ppl. a. [f. FETTER v. + -ED1.]
1. Bound with fetters or chains.
c. 1325. Prose Psalter, ci[i]. 21. He herd þe waie-mentynges of þe fettered.
1556. J. Heywood, Spider & F., ii. B j b.
| Thus though the caged byrde (with stomake stout: | |
| And voise right sweete) can sing his songs by roate, | |
| Yet can the fettred flie, so: sing no noate. |
1602. Marston, Antonio’s Rev., III. ii. Wks. 1856, I. 107.
| May I be fetter’d slave to coward Chaunce, | |
| If blood, heart, braine, plot ought save vengeance. |
1696. Lond. Gaz., No. 3214/4. Two black Geldings, the one … side fettered.
1814. Byron, The Corsair, III. ix.
| And gathering, as he could, the links that bound | |
| His form, to curl their length, and curb their sound, | |
| Since bar and bolt no more his steps preclude, | |
| He, fast as fetter’d limbs allow, pursued. |
1880. Miss Braddon, Just as I am, vi. They passed him presently, the prisoner walking at a slow and dogged pace beside the guardian of the village peace, his head sunk on his breast, his fettered wrists hanging in front of him, his weary old shoulders stooping under the burden of a long life of penury, disrepute, and evil-doing; a creature too low for hatred, looked at from a philosopher’s point of view.
b. fig. Hampered by disadvantageous conditions.
1856. Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 140. It is the old, fettered, barbarian Labor-system.
2. (See quot.)
1884. Syd. Soc. Lex., Fettered, in Biol., applied to the limbs of animals when, by their retention within the integuments, or by their backward stretched position, they are unfit for walking.
Hence Fetteredness, the state of being fettered.
1656. W. Montague, trans. The Accomplish’d Woman, 112. Gracefulness is so averse to this slavery and fetterednesse.
