Project Gutenberg's A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson, by William Morris

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Title: A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson

Author: William Morris

Release Date: March 19, 2008 [EBook #357]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DREAM OF JOHN BALL, KING'S LESSON ***

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 rest