John Ball (priest)

John Ball  (c. 1338 – 15 July 1381) was an English Lollard priest who took a prominent part in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Life
Little is known of Ball's early years. He lived in St. Albans, Hertfordshire and subsequently at Colchester during the Black Death. He also lived in Kent at the time of 1381. 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." 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? "When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman" Sources


 * 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
 * Webster's online Dictionary
 * The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001
 * The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996
 * BBC: VOICES OF THE POWERLESS - READINGS FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES
 * English Literature by William Joseph Long
 * Other versions
 * "When Adam dalfe and Eve spane, / Where was than the pride of man?" Richard Rolle de Hampole. Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations online claims that this is the original source for Ball's version.
 * "When Adam dalf, and Eve span, / Who was thanne a gentilman?" from Thomas Walsingham's Historia Anglicana (Paul H. Freedman. Images of the Medieval Peasant, Stanford University Press, 1999 ISBN 0804733732. p. 60)
 * "When Adam dolve, and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?" John Bartlett, comp. (1820–1905). Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.  1919. Page 871  from Hume: History of England, vol. i. chap. xvii. note 8.
 * "When Adam dug and Eve span, / Who was then a noble man?" Literature of Richard II's Reign and the Peasants' Revolt. Edited by James M. Dean 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.

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, his head subsequently stuck on a pike on London Bridge. 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.

John Ball in popular culture
Ball made a star appearance in the Newbery Medal-winning novel, Crispin: The Cross of Lead. He was a priest, as he usually is, and was assisting a character by the name of Bear in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

William Morris wrote a short story called 'Two extracts from a dream of John Ball', which was serialised in the Commonweal between November 1886 and February 1887. It was published in book form in 1888.