From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Ball

John Ball (d. 15 July 1381) was an English Lollard priest who took a prominent part in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Little is known of Ball's early years; he probably lived at York and subsequently at Colchester. What is recorded of his adult life comes from hostile sources liable to exaggerate his political and religious radicalism. He is said to have gained considerable fame as a roving preacher — a "hedge priest" without a parish or any cure linking him to the established order — by expounding the doctrines of John Wycliffe, and especially by his insistence on social equality. These utterances brought him into conflict with the archbishop of Canterbury, and he was thrown in prison on three occasions. He also appears to have been excommunicated; owing to which, in 1366 it was forbidden to hear him preach.

These measures, however, did not moderate his opinions, nor diminish his popularity; his words had a considerable effect in fomenting a riot which broke out in June 1381. The chroniclers were convinced of widespread conspiracy implanted before the spontaneous uprising occurred, with the watchword "John the Miller grinds small, small, small" and the response "The King's son of heaven shall pay for all."^{[citation needed]} Ball was in the archbishop's prison at Maidstone, Kent when the uprising began with protests in Dartford; he was quickly released by the Kentish rebels. He preached to them at Blackheath—the insurgents' gathering place near Greenwich— in an open-air sermon that included the following:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?^[1] From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may ( if ye will ) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.^[2]

Some sources unsympathetic to Ball assert that he urged his audience to kill the principal lords of the kingdom and the lawyers, and that he was afterwards among those who rushed into the Tower of London to seize Simon of Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury. But Ball does not appear in most accounts after his speech at Blackheath. When the rebels had dispersed, Ball was taken prisoner at Coventry, given a trial in which, unlike most, he was permitted to speak, and hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of Richard II on July 15, 1381. Ball, who was called by Froissart "the mad priest of Kent," seems to have possessed the gift of rhyme. He voiced the feelings of a section of the discontented lower orders of society at that time, who chafed at villeinage and the lords' rights of unpaid labour, or corvée.

Ball and perhaps many of the rebels who followed him found some resonance between their ideas and goals and those of Piers Plowman, a key figure in a contemporary poem putatively by one William Langland. Ball put Piers and other characters from Langland's poem into his cryptically allegorical writings which may be prophecies, motivating messages, and/or coded instructions to his cohorts. This may have enhanced Langland's real or perceived radical and Lollard affinities as well as Ball's.

• Possibly William Langland and the C-text version of his poem, Piers Plowman, which certainly influenced Ball.
• Gerrard Winstanley (1609 - 1676) a religious reformer and political activist during the 1650s who was aligned with the True Levellers, called the "Diggers").
• William Morris (1834-1896) who wrote A Dream of John Ball (1888), a poetical socialist fantasy that puts nineteenth-century enlightened ideals of social equality into John Ball's mouth^[3]:

"What else shall ye lack when ye lack masters? Ye shall not lack for the fields ye have tilled, nor the houses ye have built, nor the cloth ye have woven; all these shall be yours, and whatso ye will of all that the earth beareth; then shall no man mow the deep grass for another... and he that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won."

• Avi "Crispin: The Cross of Lead"; Pub: Hyperion; Reprint edition (2004), ISBN 0-7868-1658-9. A children's historical novel (ages 9-12), which includes a character called John Ball based on the historical person.
• H. G. Wells, who dedicated his book '42 to '44 to Ball.
• The English poet and songwriter Sydney Carter (also famous for writing such popular hymns as 'Lord of the Dance' and 'One More Step Along the World I go') wrote the song 'John Ball' in rememberance and hommage to Ball's attitudes, which recently Chris Wood (folk musician) has popularised on his 2007 album 'Tresspasser'.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

John Ball (priest)

These sources are taken from the Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition:

• Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, edited by H. T. Riley (London, 1863-1864);
• Henry Knighton, the Chronicon, edited by Joseph Rawson Lumby (London, 1889-1895);
• Jean Froissart, Chroniques, edited by S. Luce and G. Raynaud (Paris, 1869-1897);
  • More modern version published by Penguin Classics, 1978 ISBN 0-14-044200-6
• Charles Edmund Maurice, Lives of English Popular Leaders in the Middle Ages (London, 1875);
• Charles Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381 (Oxford, 1906).
  • Republished Oxford University Press, 1969.