1. 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{A} 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 over
topped 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 mediæval 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.