John Ball

John Ball was the priest who preached that all men were created equal and was hanged, drawn and quartered in front of the fifteen-year-old king in 1381. He was a hedge priest with no parish, excommunicated and repeatedly imprisoned for preaching in churchyards and marketplaces without licence, and he had been at it for twenty years before the Peasants' Revolt gave him an army. His question - when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman - was already a proverb and he made it the text of his sermon at Blackheath, arguing that lordship had no origin in nature and that things would not go well in England until goods were held in common. He was in Maidstone gaol when the rising began and the Kentish rebels under Wat Tyler released him. The revolt was set off by the third poll tax in four years, on a population still short of labour after the Black Death and legally forbidden by the Statute of Labourers from charging what the shortage was worth. The rebels took London, burned John of Gaunt's palace, executed the archbishop of Canterbury and the treasurer, and met Richard II at Mile End, where he granted their demands. Tyler was killed at Smithfield the next day, the charters were revoked, and the reprisals followed. Ball was caught at Coventry, tried at St Albans and executed on 15 July in the king's presence, his quarters sent to four towns. Froissart, who despised him, preserved the sermons, which is why they survive at all. William Morris made him the subject of A Dream of John Ball in 1888, and the poll tax comparison was made loudly in Britain again in 1990.

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