A Dream of John Ball

The narrator dreams himself into Kent in 1381, the night before the Peasants' Revolt, and hears John Ball preach at the cross — then sits with him in the church afterwards and tells him what the next five hundred years will do to everything he is about to die for. Morris designed the wallpapers still in production today and was a socialist; this is the argument of his life, put as a conversation between two men who cannot help each other. Fifty-six plates of landscape and cathedral paintings by Constable, Rossetti and others carry the medieval England of the story across five centuries of English light.