studying arts at the
little north-country foundation of the Balliols at Oxford, and John
Ball, the Essex priest, was preaching his revolutionary socialism to the
villeins. "We are all come," said he, "from one father and one mother,
Adam and Eve. How can the gentry show that they are greater lords than
we?"[1] In 1355 there were heretics in the diocese of York who
maintained that it is impossible to merit eternal life by good works,
and that original sin does not deserve damnation.[2]

[1] The sentiment, or its equivalent in Ball's famous distich,
was not new; it was employed for mystical purposes in Richard
Rolle's

"When Adam delf and Eue span, spir, if thou wil spede,
Whare was then the pride of man, that now merres his mede?"

_Library of Early English Writers. Richard Rolle of Hampole and
his followers_, ed. Horstman, i., 73 (1895).

[2] Cal. _Papal Registers, Letters_, iii., 565.

The Flagellants were denounced as heretics by Clement VI.; the
Archbishop of York proceeded against the northern heretics, and in 1366
the Archbishop of Canterbury forbade John Ball's preaching. But there
were more insidious, because more measured, enemies of the Church than
a handful of fanatics. The English were long convinced that the Avignon
popes were playing the game of the French adversary, and Clement VI.'s
efforts for peace never had a fair hearing. Since the beginning of the
war, the king laid his hand on the alien priories, and, though in his
scrupulous regard for clerical rights he had allowed the monks to
remain in possession, he diverted the stream of tribute from the French
mother houses to his own treasury. Bolder measures against papal
provisions were taken in the years which immediately followed the
pestilence. Finding remonstrances futile, the parliament of 1351, which
passed the statute of labourers, enacted also the first statute of
provisors. It recited that the anti-papal statute of Carlisle of 1307
was still law, and that the king had sworn to observe it. It claimed
for all electing bodies and patrons the right to elect or to present
freely to the benefices in their gift. It declared invalid all
appointments brought about by way of papal provision. Provisors who had
accepted appointments from Avignon were to be arrested. If convicted,
they were to be detained in prison, until they had made their peace
with the king, and found surely not to accept provisions in the future,