A Progress to Westminster
HROUGHOUT that uneasy winter following the death of Edward the Black Prince, Jack Straw and Wat Tyler were much in London. None knew their business, but they hung upon the skirts of all public disturbance and would seem to have been held in esteem by certain of the citizens. They slept, of nights, on the floor of that lower room in Langland's cot, and here Peter, the Devonshire ploughman, kept them company. He had got him a job to blow the bellows for Hobbe Smith, and he stood in a dark corner all day, earning his meat and drink, and biding his time till the law might no more hale him back to Devon for a runaway. For this was the law, that if a 'scaped villein should dwell in any town a year and a day and his lord did not take him, he was free of his lord.
Once, at midnight, Peter awoke with a light in his eyes, and after a moment of blinking discovered Jack Straw and Wat a-sprawling on their bellies, head to head, and a rushlight betwixt them. They had a square of parchment spread out, and Wat drew upon it with a quill.
“Now here I make Mile End,” said he, “and just here i' the wall 's Aldgate,—and they that come by this road”—But here he was 'ware of Peter's shock-head that shaded the light.
“Thou hast spoiled a page o' Long Will's Vision wi' hen-tracks,‘ said Peter; ’and he hath much ado to save 's parchment out of 's victual.”
“'T is a plan of London, fool!” answered Wat, and would have displayed his handiwork, but Jack Straw blew out the light.
Calote did not like Jack Straw. Thrice, of late, he would have kissed her when her father was not by, but she slipped from his hand. At the feast of St. Nicholas he gave her a ribbon. Jack Straw was a widower with two little lads. “And their grandam is old, poor soul,” he was wont to say with a sigh, looking on Calote from beneath his white eyelashes.
Calote took the ribbon with an ill grace:—
“I am daughter to a poor man; I do not wear fallals,” she objected. And at night, when she and her mother had come to bed, she spread the ribbon on her knee with discontent.