There was at that time a growing dissatisfaction with the laws which subjected the villeins to forced labour. 'We are all come,' they said, 'from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve. How can the gentry show that they are greater lords than we? Yet they make us labour for their pleasure.' It was this feeling that produced the insurrection of Wat Tyler, which broke out in June 1381. Ball was at that time lodged in the archbishop's prison at Maidstone, to which he had been committed probably about the end of April, as on the 26th of that month the archbishop issued a writ to his commissary to denounce him as an excommunicate (Wilkins, iii. 152). Formerly, it seems, he had been excommunicated by Archbishop Islip, and the sentence had never been annulled; yet, in defiance of all authority, he had gone about preaching in churches, churchyards, and market-places. It does not appear whether Islip was the archbishop who, according to Froissart, thought it was enough to chastise him with two or three months' imprisonment, and had the weakness to release him again. He excited the people not only by his preaching, but by a number of rhyming letters which passed about the country, some curious specimens of which have been preserved by Knighton and Walsingham. When committed to prison by Archbishop Sudbury he is said to have declared that he would be delivered by 20,000 friends. The prophecy was fulfilled; for, on the breaking out of the rebellion in Kent, one of the first acts of the insurgents was to deliver him from Maidstone gaol, whence they carried him in triumph to Canterbury. Here he expected to have met the archbishop who had committed him to prison, but he was then in London, where he was afterwards murdered by the rebels. The host then turned towards London, and as at Canterbury so also at Rochester, they met with an enthusiastic reception. At Blackheath, Ball preached to them from the famous text—
When Adam dalf, and Eve span,
Wo was thanne a gentilman? —
in which, as distinctly alleged by contemporary writers, he incited the multitude to kill all the principal lords of the kingdom, the lawyers, and all whom they should in future find to be destructive to the common weal. The project was clearly to set up a new order of things founded on social equality — a theory which in the whole history of the middle ages appears for the first and last time in connection with this movement. The existing law and all its upholders were looked upon as public enemies, and every attorney's house was destroyed on the line of march. The Marshalsea prison was demolished and all the prisoners set free. John of Gaunt's magnificent palace, the Savoy, was burned to the ground. The rebels took possession of London and compelled the king and his mother to take refuge in the Tower. Nor were they safe even there from molestation, as the reader of history knows. John Ball is mentioned among those who rushed in when the Tower gates were thrown open, when Archbishop Sudbury was seized and beheaded just after saying mass before the king. But the reign of violence was short-lived. The great body of the rebels deserted their leaders and went home on a promise of pardon, but a considerable number still remained when Tyler had his celebrated interview with the King at Smithfield. At that interview Ball was present, and probably saw his leader fall under the sword of Sir William Walworth. He afterwards fled to the midland counties and was taken at Coventry—'hidden in an old ruin,' says Froissart. He was brought before the king at St. Albans, where he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor. The sentence seems to have been promptly carried out, and the king himself witnessed its execution at St. Albans on 15 July. The four quarters, after the barbarous fashion of those days, were sent to four different towns to be publicly exhibited.
[Walsingham's Historia Anglicana, il. 32-34; Knighton (in Twysden's Scriptores Decem), 2633-8; Froissart (Johnes's Translation), ii. 460-80. In Maurice's 'English Popular Leaders,' vol. ii., a slight memoir of Ball is given, in which a more favourable view is taken of his character.]
BALL, JOHN (1585–1640), puritan divine, was born at Cassington, Oxfordshire, in October 1585. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was entered in 1602, and proceeded B.A. and M.A. at St. Mary's Hall. Having completed his academic course, he entered the family of Lady Cholmondeley, in Cheshire, as tutor. It was there that he bethought him of 'spiritual things,' and was 'converted.' He obtained ordination without subscription in 1610. He was then presented to the living of Whitmore, near Newcastle, in Staffordshire. There having been apparently no residence, he was the guest of Edward Mainwaring, Esq. Ball was a nonconformist wherever the relics of popery left in the national church touched his conscience. He was overwhelmed by the evils of the time, and used to associate him-
