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. 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.
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