beadledom

• All the great movements of our day, one after the other--romanticism, naturalism--had been effected independently of her, or even against her will If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest--the Novel--touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. —  The Cathedral
• Constable, and in fact it was the day duty which embraced the peculiar dignity of beadledom. —  Fragments of Two Centuries Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King
• She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most specially consecrated. —  Modern Women and What is Said of Them A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868)
• In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many, and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward, while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have not listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the relations, and leave the dead. —  En Route
• So in France, where innumerable petty posts were regular articles of sale, anyone, it seems, who had saved a little money, found it most profitable to invest it in a beadledom of some kind -- to the great detriment of the country, for he thus withdrew his capital from trade; but to his own clear gain, for he thereby purchased some immunity from public burdens, and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his taxes. —  The Ancien Regime

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms