John Ball Colchester born radical priest was hanged, drawn, and quartered on this St. Swithin’s Day in 1381 in St Alban's, England in the presence of the 14-year-old king whom he had very nearly deposed.Ball was well known for advocating social equality and preaching in English instead of Latin and has since become a symbol of resistance to injustice and oppression.
Whilst John Ball’s actions are well documented, there remains some mystery about the details of his personal life as this wasn’t recorded at the time, and what is recorded of his adult life comes from hostile sources emanating from the established religious and political social order.
John Ball, was born in Peldon around 1330, and trained in the priesthood at St. Mary’s Benedictine Abbey in York, which had a connection to St. John’s Abbey in Colchester. He returned to Colchester around the year 1360 and was one of the priests at St James Church on East Hill and afforded the protection of the King (Edward III).
This protection was short-lived however, as it was revoked when the King found that he was touring the country preaching against the practices of the church. The King’s disapproval did little to dissuade Ball who was fast becoming a powerful public speaker and a favourite of the downtrodden peasant class.
He is said to have gained considerable fame as a roving preacher without a parish or any link to the established order by expounding the doctrines of John Wycliffe, and especially by his insistence on social equality. He delivered radical sermons in many places. His utterances however brought him into conflict with the Bishop of London Simon Sudbury (later Archbishop of Canterbury). and he was thrown in prison on several occasions. He also appears to have been excommunicated; owing to which, In 1366, an edict forbade his would-be flock from hearing his seditious theology demanding clerical poverty and (so complained the Archbishop of Canterbury) “putting about scandals concerning our own person, and those of other prelates and clergy.” These measures, however, did not moderate his opinions, nor diminish his popularity.
He took to speaking to parishioners in churchyards after the official services: in English, the "common tongue", not the Latin of the clergy, a radical political move. Ball was "using the bible against the church", very threatening to the status quo. Ball’s sermons, railed against the corruption of the ecclesiastical establishment, the staggering inequalities in 14th-century society, and the brutal excesses of the upper classes against the powerless and impoverished.
Essentially, by 1381 Ball had decided that all forms of lordship had to end, including both church and lay society. The strict hierarchy of medieval England which such views challenged relied upon lordship by ownership of land, and was seen as a divine imitation of the orders of angels and saints in heaven. Opposing the system, therefore, was not merely treasonous but heretical.
There was a reason that Ball’s illicit sermons could command such attention, and ordering him to shut up was mere whistling past the graveyard.Thirty-five years after the Black Death had killed over a third of the population of Europe, there weren’t enough people to work on the land.
And under the system of serfdom every man woman and child in England was forced by both law and circumstance to work for a local lord. They were tied to their land and paid rent through hard work and harvests. The system did not consider the needs of the individual, and the success or failure of the harvest would dictate whether or not people had enough to eat.
Recognising this opportunity, workers organised to demand higher wages and better working conditions.But the government of the time, comprised mainly of landowning bishops and lords, unsurprisingly passed a law to limit wage rises, as well as introducing a poll tax to pay for a war. As a result ravaged by war and plague and heavy-handed wage suppression, England’s seething 99% broke into rebellion in June 1381.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/06/wat-tyler-and-peasants-revolt-of-1381.html
John Ball was a popular figure around the outbreak of the uprising, and soon presented as one of the leading figures of the revolt. He was already known for his preaching against the existing secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies, and by 1381 his preaching was an integral part of the rebels’ ideology—at least according to the main earliest sources—and in critical scholarship it is sometimes labelled ‘millenarian,’ ‘apocalyptic,’ or ‘eschatological’ in the sense that he and his supporters envisaged imminent and dramatic social and political upheaval.
While we inevitably have to speculate about some of the details, a general outline of Ball’s teaching can be given. Ball was understood to have believed that the summer of 1381 was the appointed time for the rebels to enact the divine plan to bring about their liberty through the violent transformation of England with particular reference to the eschatological parable of the Wheat and Tares in Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43. For Ball, the problem that needed rectifying was that the ecclesiastical and political elites were maintaining their wealth through, and at the expense of, the peasants and lower orders. He taught that the majority of the elites needed to be removed or eliminated and a new (or revived) order put in its place, with Ball as the leader of the church in England.
Ball was said to have looked to Adam and Eve to critique the invention of serfdom, justify the upheaval of the hierarchies of his time, and to point to an imminent future with fairer representation and redistribution of power and resources. He seems to have stressed the labour involved in the making of the bread of the Eucharist and tied it in with ideas about imminent liberation and freedom. This anticipated future was modelled on the earliest church, a time when all things would be held in common (Acts of the Apostles 2:44–45; 4:32–35).
It is likely that Ball believed in expectations about an ideal Christian king who should or would bring peace, justice, and a chastened church to England. There is some evidence that Ball and the rebels of 1381 thought that the youthful Richard II fitted this role. These ideas are not as elaborate or extensive as other medieval apocalyptic or millenarian schema but, collectively, there is enough evidence to suggest that Ball should be seen as a popular figure who used inherited apocalyptic and millenarian ideas. it seems he expected the imminent transformation of the social and political order in England, with himself as the head ecclesiastical authority.
The exact details of Ball’s involvement in the riots that formed the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 depend on which sources are consulted. Some believe he was rescued from Maidstone Prison by Wat Tyler’s men as their revolt spread across Essex and Kent. Others believe Ball would have been held in the Royal Prison which was not stormed by Tyler until a few months later. There is however concrete evidence of a open-air sermon delivered by Ball when the rebels arrived in Blackheath on 12th June 1381, where he spoke some of his most famous words:
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? 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."
We should understand this sentiment in its fourteenth-century context as involving a new hierarchy which would serve the interests of peasants and labourers. Ball and other rebels believed that this new England would involve holding the resources of the land in common which, in practical terms, likely included full access to game in woods, fields, and waters.
The rebels came breathtakingly close to accomplishing their aims. For a few days that pregnant June the rebels controlled London, even putting to death the Archbishop of Canterbury and mounting his head on London Bridge — and Ball the “mad priest” stood in leadership alongside Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. By appearances, Wat Tyler and John Ball and the rest were within an ace of overturning England’s feudal hierarchy.
The unfortunate and tragic end of the peasants revolt was marked first by the cruel murder of Wat Tyler. This was soon followed, despite his attempts to flee, by the execution of Ball after a swift trial in St. Albans. Ball’s striving for social equality and reforms in Western Christianity. were seen as a major threat to the establishment,
He was hung drawn and quartered in the presence of the king himself. In recognition of his influence and as a message to the peasants, after the rebellion died down Ball’s head was put on a pike and displayed on London Bridge.Feared by the elites, upon his execution his body parts were subsequently displayed in 4 different locations around England as a means of scaring off other revolters.
Ball would also subsequently be vilified by historians, poets, and theologians of the ruling class in a smear campaign that lasted 400 years, before his reputation became rehabilitated and adopted by many different popular movements throughout the years.
Ball has since been an inspirational figure for countless generations of English radicals. He appears, for instance as a character in an anonymous 1593 play called The Life and Death of Jack Straw and would have been familiar to Gerrard Winstanleyhttps://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/09/gerrard-winstanley-19101609-10091676.html and the other radicals of the 17th century English Revolution who took up his call for an England where all things were held in common.
In 1888 William Morris https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-continuing-relevance-of-visionary.html published his novel A Dream of John Ball, in which a time-traveller updates Ball on the end of feudalism and subsequent rise of industrial capitalism. The radical priest realises that his hopes for a free and egalitarian future have yet to be realised, five hundred years after his death.
In 1999, an article in Green Anarchist declared that Ball’s message was:
“not of moderation, not of putting limited demands for financial improvement, but of the revolutionary desire for authenticity and true human community that underlay them, of the courage to fight for ourselves and our visions”.
Thankfully the name of John Ball has not been forgotten, as we release our own demands for reform and social justice many centuries later.
In 2015 a marker was unveiled commemorating the peasants’ rebellion, it was done on this anniversary of John Ball’s execution — and with a summons to equality he issued that has never yet been answered :.
"Things cannot go on well in England nor ever will until everything shall be in common. When there shall be neither Vassal nor Lord and all distinctions levelled. !
There’s a great folk song by Sidney Carter written in 1981 on the 300th anniversary of the Peasant’s Revolt all about John Ball. Here's a wonderful rousing version by The Young ‘Uns.
