Towards winter’s end on a high, big, bare down, in the south of England, John Plowman was plowing. He was plowing the brown field at the top of the hill, good soil of the clay; a few yards lower down was nothing but chalk, with shallow flinty soil and steep to plow; so they let briars grow there. For generations his forbears had plowed on the top of that hill. John did not know how many. The hills were very old; it might have been always.  
He scarcely looked to see if his furrow was going straight. The work he was doing was so much in his blood that he could almost feel if furrows were straight or not. Year after year they moved on the same old landmarks; thorn trees and briars mostly guided the plow, where they stood on the untamed land beyond; the thorn trees grew old at their guiding, and still the furrows varied not by the breadth of a hoof-mark.
 
John, as he plowed, had leisure to meditate on much besides the crops; he knew so much of the crops that his thoughts could easily run free from them; he used to meditate on who they were that lived in briar and thorn tree, and danced as folk said all through midsummer night, and sometimes blessed and sometimes harmed the crops; for he knew that in Old England were wonderful ancient things, odder and older things than many folks knew. And his eyes had leisure to see much beside the furrows, for he could almost feel the furrows going straight.
 
One day at his plowing, as he watched the thorn ahead, he saw the whole big hill besides, looking south, and the lands below it; one day he saw in the bright sun of late winter a horseman riding the road through the wide lands below. The horseman shone as he rode, and wore white linen over what was shining, and on the linen was a big red cross. “One of them knights,” John Plowman said to himself or his horse, “going to them crusades.” And he went on with his plowing all that day satisfied, and remembered what he had seen for years, and told his son.
 
For there is in England, and there alwa............