to kindle and direct the revolt.

John Ball, an itinerant priest, who came from St. Mary's, at York, and then
made Colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising
the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the
Archbishop of Canterbury for teaching social "errors, schisms, and
scandals," but was in no wise contrite or cast down.

Chief of Ball's fellow-agitators were John Wraw, in Suffolk, Jack Straw, in
Essex--both priests these--William Grindcobbe, in Hertford, and Geoffrey
Litster, in Norfolk. In Kent lived Wat Tyler, of whom nothing is told till
the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and
captain by the rebel hosts.

From village to village went John Ball in the years that preceded the
rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with
revolutionary talk. It was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the
people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text--"In
the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created
equal."[35] Inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended:

"Good people, things will never go well in England, so long as goods be not
kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what
right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? If all come from
the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that
they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by
our toil what they spend in their pride?

"They are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while
we are covered in rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we
oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses;
we have pain and labour, the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of
us and of our toil that these men hold their state.

"We are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are
beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who
wishes to hear us and do us justice."

The poet, William Langland, in "Piers Plowman," dwelt on the social wrongs
of the time; Ball was fond of quoting from Langland, and of harping on a
familiar couplet:

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"

Besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that John Ball sent about
the country have been preserved:

"John Ball, Priest of St.