A DREAM OF JOHN BALL
AND
A KING'S LESSON
BY
WILLIAM MORRIS
CONTENTS
I. The Men of Kent
II. The Man from Essex
III. They Meet at the Cross
IV. The Voice of John Ball
V. They hear Tidings of Battle and make them Ready
VI. The Battle at the Township's End
VII. More Words at the Cross
VIII. Supper at Will Green's
IX. Betwixt the Living and them Dead
X. Those Two Talk of the Days to Come
XI. Hard it is for the Old World to see the New
XII. Ill would Change be at Whiles were it not for the
Change beyond the Change
A KING'S LESSON
A DREAM OF JOHN BALL
CHAPTER I
THE MEN OF KENT
Sometimes I am rewarded for fretting myself so much about present
matters by a quite unasked-for pleasant dream. I mean when I am
asleep. This dream is as it were a present of an architectural
peep-show. I see some beautiful and noble building new made, as it
were for the occasion, as clearly as if I were awake; not vaguely or
absurdly, as often happens in dreams, but with all the detail clear and
reasonable. Some Elizabethan house with its scrap of earlier
fourteenth-century building, and its later degradations of Queen Anne
and Silly Billy and Victoria, marring but not destroying it, in an old
village once a clearing amid the sandy woodlands of Sussex. Or an old
and unusually curious church, much churchwardened, and beside it a
fragment of fifteenth-century domestic architecture amongst the not
unpicturesque lath and plaster of an Essex farm, and looking natural
enough among the sleepy elms and the meditative hens scratching about
in the litter of the farmyard, whose trodden yellow straw comes up to
the very jambs of the richly carved Norman doorway of the church. Or
sometimes 'tis a splendid collegiate church, untouched by restoring
parson and architect, standing amid an island of shapely trees and
flower-beset cottages of thatched grey stone and cob, amidst the narrow
stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the sweeping
Wiltshire downs, so well beloved of William Cobbett. Or some new-seen
and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey village of the upper
Thames overtopped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth-century
church; or even sometimes the very buildings of the past untouched by
the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows
not of beauty and history: as once, when I was journeying (in a dream
of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt
Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall
back from the broad stream, I came upon a clear-seen mediaeval town
standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, grey and
ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old. All this I
have seen in the dreams of the night clearer than I can force myself to
see them in dreams of the day. So that it would have been nothing new
to me the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were
all, and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell me
after I had fallen asleep. I had begun my sojourn in the Land of Nod by
a very confused attempt to conclude that it was all right for me to
have an engagement to lecture at Manchester and Mitcham Fair Green at
half-past eleven at night on one and the same Sunday, and that I could
manage pretty well. And then I had gone on to try to make the best of
addressing a large open-air audience in the costume I was really then
wearing--to wit, my night-shirt, reinforced for the dream occasion by a
pair of braceless trousers. The consciousness of this fact so bothered
me, that the earnest faces of my audience--who would NOT notice it, but
were clearly preparing terrible anti-Socialist posers for me--began to
fade away and my dream grew thin, and I awoke (as I thought) to find
myself lying on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a
country village.
I got up and rubbed my eyes and looked about me, and the landscape
seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an
ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and
there. The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece of
Roman road from its straightness. Copses were scattered over the
country, and there were signs of two or three villages and hamlets in
sight besides the one near me, between which and me there was some
orchard-land, where the early apples were beginning to redden on the
trees. Also, just on the other side of the road and the ditch which
ran along it, was a small close of about a quarter of an acre, neatly
hedged with quick, which was nearly full of white poppies, and, as far
as I could see for the hedge, had also a good few rose-bushes of the
bright-red nearly single kind, which I had heard are the ones from
which rose-water used to be distilled. Otherwise the land was quite
unhedged, but all under tillage of various kinds, mostly in small
strips. From the other side of a copse not far off rose a tall spire
white and brand-new, but at once bold in outline and unaffectedly
graceful and also distinctly English in character. This, together with
the unhedged tillage and a certain unwonted trimness and handiness
about the enclosures of the garden and orchards, puzzled me for a
minute or two, as I did not understand, new as the spire was, how it
could have been designed by a modern architect; and I was of course
used to the hedged tillage and tumbledown bankrupt-looking surroundings
of our modern agriculture. So that the garden-like neatness and
trimness of everything surprised me. But after a minute or two that
surprise left me entirely; and if what I saw and heard afterwards seems
strange to you, remember that it did not seem strange to me at the
time, except where now and again I shall tell you of it. Also, once
for all, if I were to give you the very words of those who spoke to me
you would scarcely understand them, although their language was English
too, and at the time I could understand them at once.
Well, as I stretched myself and turned my face toward the village, I
heard horse-hoofs on the road, and presently a man and horse showed on
the other end of the stretch of road and drew near at a swinging trot
with plenty of clash of metal. The man soon came up to me, but paid me
no more heed than throwing me a nod. He was clad in armour of mingled
steel and leather, a sword girt to his side, and over his shoulder a
long-handled bill-hook.
His armour was fantastic in form and well wrought; but by this time I
was quite used to the strangeness of him, and merely muttered to
myself, "He is coming to summon the squire to the leet;" so I turned
toward the village in good earnest. Nor, again, was I surprised at my
own garments, although I might well have been from their unwontedness.
I was dressed in a black cloth gown reaching to my ankles, neatly
embroidered about the collar and cuffs, with wide sleeves gathered in
at the wrists; a hood with a sort of bag hanging down from it was on my
head, a broad red leather girdle round my waist, on one side of which
hung a pouch embroidered very prettily and a case made of hard leather
chased with a hunting scene, which I knew to be a pen and ink case; on
the other side a small sheath-knife, only an arm in case of dire
necessity.
Well, I came into the village, where I did not see (nor by this time
expected to see) a single modern building, although many of them were
nearly new, notably the church, which was large, and quite ravished my
heart with its extreme beauty, elegance, and fitness. The chancel of
this was so new that the dust of the stone still lay white on the
midsummer grass beneath the carvings of the windows. The houses were
almost all built of oak frame-work filled with cob or plaster well
whitewashed; though some had their lower stories of rubble-stone, with
their windows and doors of well-moulded freestone. There was much
curious and inventive carving about most of them; and though some were
old and much worn, there was the same look of deftness and trimness,
and even beauty, about every detail in them which I noticed before in
the field-work. They were all roofed with oak shingles, mostly grown
as grey as stone; but one was so newly built that its roof was yet pale
and yellow. This was a corner house, and the corner post of it had a
carved niche wherein stood a gaily painted figure holding an
anchor--St. Clement to wit, as the dweller in the house was a
blacksmith. Half a stone's throw from the east end of the churchyard
wall was a tall cross of stone, new like the church, the head
beautifully carved with a crucifix amidst leafage. It stood on a set
of wide stone steps, octagonal in shape, where three roads from other
villages met and formed a wide open space on which a thousand people or
more could stand together with no great crowding.
All this I saw, and also that there was a goodish many people about,
women and children, and a few old men at the doors, many of them
somewhat gaily clad, and that men were coming into the village street
by the other end to that by which I had entered, by twos and threes,
most of them carrying what I could see were bows in cases of linen
yellow with wax or oil; they had quivers at their backs, and most of
them a short sword by their left side, and a pouch and knife on the
right; they were mostly dressed in red or brightish green or blue cloth
jerkins, with a hood on the head generally of another colour. As they
came nearer I saw that the cloth of their garments was somewhat coarse,
but stout and serviceable. I knew, somehow, that they had been
shooting at the butts, and, indeed, I could still hear a noise of men
thereabout, and even now and again when the wind set from that quarter
the twang of the bowstring and the plump of the shaft in the target.
I leaned against the churchyard wall and watched these men, some of
whom went straight into their houses and some loitered about still;
they were rough-looking fellows, tall and stout, very black some of
them, and some red-haired, but most had hair burnt by the sun into the
colour of tow; and, indeed, they were all burned and tanned and
freckled variously. Their arms and buckles and belts and the
finishings and hems of their garments were all what we should now call
beautiful, rough as the men were; nor in their speech was any of that
drawling snarl or thick vulgarity which one is used to hear from
labourers in civilisation; not that they talked like gentlemen either,
but full and round and bold, and they were merry and good-tempered
enough; I could see that, though I felt shy and timid amongst them.
One of them strode up to me across the road, a man some six feet high,
with a short black beard and black eyes and berry-brown skin, with a
huge bow in his hand bare of the case, a knife, a pouch, and a short
hatchet, all clattering together at his girdle.
"Well, friend," said he, "thou lookest partly mazed; what tongue hast
thou in thine head?"
"A tongue that can tell rhymes," said I.
"So I thought," said he. "Thirstest thou any?"
"Yea, and hunger," said I.
And therewith my hand went into my purse, and came out again with but a
few small and thin silver coins with a cross stamped on each, and three
pellets in each corner of the cross. The man grinned.
"Aha!" said he, "is it so? Never heed it, mate. It shall be a song
for a supper this fair Sunday evening. But first, whose man art thou?"
"No one's man," said I, reddening angrily; "I am my own master."
He grinned again.
"Nay, that's not the custom of England, as one time belike it will be.
Methinks thou comest from heaven down, and hast had a high place there
too."
He seemed to hesitate a moment, and then leant forward and whispered in
my ear: "John the Miller, that ground small, small, small," and
stopped and winked at me, and from between my lips without my mind
forming any meaning came the words, "The king's son of heaven shall pay
for all."
He let his bow fall on to his shoulder, caught my right hand in his and
gave it a great grip, while his left hand fell among the gear at his
belt, and I could see that he half drew his knife.
"Well, brother," said he, "stand not here hungry in the highway when
there is flesh and bread in the Rose yonder. Come on."
And with that he drew me along toward what was clearly a tavern door,
outside which men were sitting on a couple of benches and drinking
meditatively from curiously shaped earthen pots glazed green and
yellow, some with quaint devices on them.