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 g