Ball
John, "the mad priest," an English priest who took part in the rising of the peasantry under Wat the Tyler. He was a Lollard, a follower of Wyclif's teachings. He pleased the peasants by inveighing on the equality of gentry and villeins, and was thrice imprisoned by an archbishop for preaching heresy. He was in jail at Maidstone when the peasants rose. One of their first efforts was to set him free. They escorted him to Blackheath, where he exhorted them, so it is said from the text,
Who was thanne a gentilman!
After the murder of Wat the Tyler, Ball fled, but was overtaken at Coventry and was executed at St. Albans July 15, 1381, in the presence, it is said, of the king. See Lollards; Wat Tyler
This priest used oftentimes to go and preach when the people in the villages were coming out from mass; and he would make them gather about him, and would say thus: "Good people, things go not well in England, nor will, till everything be in common and there no more be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve, . . . but they are clothed in velvet and are warm in their furs, while we shiver in rags; they have wine, and spices, and fair bread; and we, oat cake and straw, and water to drink; they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, the rain and the wind in the fields. Yet from our labor they keep their estate." And so the people would murmur one with the other in the fields, and in the ways as they met together, affirming that John Ball spoke truth.--Froissart.
The peasants were dispersed and defeated, their leaders were tried, sentenced and hanged; but the solid fruits of victory rested with the insurgents of June, 1381. Once in the history of England only--once, perhaps, only in the history of the world--peasants and artizans attempted to effect a revolution by force. They nearly succeeded--at least they became for a short time the masters of the situation. The English laborer, for a century or more, became virtually free and constantly prosperous.--Thorold Rogers.