A socialist dreams himself into the Peasants' Revolt.

A Dream of John Ball

William Morris · 1888

William Morris — designer, poet, and committed socialist — wrote this novella for his own journal Commonweal in 1886-87. Its narrator falls asleep in his own century and wakes in Kent on the eve of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, where he spends a night and a day talking with John Ball, the radical priest who preached that no one was born a gentleman. The novella's real subject isn't the revolt itself, which history had already settled by the time Morris wrote — it's the conversation between a man who knows how the story ends and one who doesn't, and what it means to fight for a fellowship you will not live to see.

12 chapters · 28,738 words · ~2.2 hr read