Courtesy of Project Gutenberg, I’m currently reading some of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles and last night perused his account of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. One of the main protagonists of the Revolt was a priest (possibly excommunicated and probably a “hedge-priest“) called John Ball, whom Froissart termed the “mad priest of Kent“.
John Ball (c.1338-15 July 1381) gained considerable fame as a preacher by expounding the doctrines of John Wycliffe, but especially by his insistence on the principle of social equality. These utterances brought him into collision with the Archbishop of Canterbury and on 3 occasions the archbishop committed him to prison. Indeed Ball was in prison when the Revolt began and he was released by Kentish rebels who then marched on London, along with Ball.
John Ball’s most famous public address was that to the assembled masses on Blackheath Common during the Peasant’s Revolt that began: “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?”
However, what struck me most of what Ball is reported to have said is a sermon he’s alleged by Froissart to have delivered to a congregation leaving the minster of Canterbury one Sunday:
Ah, ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall not do till everything be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be all united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we be. What have we deserved, or why should we be kept thus in servage? We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shew that they be greater lords than we be, saving by that they cause us to win and labour for that they dispend? They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices and good bread, and we have the drawing out of the chaff and drink water; they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields; and by that that cometh of our labours they keep and maintain their estates: we be called their bondmen, and without we do readily them service, we be beaten; and we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right. Let us go to the king, he is young, and shew him what servage we be in, and shew him how we will have it otherwise, or else we will provide us of some remedy; and if we go together, all manner of people that be now in any bondage will follow us to the intent to be made free; and when the king seeth us, we shall have some remedy, either by fairness or otherwise.
To me this shows that John Ball was a man way ahead of his times – and not mad at all (Froissart as a chronicler was true to his times and favoured the elite and their version of events). Indeed ideas of equality such as he voiced were not widely heard again until the Commonwealth (1649-1660) and still have relevance today as the gap between rich and poor, the haves and have-nots yawns ever wider once more.
And at no time are the poor subsidising the rich more than they do now, in this age of austerity and spending cuts.
http://www.blog.rippedoffbritons.com/2011/01/public-spending-cuts-how-poor-subsidise.html
Thanks for your comment and the link, Richard.
What strikes me is the historical continuity: the rich have always exploited the poor down the ages.
In the 18th century Voltaire remarked: “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
The exploitation of the poor by the rich and the former subsidising the latter was a central point of Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” (the link is to the Project Gutenberg download page for the book).
Hi Woody, very good write up. I have heard of this priest in the dim and distant past, also the quote re Adam & Eve.
Very enjoyable to be reminded of it. Memories – how they linger and come to the surface at a split second’s notice.
Gladys 🙂 🙂
Many thanks for your comment, Gladys.
You may be interested to learn that Ball’s line about Adam and Eve was one he adapted from the writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole (c. 1290–1349) and which originally read as follows:
In modern English: When Adam delved and Eve span … Where was then the pride of man?