Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need to go by thy side.
This is No. 328 of Everyman's Library. A list of authors and theirworks in this series will be found at the end of this volume. Thepublishers will be pleased to send freely to all applicants aseparate, annotated list of the Library.
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EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS
FICTION
LONG WILL
BY FLORENCE CONVERSE
All rights reserved
Made in Great Britain
at The Temple Press Letchworth
and decorated by Eric Ravilious
for
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Aldine House Bedford St. London
First Published in this Edition 1908
Reprinted 1911, 1917, 1919, 1923, 1926
1929, 1933
EDITOR'S NOTE
This story forms a very tempting by-way into the old English life andthe contemporary literature which gave us Chaucer's CanterburyTales and Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman. It deals withthose poets and with many figures of the fourteenth century whosenames still ring like proverbs in the twentieth—Wat Tyler and JackStraw, John Wycliff, John of Gaunt, and Richard II.—and it summonsthem to real life in that antique looking-glass of history which isromance. It begins in its prologue very near the evil day of the BlackDeath, when the fourteenth century had about half run its course; andin its epilogue it brings us to the year when the two poets died,barely surviving the century they had expressed in its gaiety and itsgreat trouble, as no other century has ever been interpreted. To readthe story without wishing to read Chaucer and Piers Plowman isimpossible, and if a book may be judged by its art in provoking a newinterest in other and older books, then this is one of an uncommonquality. First published in 1903, it has already won a criticalaudience, and it goes out now in a second edition to appeal to a stillwider public here and in America.
April 1908.
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."
...