a dream of john ball(约翰·勃尔的梦)

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A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

A DREAM OF JOHN

BALL

By William Morris

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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.

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

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

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ADREAMOFJOHNBALL1ADREAMOFJOHNBALLByWilliamMorrisADREAMOFJOHNBALL2CHAPTERITHEMENOFKENTSometimesIamrewardedforfrettingmyselfsomuchaboutpresentmattersbyaquiteunasked-forpleasantdream.ImeanwhenIamasleep.Thisdreamisasitwereapresentofanarchitecturalpeep-show.Iseesomebeautifulandnoblebuildingnewmade,asitwe...

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a dream of john ball(约翰·勃尔的梦)

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