State of subjection to an owner or master or forced labor imposed as punishment

Usage examples of servitude.

Gothic standard became the refuge of forty thousand Barbarian slaves, who had broke their chains, and aspired, under the command of their great deliverer, to revenge the injuries and the disgrace of their cruel servitude.

Wilson, whose term of servitude had expired, preferred the mode of living among the natives, to earning his livelihood by the sweat of his brow.

This reconstruction measure was an attempt to put the superior part of the community under the control of the inferior, these parts separated by all the prejudices of race, and by traditions of mastership on the one side and of servitude on the other.

Thus it is that whatsoever be their utterance, whether it pertain to the realm of Divinity, Lordship, Prophethood, Messengership, Guardianship, Apostelship or Servitude, all is true, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Besieged by solicitations for products and services we neither want nor need, misrepresented and misgoverned by corrupt politicians beholden to multinational megacorporations, and reduced to involuntary servitude by usurious financial institutions, we are not so much consumers as we are in danger of being consumed.

It claims to be an everlasting protest against priestly tyranny, and monkish authority, and abject spiritual servitude in the laity.

Bineses, the ambassador of Persia, entered the place, displayed from the citadel the standard of the Great King, and proclaimed, in his name, the cruel alternative of exile or servitude.

Christian bishops, on whose aid he relied for subduing the temporal princes, saw that he was determined to reduce them to servitude, and, by assuming the whole legislative and judicial power of the church to centre all authority in the sovereign pontiff.

Such a state of society was very little advanced beyond the rude state of nature: violence universally prevailed, instead of general and equitable maxims: the pretended liberty of the times was only an incapacity of submitting to government: and men, not protected by law in their lives and properties, sought shelter, by their personal servitude and attachments, under some powerful chieftain, or by voluntary combinations.

He had contracted for 100,000 bricks, ordered specially made window frames from London, and in Philadelphia purchased the unexpired servitude of an indentured servant, a stonecutter, to do the columns.

When we contemplate these achievements of mind, by which manual labor has been diminished, and every physical force both magnified and economized, how unstatesmanlike is the view which regards a human being as a bundle of muscles and bones merely, with no destiny but ignorance, servitude, and poverty!

A wandering tribe of the Blemmyes or Nubians invaded his solitary prison: in their retreat they dismissed a crowd of useless captives: but no sooner had Nestorius reached the banks of the Nile, than he would gladly have escaped from a Roman and orthodox city, to the milder servitude of the savages.

I saw her, in the courtyard of Cereus House, the day she sold me into servitude.

The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude.

I am rather of the opinion of those who say that, on the taking of Corniculum, the wife of Servius Tullius, who had been the leading man in that city, being pregnant when her husband was slain, being known among the other female prisoners, and, in consequence of her high rank, exempted from servitude by the Roman queen, was delivered of a child at Rome, in the house of Tarquinius Priscus.