A Dream of John Ball
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7 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.
CHAPTER II
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?"
CHAPTER III
THEY MEET AT THE CROSS
The street was pretty full of men by then we were out in it, and
all faces turned toward the cross. The song still grew nearer
and louder, and even as we looked we saw it turning the corner
through the hedges of the orchards and closes, a good clump of
men, more armed, as it would seem, than our villagers, as the low
sun flashed back from many points of bright iron and steel. The
words of the song could now be heard, and amidst them I could
pick out Will Green's late challenge to me and my answer; but as
I was bending all my mind to disentangle more words from the
music, suddenly from the new white tower behind us clashed out
the church bells, harsh and hurried at first, but
presently falling into measured chime; and at the first sound of
them a great shout went up from us and was echoed by the new-
comers, "John Ball hath rung our bell!" Then we pressed on, and
presently we were all mingled together at the cross.
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