What is "scourings"

Usage examples of "scourings".

After decreeing the burning of corpses and their flammable effects, the stringent cleaning of the interiors of buildings, the filling in of cesspits, the scourings of towns and cities, and the towing out to sea and burning of hulks filled with corpses, he and the court had set out on a procession around the realm, avoiding castles, manors, halls, or abbeys and biding in pavilions set up in fields and leas, moors and forests, under the sky.

The Hos-Harphaxi levy were the dregs of the Five Kingdoms, gallows-fruit, cutpurses, imbeciles and the scourings of every prison in the eleven Princedoms of Hos-Harphax.

It also meant a good chance of having to open the battle with a frontal assault on the West Gap, which didn't appeal to Kalvan even if he did have the edge in numbers and many of the Harphaxi were the scourings of every dive and almshouse in Hos-Harphax and Hos-Agrys.

He had no love for these, these scourings of Hiuaj’s Barrow-hills, these fallen Myya.

The sound that went up from the Shiua horde was like that of the waves of the sea, and their number—the number was unimaginable even to a man who had seen forces in the field and knew how to estimate them: all that the camp on Azeroth had spilled forth, the refuse and scourings of a drowning world.

The stallion covered me with his scourings, though my Spadix—eyes white with fear, all four legs poking out stiffly—did not succumb.

On the eastern horizon were coral heads worn to mushroom shapes by the currents that deposited their scourings here to form the shore on which the trireme rested.

Ann hefted one after another of them, thinking about how many years their planed sides represented, wondering whether her mind might not reveal similar scourings, big sections worn flat by time.