John Ball was a former priest and Froissart records that he would ‘oftentimes on the Sundays after mass, when the people were going out of the minster, to go into the cloister and preach, and made the people to assemble about him, and would say thus:
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.
Ball questioned why some were kept in servitude when we ‘all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve’. He asked how the aristocracy could show that ‘they be greater lords than we be’. As the Church was the main ideological institution of feudal society, all social conflict was addressed in theological terms, and clerics like Ball were educated men equipped to give political leadership. And some of them stood close enough to the people to share their grievances. There is an unmistakable economic content to Ball’s words when he says:
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.
Ball’s solution was to ‘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’. He was confident that ‘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’.22
This is all of a piece with John Ball’s most famous saying, the rhetorical question that suggested an absence of class difference in Eden: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ The message made John Ball popular: ‘wherefore many of the mean people loved him, and such as intended to no goodness said how he said truth; and so they would murmur one with another in the fields and in the ways as they went together, affirming how John Ball said truth.’
The archbishop of Canterbury, however, did not love him. When he heard what Ball was preaching he ‘caused him to be taken and put in prison a two or three months to chastise him’. But this was useless, because ‘when this John Ball was out of prison, he returned again to his error, as he did before’. Froissart concludes: ‘it had been much better at the beginning that he had been condemned to perpetual prison or else to have died, rather than to have suffered him to have been again delivered out of prison.’23
Ball seems to have had particular appeal in London. Froissart records that ‘of his words and deeds there were much people in London informed, such as had great envy at them that were rich and such as were noble; and then they began to speak among them and said how the realm of England was right evil governed, and how that gold and silver was taken from them by them that were named noblemen: so thus these unhappy men of London began to rebel . . .’. Froissart even suggests that it was Londoners that ‘sent word to the foresaid countries that they should come to London and bring their people with them, promising them how they should find London open to receive them and the commons of the city to be of the same accord’, although it seems unlikely that the revolt was actually stirred up by the metropolis.24 At any rate it was the surrounding counties, especially Essex and Kent, that rose up in revolt with John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw at their head.25
A huge mass of rebels, some 60,000 in Froissart’s exaggerated estimate, now converged on London.26 And, as English peasants were accustomed to do, they bore arms – often the very same bows that had proved so effective at Crécy and Poitiers. The rebels caught up with the king’s mother on her way back from a pilgrimage, but she was unharmed. Having collected greater numbers in Canterbury and Rochester, the marchers arrived at Blackheath in South East London. There they took the family of one Sir John Newton hostage and sent him to Richard II, who was at the Tower of London with his courtiers. Sir John apologized profusely for the message he bore, which was a clear summons to the king to meet the rebels. Richard was forced to agree. ‘In the morning on Corpus Christi day King Richard heard mass in the Tower of London, and all his lords, and then he took his barge with the earl of Salisbury, the earl of Warwick, the earl of Oxford and certain knights, and so rowed down along the Thames to Rotherhithe, whereas was descended down the hill a ten thousand men to see the king and to speak with him.’
But the threat of the crowd was too terrifying for Richard to disembark as the rebels wanted. When the mob handed over a list of those they wanted executed, Richard refused this demand also. He would not even speak with them, and returned to the Tower, which ignited the anger of the crowd, and ‘they cried all with one voice, “Let us go to London”.’ As they moved towards London Bridge they pulled down the houses of the courtiers and the rich and broke open the Marshalsea prison. Finding the gates of the bridge closed the rebels threatened to take the city by storm, but Londoners inside the gates put their heads together, saying ‘Why do we not let these good people enter into the city? They are your fellows, and that that they do is for us.’ The gates were opened and the Peasants’ Revolt poured into the capital through Aldgate, where Geoffrey Chaucer had his lodgings.27
According to Froissart, the following day a crowd of some 20,000 followed John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw towards Westminster. Along the Strand they came to the Savoy Palace of the hated John of Gaunt, one of the main inspirers of the poll tax. The crowd – much more determined than it had been four years earlier – broke into the opulent residence and pillaged it, killing John of Gaunt’s servants. Then it was set on fire. At the same time the anger built up over many years was also spent in killing Flemish immigrants and those associated with the Italian merchants: ‘they brake up divers houses of the Lombards and robbed them and took their goods at their pleasure, for there was none that durst say them nay.’ Wat Tyler got his revenge on a rich merchant who had ill-treated him in the past, parading his severed head on spear-point.28
When they got to Westminster the rebels broke open the prison. They then surged back to the Tower to confront the king. That night the crowd assembled at St Katherine’s in front of the Tower of London, ‘saying how they would never depart thence till they had the king at their pleasure’. Richard was advised by ‘his brethren and lords and by Sir Nicholas Walworth, mayor of London, and divers other notable and rich burgesses, that in the night time they should issue out of the Tower and enter into the city, and so to slay all these unhappy people, while they were at their rest and asleep’. But the plan was not acted upon for fear it might provoke an even more extensive rising of the ‘commons of the city’.
The embattled royal party then decided that if force was not yet possible, fraud should be attempted. ‘The Earl of Salisbury and the wise men about the king said: “Sir, if ye can appease them with fairness, it were best and most profitable, and to grant them everything that they desire, for if we should begin a thing the which we could not achieve, we should never recover it again, but we and our heirs ever to be disinherited.”’ The following day when the crowd at St Katherine’s began ‘to cry and shout, and said, without the king would come out and speak with them, they would assail the Tower and take it by force, and slay all them that were within’, Richard decided that he would have to speak to them. He ‘sent to them that they should all draw to a fair plain place called Mile-end . . . and there it was cried in the king’s name, that whosoever would speak with the king let him go to the said place, and there he should not fail to find the king’.29
The king’s party rode out of the Tower hoping to reach Mile End Green. But ‘as soon as the Tower gate opened . . . then Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball and more than four hundred entered into the Tower and brake up chamber after chamber’. When they came on the archbishop of Canterbury, the ‘chief chancellor of England’, ‘these gluttons took him and strake off his head’. Three others met the