"'After sharp showers, quoth Peace, most glorious is the sun;
Is no weather warmer than after watery clouds.
Ne no love dearer, nor dearer friends,
Than after war and woe when Love and Peace be masters
Was never war in this world, nor wickedness so keen,
That Love, an him list, might not bring it to laughter,
And Peace through patience all perils stopped.'"
CHAPTER VIII
The Believers
UT of a lonely land of moor and fen and scattered shepherds, Calote came down into the stir and bustle of the eastern counties. Almost, she had come to believe there were no men in England, but two or three; so, for a little, her heart was lifted up when she saw the villages set so close as to join hands and kiss; when she saw the high road and the lanes alive with wayfarers; when she saw men in every field,—idle men for the most part. Yet was her joy soon turned to terror.
If the folk of the north were slow to kindle and loth to learn, 't was not so with them of Norfolk and Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. These men were John Ball's men, and Wat Tyler's, and Jack Straw's. Already they had their lesson by heart. Nevertheless, to Calote's thinking, they had not learned it aright.
“Ah, woe! better the sloth and dulness of west and north than this quick hate,‘ she sighed to the peddler. ’There 's murder in these hearts.”
And this was true.
One day, when she was preaching Piers Ploughman to a great crowd, and how he set straight the kingdom and gave each man work to do and bade the wasters go hungry,—and all that company of an hundred and more men and women stood about, chaunting the words of the Vision till the roar of it might be heard half a mile,—there came by a man-of-law on a hackney, was seen of those that stood at the edge of the throng. He set spurs to his horse, but to no purpose; all that rout was upon him. They beat him, and tore his clothes into ribands. His ink-horn they emptied on his head, and made of his saddle-bags and parchments a very stinking bonfire. And all the while they shrieked: “Thou wilt write us in bondage, wilt thou?”—“We be slaves, be we, bound to the soil?”—“Slit 's lying tongue!”—“Pluck out 's eyes!”
After a little while they left him half dead, and Calote wiped his bloody face, and the peddler caught his horse and set him on it. Then came the sheriff and his men that way and set Calote and the peddler in the stocks, for that they had gathered the people together and made a tumult. But the people hewed the stocks to splinters so soon as the sheriff's back was turned.