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 orchardland, 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 brandnew, 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 framework 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 ...
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