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A Dream of John Ball; and, a king's lesson By: William Morris (1834-1896) |
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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... Continue reading book >>
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Genres for this book |
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Fiction |
Historical Fiction |
History |
Literature |
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