EDITOR'S NOTE

This story forms a very tempting by-way into the old English life and the contemporary literature which gave us Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman. It deals with those poets and with many figures of the fourteenth century whose names still ring like proverbs in the twentieth—Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, John Wycliff, John of Gaunt, and Richard II.—and it summons them to real life in that antique looking-glass of history which is romance. It begins in its prologue very near the evil day of the Black Death, when the fourteenth century had about half run its course; and in its epilogue it brings us to the year when the two poets died, barely surviving the century they had expressed in its gaiety and its great trouble, as no other century has ever been interpreted. To read the story without wishing to read Chaucer and Piers Plowman is impossible, and if a book may be judged by its art in provoking a new interest in other and older books, then this is one of an uncommon quality. First published in 1903, it has already won a critical audience, and it goes out now in a second edition to appeal to a still wider public here and in America.

April 1908.

To ..........

Lo, here is felawschipe:
One fayth to holde,
One truth to speake,
One wrong to wreke,
One loving-cuppe to syppe,
And to dippe
In one disshe faithfullich,
As lamkins of one folde.
Either for other to suffre alle thing.
One songe to sing
In swete accord and maken melodye.
Right-so thou and I good-fellowes be:
Now God us thee!

HY I move this matere is moste for the pore,
For in her lyknesse owre lord ofte hath ben y-knowe."

The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman.
B. Passus XI.

Contents

Prologue
PAGE
I.The Lark and the Cuckoo[3]
II.The Hills[11]
III.Kingdoms Not of This World[17]
Part I. The Malcontents
I.The Miracle[27]
II.The Rose of Love[31]
III.They That Mourn[39]
IV.A Vow[46]
V.A Disciple[48]
VI.Food for Thought[61]
VII.A Progress to Westminster[65]
VIII.An Embassage[75]
IX.The King's Secret[80]
X.Plot and Counterplot[94]
XI.Midsummer Eve[107]
XII.Sanctuary[114]
XIII.The Man o' Words[121]
Part II. The Pilgrimage
I.In the Cloisters[131]
II.In Malvern Chase[137]
III.By a Burn's Side[147]
IV.A Boon[156]
V.The Adventure in Devon[164]
VI.The Adventure in Cheshire[180]
VII.The Adventure in Yorkshire[196]
VIII.The Believers[217]
IX.The Adventure in Kent[228]
X.The Poets Sing to Richard[242]
Part III. The Rising
I.The Beginning[265]
II.Blackheath[271]
III.In the City[280]
IV.In the Tower[286]
V.Mile End[296]
VI.Free Men[307]
VII.Reaction[315]
VIII.The Friday Night[319]
IX.Smithfield[324]
X.The Old Fetters[338]
XI.The Prisoner[349]
XII.Y-Robed in Russet[358]
Epilogue[369]