THE MAN FROM ESSEX
I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment, with
which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior seem to
me, though it was but a pothouse parlour. A quaintly-carved side board
held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden and earthen
bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a carved oak
chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very old man
dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools and benches
on which the company sat, was all the furniture. The walls were
panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet from the
floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was wrought in a
pattern of a rose stem running all round the room, freely and roughly
done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes) wonderful skill and
spirit. On the hood of the great chimney a huge rose was wrought in
the plaster and brightly painted in its proper colours. There were a
dozen or more of the men I had seen coming along the street sitting
there, some eating and all drinking; their cased bows leaned against
the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the panelling, and in a corner
of the room I saw half-a-dozen bill-hooks that looked made more for war
than for hedge-shearing, with ashen handles some seven foot long.
Three or four children were running about among the legs of the men,
heeding them mighty little in their bold play, and the men seemed
little troubled by it, although they were talking earnestly and
seriously too. A well-made comely girl leaned up against the chimney
close to the gaffer's chair, and seemed to be in waiting on the
company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown of bright blue cloth,
with a broad silver girdle daintily wrought, round her loins, a rose
wreath was on her head and her hair hung down unbound; the gaffer
grumbled a few words to her from time to time, so that I judged he was
her grandfather.
The men all looked up as we came into the room, my mate leading me by
the hand, and he called out in his rough, good-tempered voice, "Here,
my masters, I bring you tidings and a tale; give it meat and drink that
it may be strong and sweet."
"Whence are thy tidings, Will Green?" said one.
My mate grinned again with the pleasure of making his joke once more in
a bigger company: "It seemeth from heaven, since this good old lad
hath no master," said he.
"The more fool he to come here," said a thin man with a grizzled beard,
amidst the laughter that followed, "unless he had the choice given him
between hell and England."
"Nay," said I, "I come not from heaven, but from Essex."
As I said the word a great shout sprang from all mouths at once, as
clear and sudden as a shot from a gun. For I must tell you that I knew
somehow, but I know not how, that the men of Essex were gathering to
rise against the poll-groat bailiffs and the lords that would turn them
all into villeins again, as their grandfathers had been. And the
people was weak and the lords were poor; for many a mother's son had
fallen in the war in France in the old king's time, and the Black Death
had slain a many; so that the lords had bethought them: "We are
growing poorer, and these upland-bred villeins are growing richer, and
the guilds of craft are waxing in the towns, and soon what will there
be left for us who cannot weave and will not dig? Good it were if we
fell on all who are not guildsmen or men of free land, if we fell on
soccage tenants and others, and brought both the law and the strong
hand on them, and made them all villeins in deed as they are now in
name; for now these rascals make more than their bellies need of bread,
and their backs of homespun, and the overplus they keep to themselves;
and we are more worthy of it than they. So let us get the collar on
their necks again, and make their day's work longer and their
bever-time shorter, as the good statute of the old king bade. And good
it were if the Holy Church were to look to it (and the Lollards might
help herein) that all these naughty and wearisome holidays were done
away with; or that it should be unlawful for any man below the degree
of a squire to keep the holy days of the church, except in the heart
and the spirit only, and let the body labour meanwhile; for does not
the Apostle say, 'If a man work not, neither should he eat'? And if
such things were done, and such an estate of noble rich men and worthy
poor men upholden for ever, then would it be good times in England, and
life were worth the living."
All this were the lords at work on, and such talk I knew was common not
only among the lords themselves, but also among their sergeants and
very serving-men. But the people would not abide it; therefore, as I
said, in Essex they were on the point of rising, and word had gone how
that at St. Albans they were wellnigh at blows with the Lord Abbot's
soldiers; that north away at Norwich John Litster was wiping the woad
from his arms, as who would have to stain them red again, but not with
grain or madder; and that the valiant tiler of Dartford had smitten a
poll-groat bailiff to death with his lath-rending axe for mishandling a
young maid, his daughter; and that the men of Kent were on the move.
Now, knowing all this I was not astonished that they shouted at the
thought of their fellows the men of Essex, but rather that they said
little more about it; only Will Green saying quietly, "Well, the
tidings shall be told when our fellowship is greater; fall-to now on
the meat, brother, that we may the sooner have thy tale." As he spoke
the blue-clad damsel bestirred herself and brought me a clean
trencher--that is, a square piece of thin oak board scraped clean--and
a pewter pot of liquor. So without more ado, and as one used to it, I
drew my knife out of my girdle and cut myself what I would of the flesh
and bread on the table. But Will Green mocked at me as I cut, and
said, "Certes, brother, thou hast not been a lord's carver, though but
for thy word thou mightest have been his reader. Hast thou seen
Oxford, scholar?"
A vision of grey-roofed houses and a long winding street and the sound
of many bells came over me at that word as I nodded "Yes" to him, my
mouth full of salt pork and rye-bread; and then I lifted my pot and we
made the clattering mugs kiss and I drank, and the fire of the good
Kentish mead ran through my veins and deepened my dream of things past,
present, and to come, as I said: "Now hearken a tale, since ye will
have it so. For last autumn I was in Suffolk at the good town of
Dunwich, and thither came the keels from Iceland, and on them were some
men of Iceland, and many a tale they had on their tongues; and with
these men I foregathered, for I am in sooth a gatherer of tales, and
this that is now at my tongue's end is one of them."
So such a tale I told them, long familiar to me; but as I told it the
words seemed to quicken and grow, so that I knew not the sound of my
own voice, and they ran almost into rhyme and measure as I told it; and
when I had done there was silence awhile, till one man spake, but not
loudly:
"Yea, in that land was the summer short and the winter long; but men
lived both summer and winter; and if the trees grew ill and the corn
throve not, yet did the plant called man thrive and do well. God send
us such men even here."
"Nay," said another, "such men have been and will be, and belike are
not far from this same door even now."
"Yea," said a third, "hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that shall
hasten the coming of one I wot of." And he fell to singing in a clear
voice, for he was a young man, and to a sweet wild melody, one of those
ballads which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read perhaps.
My heart rose high as I heard him, for it was concerning the struggle
against tyranny for the freedom of life, how that the wildwood and the
heath, despite of wind and weather, were better for a free man than the
court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the
poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of
another man commanding him for the commandment's sake. The men all
listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the
end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices.
As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were
indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled
thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the morning sun, and
dreary with the rising of the evening wind and the drift of the
night-long rain.
When he had done, another began in something of the same strain, but
singing more of a song than a story ballad; and thus much I remember of
it:
The Sheriff is made a mighty lord,
Of goodly gold he hath enow,
And many a sergeant girt with sword;
But forth will we and bend the bow.
We shall bend the bow on the lily lea
Betwixt the thorn and the oaken tree.
With stone and lime is the burg wall built,
And pit and prison are stark and strong,
And many a true man there is spilt,
And many a right man doomed by wrong.
So forth shall we and bend the bow
And the king's writ never the road shall know.
Now yeomen walk ye warily,
And heed ye the houses where ye go,
For as fair and as fine as they may be,
Lest behind your heels the door clap to.
Fare forth with the bow to the lily lea
Betwixt the thorn and the oaken tree.
Now bills and bows I and out a-gate!
And turn about on the lily lea!
And though their company be great
The grey-goose wing shall set us free.
Now bent is the bow in the green abode
And the king's writ knoweth not the road.
So over the mead and over the hithe,
And away to the wild-wood wend we forth;
There dwell we yeomen bold and blithe
Where the Sheriff's word is nought of worth.
Bent is the bow on the lily lea
Betwixt the thorn and the oaken tree.
But here the song dropped suddenly, and one of the men held up his hand
as who would say, Hist! Then through the open window came the sound of
another song, gradually swelling as though sung by men on the march.
This time the melody was a piece of the plain-song of the church,
familiar enough to me to bring back to my mind the great arches of some
cathedral in France and the canons singing in the choir.
All leapt up and hurried to take their bows from wall and corner; and
some had bucklers withal, circles of leather, boiled and then moulded
into shape and hardened: these were some two hand-breadths across, with
iron or brass bosses in the centre. Will Green went to the corner
where the bills leaned against the wall and handed them round to the
first-comers as far as they would go, and out we all went gravely and
quietly into the village street and the fair sunlight of the calm
afternoon, now beginning to turn towards evening. None had said
anything since we first heard the new-come singing, save that as we
went out of the door the ballad-singer clapped me on the shoulder and
said: "Was it not sooth that I said, brother, that Robin Hood should
bring us John Ball?"