A Dream of John Ball
Glossary
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- "The Change Beyond the Change"
- Chapter XII's title and its argument: that the abolition of villeinage Ball is fighting and dying for will itself, centuries later, give way to a new and subtler form of mastery — industrial wage-slavery — before finally, in the narrator's own hoped-for future, giving way again to true fellowship. The narrator tells Ball that his hope will not be forgotten: "thy name shall abide by thy hope in those days to come."
- Related: The Prophecy of Mastership, Fellowship
- "When Adam Delved and Eve Span, Who Was Then the Gentleman?"
- The couplet historically associated with John Ball, carried on a banner through the village showing Adam with a spade and Eve with a distaff, "underneath this symbol of the early world and man's first contest with nature." It is the revolt's core claim of natural human equality, made visual before Ball ever speaks a word.
- Related: John Ball, Fellowship
F
- Fellowship
- The novella's thesis word, defined by Ball at the cross: "fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell... the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them." He extends it to explain why the rich man, despite his power, "is in hell already, because he hath no fellow," and frames the whole rising as Kent answering the call of fellowship with Essex.
- Related: John Ball, "When Adam Delved and Eve Span"
J
- Jack Straw
- A tall, wiry rebel captain, one of several men using that name among the "fellowship of the discontented," who commands the archers and billmen at the battle and rebuffs the enemy's summoner with a blunt threat: "Sir Fool, hold your peace till ye have heard me, or else we shoot at once." He announces the rebels' aim plainly — to march on London and speak with King Richard directly.
- Related: Will Green, The Battle at the Township's End
- John Ball
- The historical "mad priest of Kent," a leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, whom the narrator meets after his sermon at the village cross. Morris gives him a tall, big-boned figure with grey eyes that alternate between kindly warmth and the far-off gaze "of the poet or enthusiast," and builds his central sermon around a single word: "fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death."
- Related: Fellowship, The Frame Narrator, "When Adam Delved and Eve Span"
K
- King Richard
- The boy-king (Richard II) whom Jack Straw declares the rebels intend to petition directly in London, bypassing the lords and lawyers they blame for the poll tax and renewed villeinage: "we free men of Kent are on the way to London to speak with King Richard... and if he be too weak, then shall we help him." His name marks the historical horizon the narrator, but not the villagers, knows will end in betrayal at Smithfield.
- Related: Poll-Groat Bailiffs, Jack Straw
P
- Poll-Groat Bailiffs
- The tax collectors enforcing the poll tax whose abuses helped spark the revolt — the novella's men of Kent are marching to London specifically to protest them, and Ball's speech recalls how "the valiant tiler of Dartford had smitten a poll-groat bailiff to death with his lath-rending axe for mishandling a young maid, his daughter," a periphrastic reference to the historical Wat Tyler that Morris never names directly.
- Related: The Peasants' Revolt (1381), Villeinage
T
- The Archbishop's Prison
- The Canterbury jail from which Ball was freed three days before the novella's events by the men of Kent, who "lighted the archbishop's house for the candle of Canterbury." Ball's sermon recounts his despair while imprisoned there — wishing he had stayed silent and comfortable rather than preached — followed by his recovery of purpose through remembered fellowship, before his rescuers actually arrived.
- Related: John Ball, Fellowship
- The Battle at the Township's End
- The skirmish between the villagers and a force of men-at-arms, sergeants, and lawyers sent to suppress them, fought with longbows against crossbowmen and armored soldiers along the orchard hedges outside the village. The rebels win decisively — killing a sheriff, several lawyers and bailiffs, and a number of soldiers — but the fight costs the fellowship several of its own men, including Hob Horner and Antony Webber.
- Related: Will Green, Jack Straw
- The Dream-Vision Frame
- The novella's structuring device: the narrator falls asleep mid-lecture on socialism and wakes, in his own account, into 1381 Kent, complete with unfamiliar but somehow comprehensible speech and clothing that fits him without surprise. The device lets Morris stage a direct conversation between a nineteenth-century socialist's hindsight and a fourteenth-century radical's hope, without either character needing to be literally real to the other.
- Related: The Frame Narrator, John Ball
- The Field of Senlac (1066)
- Ball's reference point for Kentish exceptionalism — the battle where the men of Kent met "Duke William with bill and bow as he wended Londonward" after the Norman Conquest — which he invokes to remind the men of Kent that they are less hard-pressed than other shires, even as he warns that their present lords, unlike the "prudent" and "wise" William, are merely "cruel... and headstrong... thieves and fools in one."
- Related: John Ball
- The Frame Narrator
- The unnamed nineteenth-century dreamer who falls asleep in his own bed and wakes in Kent in 1381, carrying knowledge no one around him can have — including the revolt's eventual failure. His long final dialogue with Ball, in which he tries to explain factory labor and wage-slavery to a man who cannot yet imagine them, is the book's real argument: what a defeated cause is worth to the people who come after.
- Related: John Ball, The Prophecy of Mastership
- The Peasants' Revolt (1381)
- The historical rising the novella depicts on the eve of its outbreak, driven by poll taxes and the social upheaval following the Black Death — with lords, as Morris's narrator explains, trying to "get the collar on their necks again" now that scarce labor had made villeins comparatively prosperous. The narrator knows, though no character in Kent does, that the revolt will be crushed within weeks and Ball executed.
- Related: Poll-Groat Bailiffs, Villeinage, John Ball
- The Prophecy of Mastership
- The narrator's climactic explanation to Ball, in the small hours before dawn, of how mastership will survive the end of villeinage: not through legal ownership of a man's body, but through owning "that which he on whom he liveth may not lack and live withal, and cannot have without selling himself" — the essential structure of wage labor, explained centuries before the term existed.
- Related: The Weaver's Loom Prophecy, The Frame Narrator, John Ball
- The Robin Hood Ballad
- A song sung by the men at the tavern before John Ball's arrival, celebrating outlaw resistance to the sheriff and the taking "from the rich to give to the poor." One singer remarks that the ballad may "hasten the coming of one I wot of," linking the outlaw tradition directly to Ball's arrival moments later and framing the revolt as continuous with older English resistance to unjust law.
- Related: Will Green, John Ball
- The Tale of the Iceland Men
- A story the narrator tells the tavern crowd in Chapter II, claiming to have heard it the previous autumn from Icelandic sailors at Dunwich — an anachronistic flourish the narrator himself half-notices, since "the words seemed to quicken and grow" strangely as he spoke, blurring the line between the dreaming narrator's own voice and a voice not entirely his own.
- Related: The Dream-Vision Frame, Will Green
- The Weaver's Loom Prophecy
- The narrator's image, in Chapter XII, for coming industrial machinery: a loom in which "the shed open of itself and the shuttle of itself speed through it," with the weaver merely standing by "looking to half-a-dozen looms," so that one man's labor multiplies a hundred or a thousandfold. Ball at first hopes this means abundance for all, until the narrator explains that under mastership, most of that abundance will still be pawned away for "leave to labour."
- Related: The Prophecy of Mastership, John Ball
- The White Poppy
- A small recurring object the narrator finds himself holding without explanation while walking through the church at night — first noticed as he enters, and observed near dawn to have "withered and dwindled" as the vision approaches its end. Functioning almost like a dream-token, its fading tracks the narrator's own returning consciousness of the boundary between his two worlds.
- Related: The Dream-Vision Frame
V
- Villeinage
- The unfree legal status the rising lords are trying to reimpose on peasants who had grown comparatively free and prosperous after the Black Death thinned the labor supply. Ball warns the men of Kent that if Essex's villeins are not helped, "Kent shall sweat for it ere it be long... and ye shall be servants in your own houses, and your sons shall be the lords' lads."
- Related: Poll-Groat Bailiffs, The Peasants' Revolt (1381)
W
- Will Green
- The tall, black-bearded bowman who first finds the narrator dazed by the roadside, feeds him at the village tavern, and takes him under his wing through the battle and its aftermath. A yeoman archer with a wife, daughter, and comfortable stone-built house, he is the novella's warmest ordinary character — practical, kind, and quietly moved to tears during Ball's sermon.
- Related: The Frame Narrator, The Battle at the Township's End