounded by thick and lofty walls and a deep fosse, was amply garrisoned, and was abundantly supplied with provisions, having food-supplies, it was said, sufficient "for a period of ten years." Thus provided, the gallant commandant, confident in ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... and Episcopal Palace of St. Andrews is now in ruins. It stands on a detached point of land to the north of the town, and is bounded on two sides by the sea. It entered from the south side by a drawbridge, across a deep fosse or ditch, which being now removed and filled up with rubbish, very much injures the picturesque appearance of the Castle. After its surrender, on the last of July 1547, the Castle was ordered by an Act of Council to ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... gun was in position on any one of the ninety-five bastions of the ramparts. On the other hand, Palikao was certainly doing all he could for the city. He had formed the aforementioned Committee of Defence, and under his auspices the fosse or ditch in front of the ramparts was carried across the sixty-nine roads leading into Paris, whilst drawbridges were installed on all these points, with armed lunettes in front of them. Again, redoubts were thrown up in advance of some of the outlying forts, or on spots where ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... somewhere by Fosse 8. The two comrades in the Scots Guards were badly wounded. One of the young brothers was killed and the other maimed. I found their names in the casualty lists which filled columns of The Times for a long ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... l'ultima ora del nostro amor, come se fosse l'ultima, l'ultima ora, ora del nostro amor, del nostro amor? Oh, qual presagio m'assale, come se fosse l'ultima ora del nostro amor, se fosse ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... Grange-Chancel (author of the Philippiques, directed against the Regent) followed him in tragedies on classical subjects. If any piece deserves to be distinguished above the rest, it is the Manlius (1698) of La Fosse, a work—suggestive rather of Corneille than of Racine—which was founded on the Venice Preserved of Otway. The art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The eighteenth century, while preserving its form, thought to reanimate it by the provocatives ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... The police were at once in pursuit. The post-horse ridden by Durochat, and abandoned by him on the Boulevard, was found wandering about the Palais Royale. It was known that four horses covered with foam had been conducted at about five in the morning to the stables of a certain Muiron, Rue des Fosse's, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, by two men who had hired them the day before: these men were Bernard and Couriol; the former of whom was immediately arrested, the second had, with the other accomplices, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... Harry the Seventh(1448) was so sumptuously banqueted, and imposed that villainous fine for his entertainment, is now shrunk to one vast curious tower, that stands on a spacious mount raised on a high hill with a large fosse. It commands a fine prospect, and belongs to Mr. Ashurst, a rich citizen, who has built a trumpery new house close to it. In the parish church is a fine square monument of black marble of one of the Earls; and there are three more tombs of the family at Earl's Colne, some miles from the castle. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... the castle is very bold: it crowns the extremity of a ridge of chalk hills of considerable height, which commencing to the west of Dieppe, and terminating at this spot, have full command of the valley below. The fosse which surrounds the walls is wide and deep. The outline of the fortress is oval, but not regularly so; and it is varied by towers of uncertain shape, placed at unequal distances. The two entrance towers, and those nearest to ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... hedge, hedge row; espalier; fence &c. (defense) 717; pale, paling, balustrade, rail, railing, quickset hedge, park paling, circumvallation[obs3], enceinte, ring fence. barrier, barricade; gate, gateway; bent, dingle [U.S.]; door, hatch, cordon; prison &c. 752. dike, dyke, ditch, fosse[obs3], moat. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... arm, (15) No pious thought of father or of kin; But full in face of brother or of sire, Drive home the blade. Unless the slain be known Your foes account his slaughter as a crime; Spare not our camp, but lay the rampart low And fill the fosse with ruin; not a man But holds his post within the ranks to-day. And yonder tents, deserted by the foe, Shall give us shelter ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... narration proving the feeling I have referred to, actuating even this animal. A proof of the bad feeling of a bear is fully established by the fact that, although Martin, as the old bear is called in the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, had been confined in his fosse nearly twenty years, during which time not a day passed that he was not well fed by the people who amused themselves in the gardens, when a man fell into his pit, he immediately destroyed him. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... its capes, grotesque and wild. High on a mound th' exalted gardens stand, Beneath, deep valleys, scoop'd by Nature's hand. A Cobham here, exulting in his art, Might blend the general's with the gardener's part; Might fortify with all the martial trade Of rampart, bastion, fosse, and palisade; Might plant the mortar with wide threat'ning bore, Or bid the mimic ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... resolved, disposing in their place Their guard's relief, depart the youthful pair, Leave fosse and palisade, and in small space Are among ours, who watch with little care; Who, for they little fear the Paynim race, Slumber with fires extinguished everywhere. 'Mid carriages and arms they lie supine, Up to the eyes immersed in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Street, ran by St Albans Wall near Lichfield (Letocetum), to Wroxeter and Chester. It also gave access by a branch to Leicester and Lincoln. A fourth served Colchester, the eastern counties, Lincoln and York. The fifth is that known to the English as the Fosse, which joins Lincoln and Leicester with Cirencester, Bath and Exeter. Besides these five groups, an obscure road, called by the Saxons Akeman Street, gave alternative access from London through Alchester (outside of Bicester) to Bath, while another obscure road winds south ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... of twelve Black Watch officers awaiting us, and the day was spent in cleaning ourselves. Next day (12th September) we moved back to Templeux la Fosse, with Battalion H.Q. in the old Prisoners of War compound and the companies in trenches. Major J.M. M'Kenzie, Royal Scots, arrived to take over command of the Battalion from, Major D.D. Ogilvie, and Brig.-General F.S. Thackeray (H.L.I.) assumed command of the Brigade ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie

... he could define an alteration; and yet, with that marvellous power of self-defence, that instinctive knowledge of spirituo-military engineering with which maidens are gifted, she had set up such a palisade between them, dug such a fosse, and raised such a rampart, that without knowing how the effect was produced, he felt that he could not approach her. It is strange how women can put out an invisible arm and push one off to ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... right and a little behind them, rose the great tower of Antonia. Beneath this wall were rubbish-heaps, foul-smelling and covered over with rough grasses and some spring flowers, which grew upon the slopes of the ancient fosse. Here seemed a place where they might lie hid awhile, since there were no houses and it was unsavoury. She dragged Miriam to her feet, and, notwithstanding her complaints and swollen ankle, forced her on, till they came to a spot ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... si santo ne benigno Augusto Come la tuba di Virgilio suona: L'aver avuto in poesia buon gusto La proscrizion iniqua gli perdona. Nessun sapria se Neron fosse ingiusto, Ne sua fama saria forse men buona, Avesse avuto e terra e ciel nimici, Se gli scrittor sapea ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt

... stile. That surmounted and left behind, a narrow by-path led you through its twisting turns until you reached a tiny, rustic stone bridge—such a tiny, little bridge! This was over the sluice and aqueduct from the adjacent river, which supplied the fosse that in olden times surrounded the prebend's residence, when there were such things as sieges and besiegements in this fair ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the castle. Seeing a knight approaching alone the garrison judged that he was friendly, and it was not until it was seen that instead of approaching the drawbridge he turned aside and rode to the edge of the fosse, that they suspected that he was a foe. Running to the walls they opened fire with arrows upon him, but by this time Archie had seen all that he required. Across the promontory ran a sort of fissure, some ten yards wide and as many deep. From the opposite edge of this ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty

... incident to a cause of self-approbation before he had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns' love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety darkness ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... preparing to cross the bridge at Fouchard. It was an awful looking place at which ha had to make his entrance there was certainly a considerable breach in the wall, and the fragments of it had fallen into the fosse, so as to lessen its width; but, nevertheless, there was full twenty feet of running water to cross, which had more the appearance of a branch of the river Loire, than of ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... [1] La Fosse has thought proper to lengthen this poem by considerable interpolations of his own, which he thinks are indispensably necessary to the completion ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... darkly and stormily along; the mount, though not steep, was full two miles in circumference, from base to brow occupied by the castle, which was erected in that massive yet irregular form peculiar to the architecture of the middle ages. A deep, broad moat or fosse, constantly supplied by the river, defended the castle wall, which ran round the mound, irregularly indeed, for there were indentations and sharp angles, occasioned by the uneven ground, each of which was guarded by a strong turret or tower, rising ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... Sometimes the name Dykes may imply residence near some historic earthwork, such as Offa's Dyke, just as Wall, for which Waugh was used in the north, may show connection with the Roman wall. With these may be mentioned the French name Fosse, whence the apparently pleonastic Fosdyke and the name of Verdant Green's friend, Mr. Four-in-hand Fosbrooke. Delves is from Mid. Eng. dell, ditch. Jury is for Jewry, the quarter allotted to the Jews, but Jewsbury is no doubt for Dewsbury; ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Coccosteus minor,—if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such time as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a more characteristic one,—there are the remains, consisting of fosse and rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins, of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... consist of a triple wall, with towers at every 150 yards; the first wall being 30 feet in height; the second 20, and about 30 feet from the first; the third is twelve feet in height; beyond this is a fosse, thirty feet wide, now converted into gardens, and filled with fine grown trees, and a low counterscarp. There are five gates on this side, and several to the water. The streets, of which there are 3,770, with the exception of two or three, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various

... manufactures of trade in iron, as it was obliged to supply iron and iron rods for the king's ships. Martins' skins were imported into Chester, either from Iceland or Germany. The navigation of the Trent and the Fosse, and the road to ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... the remark that Kent leapt the fence, Horace Walpole alludes to that artist's practice of throwing down walls and other boundaries and sinking fosses called by the common people Ha! Ha's! to express their astonishment when the edge of the fosse brought ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... Gibourc grew red when she heard the porter's words, and she left the Palace and mounted the battlements, where she called across the fosse, ...
— The Book of Romance • Various

... water from any neighbouring hill percolate through your garden, nor rise into a pleasing jet-d'eau right under the floor of your principal dining-room. If you can, and if you do not mind the "old-fashioned" look of the thing, dig a good deep fosse all round your garden, and line it with masonry; and have a couple of bridges over it; you may then not only effectually carry off all intruding visits of the watery sprites, but you may keep off hares from your flower-beds, two-legged cats from your larder, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... himself drop over the wall, lower than Raymond had taken it, he saw Ralph and Dare, followed by the others, come streaming down the slope in the moonlight, spreading as they came. It was now or never. He rushed up the fosse under cover of the wall, and almost stumbled over a prostrate figure, which was helplessly trying to raise itself on ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... past nine when they arrived at the capital of Belgium. The party were greeted by Mr. Fluxion, who had been sent direct from Antwerp to make arrangements for their stay over night. Captain Kendall, his officers and crew, were sent to the Hotel Royal in the Rue Fosse aux Loups. It was a small hotel, but very nice and comfortable. Mr. Molenschot, the proprietor, spoke English, but he appeared to be the only person in the house who could do so. He was very polite and attentive to the students, and spoke familiarly and pleasantly ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... custom, dropped their pieces, such as had them, when they had fired the first shot, and risked all on the push of the target and the slash of the broad brand, confident even that our six or seven feet of escarpment would never stay their onset any time to speak of. An abattis or a fosse would have made this step futile; but as things were, it was not altogether impossible that they might surmount our low wall. Our advantage was that the terre-plein on which we stood was three or four feet higher than they were at the outer side of the wall, apart ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... which gave light as well to the two anterooms as to the mysterious chamber itself, looked down upon an ancient moat, by which they were divided from the level ground on the farther side. The defence which this fosse afforded seemed to have been long neglected, and the bottom, entirely dry, was choked in many places with bushes and low trees, which rose up against the wall of the castle, and by means of which it seemed to Rose the windows might be easily scaled, and the mansion entered. From ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... once again calls up a vision of the Downs; it is not so thick and strong, and it lacks that cushion of herbage which so often marks the site of its growth on the noble slopes of the hills, and along the sward-grown fosse of ancient earthworks, but it is wild thyme, and that is enough. From this bed of varieties of thyme there rises up a pleasant odour which attracts the bees. Bees and humble-bees, indeed, buzz everywhere, but they are much too busily occupied to ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... about two miles from the present city of Salisbury on the plain. It was built on the top of an enormous circular mound of earth several hundred yards in diameter, and was supposed to have been surrounded by the usual fosse and ditch. Roman, Saxon and Norman remains have been, and are still being, found, as the stonework of walls and buildings is being uncovered. It is supposed that much of the original stone was used in the 12th century to build ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... as determined as ever, he pushed on, and presently stood on the summit, on the edge of the fosse. He looked down; the waggon seemed under his feet; the plain, the hills beyond, the blue distant valley on one side, on the other the ridge he had mounted stretched away, and beyond it still more ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... difficult of access; from its position at the summit of a steep hill; but it is still protected by a vallum from thirty to forty feet high, and between the sea and the entrance nearest to it, a length of about three hundred yards, by a wide exterior ditch with other out-works, as well as by an inner fosse, faint traces of which only now remain. Hence to the next and large entrance is a distance of about two thousand feet; and in this space the interior fosse is still very visible; but the great abruptness of the hill forbade an ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... The naval captain Foligny, writing on the spot at the time of the burial, says in his Diary, under the date of September 14: "A huit heures du soir, dans l'eglise des Ursulines, fut enterre dans une fosse faite sous la chaire par le travail de la Bombe, M. le Marquis de Montcalm, decede du matin a 4 heures apres avoir recu tous les Sacrements. Jamais General n'avoit ete plus aime de sa troupe et plus universellement regrette. Il etoit d'un esprit ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... we had lost and won was unfurled; and the war horns blew bravely enough to wake the mighty dead whose mounds were round about us; and soon the hillside was full of men who crowded upwards and filled the camp and ramparts and fosse, so that before sunset Alfred had a host that any king might be proud to call his own. Yet he would call it not Alfred's ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... decrease, Such fates the ruthless years unfold; And yet we shall not wholly cease, We shall not perish unconsoled; Nay, still shall Freedom keep her hold Within the sea's inviolate fosse, And boast her sons of English mould, Ye ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang

... bend as I pass them by; and, seem to sigh for her who is gone, never to return. The ruined fosse, stagnant and moss- covered, speaks of ruin and desolation. The crumbling walls that once encircled the Prebend's residence, also reveal the slowly-sure power of the destroyer's hand, more and more apparent each year ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... 8, 1, mentions this fosse, and says that Drusus sailed up the Meuse and the Waal. Cluverius places it between the village of Iselvort and ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, Senza tema d'infamia ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot

... strewn with roses. He is Christ's freeman; but it is with spiritual freedom as with civil, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Neither is it an artillery duel, or firing at long range; it is ofttimes a grapple in the fosse for victory or death. ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace



Words linked to "Fosse" :   trench, moat



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