A Dream of John Ball; and, a king's lesson

by William Morris

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Genres: Classics, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Medieval, Literature, British Literature, Speculative Fiction

64 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1886

About the author

William Morris was an English architect, furniture and textile designer, artist, writer, socialist and Marxist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere. He was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with the movement over goals and methods by the end of that decade. He devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.

Reviews

[Evan Whyman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don’t tell John Ball about the global Amazon supply chain 🤫

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in his longer novel News From Nowhere, Morris presents his political message as a dream set in another era. Here the account is more explicitly a dream, but carefully written in a way that renders ambiguous the dream-nature of the experience. The narrator relates an adventure that, as he puts it, “Befell me after I had fallen asleep” – he does not use the term “dream,” and the description of his journey into the past is linguistically distinct from his earlier use of dream in the preceding pages. In the opening, transitional passage, the Narrator seems to pass through a stereotypical confused dream of public speaking, muteness, and public undress, and then seems to wake “on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a country village.” The contrast between the preliminary, vague dream and the clarity and detail of the subsequent extended experience of medieval England suggests to the reader that the account of the rebellion may not be a dream at all, and certainly is not an ordinary dream. Morris goes on to describe,

This dream is as it were a present of an architectural peep-show. I see some beautiful and noble buildings new-made… 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 Victorian, marring but not destroying it, in an old village once a clearing amid the sandy woodlands of Sussex. Or and 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 in the litter of the farmyard 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 ‘til a splendid collegiate church, untouched by restoring parson and architect… or 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.

Note that as well as precise in architectural detail, the dream buildings are also geographically and historically placed in a very specific way. This contrasts sharply with the vague fantasy-geography of many of Morris’ novels, particularly the cartography-defying circularity of The Water of the Wondrous Isles. The 1st-person narration of Dream and the autobiographical level especially of News intensify the presentation of both accounts as remembered personal experience. This remembered experience, whether actual or dreamed, is presented as more authentic than the narrator’s waking life, which he describes as “doubtfully alive” and implies finally that another, more real and more natural reality exists around its edges, just out of sight.

[Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the way this book contrasts medieval and modern (late 1800s) modes of thinking and finds the author discovering common ground with the leaders of the peasants' revolt. Some pearls throughout, although the attempt to capture medieval English can weigh down the text a bit.

[Sem · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which William Morris dreams a dream, encounters a merry band of hobbits, watches as they defeat Sharkey's ruffians in the Battle of Bywater... Oops. Wrong book.

"Nevertheless, I say to you, remember the Fellowship, in the hope of which ye have this day conquered; and when ye come to London be wise and wary; and that is as much as to say, be bold and hardy; for in these days are ye building a house which shall not be overthrown, and the world shall not be too great or too little to hold it: for indeed it shall be the world itself, set free from evil-doers for friends to dwell in."

[Nicholas Zacharewicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This dream vision of William Morris’ visit to John Ball and the other rebels coming from across England during the Peasant’s revolt of 1381 made for fascinating bus-ride and line-waiting reading. It basically boils down to a dialogue between Morris, the man from the future, and the, perhaps to some, naively rebelling peasantry of 14th century England. True to his socialist leanings, Morris emphasizes that the peasants are striving for better wages, fairer working conditions, and an improved quality of life, untrammeled by the mere words and empty promises that see the peasants sweating more while the rich skim more cream for themselves.

Told in Morris’ signature Victorian style, though the “future” he comes from is our past, there’re still a lot of parallels to draw between the world of automation and theoretical plenty that Morris describes to his medieval companions and our own. Likewise, the problems of wage slavery and servitude persist from Morris’ time (and earlier) into our own. This dream vision is paired with the brief fable of the king who went with his lords to work in a field for a day to prove whether or not they could. The result, richly reached, is what you likely expect given Morris’ perspective on labour and workers.

This book is a whimsical yet grounded look into the insights that Victorian England’s sunniest medieval history buff/socialist had. And, because most of us still work for a living doing things we’d likely prefer not to in terms of substance, volume, or both, those insights continue to be relevant.

[Julesmarie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating glimpse at a past culture from the point of view of a different past culture. The author, writing in the 1800's, does a first-person account of a character waking up in the 1300's. The narrator meets John Ball (my sister called him a Friar Tuck-like man when she recommended the book to me, so that was the image in my mind as I read), witnesses him giving a rallying speech to some villagers, and then two proceeds to have a discussion with him of the status of the working class in the two eras.

Some Favorite Quotes:
"then shall ye be, though men call you dead, a part and parcel of the living wisdom of all things, very stones of the pillars that uphold the joyful earth."

"shall have memory of the merry days of earth, and how that when his heart failed him there, he cried on his fellow, ... and how that his fellow heard him and came and they mourned together under the sun, till they again laughed together and were but half sorry between them."

"the wrath of battle and the hope of better times lifting up their hearts till nothing could withstand them."

as though I had more things to say than the words I knew could make clear

Ill would be change at whiles were it not for the change beyond the change

"so at least I wish thee what thou thyself wishest for thyself, and that is hopeful strife and blameless peace, which is to say in one word, life."

[Peter Gilmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Morris - designer, dreamer, artist, writer, social critic - was among late nineteenth-century Britain's most engaging individuals. He was, in a sense, Tolkien before Tolkien existed, enraptured by northern European sagas and their language, enamored of the artistry of medieval craftspeople - which to him spoke to the enormous potential creativity within humanity imprisoned by oppressive social systems. Which brought him to John Ball. A priest imprisoned and excommunicated and eventually barbarously executed for preaching the Gospel instead of the teachings of the Church, John Ball advised and encouraged peasants in late fourteenth-century England protesting attempts by the landowning aristocracy to reimpose the most draconian of feudal restrictions. The narrator, having fallen asleep, finds himself in England in 1381. He notes (with Morris's sensibility) the architecture, craftsmanship, furniture, and clothing he observes all around him. And he encounters John Ball. The real dream, as it turns out, is that of the narrator, who explains to the receptive if occasionally bewildered priest that the common people will indeed gain their freedom - only to lose it to new lords, even as they imagine themselves to be free. A brilliant explanation of the triumph of industrial capitalism from the perspective of the Middle Ages, declaimed in Morris's pre-Tolkienesque imagined recreation of saga-speak.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing.

[Aditi B]

i think i want to read because it is a very nice story book.

[J M-B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Genteel English socialism for those with a taste for medieval romance and stained glass, and of historical interest precisely because of those contradictory impulses.

[Tom Gwillim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charming 19th century commentary on social class and the struggles of the working class.

Very simply written but enjoyable. Bit slow to start but picked up and improved towards the end.

[Daniel Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little slow of the mark with historical scene setting, but when it gets to the discussion between Ball and Morris about conditions of the labouring (working) class in the 14th and 19th centuries, and how much worse things had become - people reduced to "Tharlldom" (wage slaves) - in the latter, despite Wat Tyler and John Balls defeat being seen as a pyrrhic victory preventing a return to villeinage.
The book is at its strongest when dealing with the political and socioeconomic comparisons - the battle scene is a tad confusing, and the glowing description of medieval life and architecture, while beautiful, is very rose tinted.
All in all, a good, thought provoking read - particularly in light of the changes that have happened in the last hundred and twenty five years, and the raise and full of the working class (worldwide) in that time to a condition arguably almost as bad - and indeed in places equal or worse - to the slavery by another name of Morris's time.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must admit A Dream of John Ball was not my favourite Morris. As far as "worker's conditions" and the state of the nation go I think I much prefer News from Nowhere. This started as far too much fighting and speeches. It was interesting to hear the 19th century working conditions explained to someone from the past but overall there really weren't any new ideas here and the writing style didn't really strike me. A king's lesson was a nice ironic tale about how nobles aren't as good as peasants.

[joan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Morris travels back to 1381 or whenever and tactlessly explains to John Ball, on the very morning of his death, that in the future the workers will still be downtrodden but morally degraded to boot. But then, phase 2???, Communism!

[Norman Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got bogged down with the formal, 19th-Century prose style, and didn't get much out of reading this book.