Who Was John Ball?

Written by Simon Williams

John Ball was a radical priest who preached social equality for decades before joining the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. His Blackheath sermon asking who was the gentleman when Adam delved and Eve span became the rebellion's rallying cry before his execution on 15 July.

Key Facts

• Born: c.1338, exact date and place unknown
• Career: itinerant priest, active at York and Colchester
• Excommunicated: c.1366, for preaching against Church hierarchy and property
• Imprisoned: multiple times by order of Archbishop Simon Sudbury; freed from Maidstone gaol by Kentish rebels, June 1381
• Famous sermon: Blackheath, c.12 to 13 June 1381, on the text "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"
• Executed: 15 July 1381, St Albans, hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of Richard II

By the time the Kentish rebels broke open Maidstone gaol in June 1381, John Ball had already spent fifteen years telling anyone who would listen that serfdom was against the will of God. Most of that time he had preached to hostile bishops, small crowds, and prison walls. For a few weeks in the summer of 1381 he preached to an army, and the words he chose that summer are still quoted six hundred and fifty years later.

Chroniclers writing after the revolt, all of them hostile to Ball and what he represented, still could not resist recording his most famous line. That alone tells you how far it travelled. This article sets out what is actually known about the man behind it.

Background as an Itinerant Priest

John Ball was ordained and worked as a chaplain, associated at various points with York and with Colchester in Essex, though he spent much of his career without a fixed parish, preaching wherever he could find an audience, in marketplaces and on village greens rather than from an approved pulpit. This itinerant, unlicensed preaching was itself a challenge to Church authority, since it bypassed the control that bishops normally held over who was allowed to address a congregation and on what subject.

What set Ball apart from other unlicensed preachers was the content of his message. He argued, consistently over many years, that social rank and serfdom had no basis in divine order, that all people were created equal, and that the current arrangement of lords and labourers was a human corruption of God's intention rather than a natural or sacred hierarchy.

Excommunication and Repeated Imprisonment

Ball's preaching brought him into direct conflict with the Church hierarchy from the 1360s onward. He was excommunicated around 1366 for sermons judged heretical and seditious, a formal sanction that should have ended his ability to preach altogether. It did not stop him.

Archbishop Simon Sudbury, who would later be one of the revolt's most prominent victims, had Ball arrested and imprisoned on at least three separate occasions in the years before 1381 for continuing to preach after his excommunication. Each time, Ball appears to have returned to preaching once released or once his sentence ended. This pattern, of a man who simply would not stop, is one of the clearer facts historians agree on about him.

The Blackheath Sermon

Ball was in Maidstone gaol when the Kentish rising reached the town in early June 1381. The rebels broke him out along with other prisoners and brought him with them as they marched toward London under Wat Tyler's command. At Blackheath, on the approach to the city, Ball delivered the sermon for which he is best remembered.

"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" The line survives because it compresses Ball's entire argument into a single unanswerable question: at the moment of creation, before rank existed, on what basis could anyone claim to be born a lord?

Chroniclers report that Ball expanded on this text at length, arguing that servitude was introduced by unjust men against God's will, and that if God had intended some to be lords and others serfs, he would have made that distinction clear from the beginning of the world. It is, in essence, a theological argument for social equality delivered to an armed crowd on the edge of the capital.

Ball, Tyler and the Revolt's Two Faces

Historians have long characterised the revolt's leadership as split between two complementary figures: Wat Tyler as its military commander and John Ball as, in one memorable phrase, its soul and voice. Where Tyler negotiated directly with the king and led the seizure of London, Ball supplied the moral and theological justification that turned a tax revolt into something closer to a demand for a different kind of society altogether.

This distinction matters for understanding why the authorities treated the two men so differently after the revolt collapsed. Tyler died in the heat of confrontation at Smithfield. Ball, captured separately after the rising failed, was tried through the formal machinery of royal justice, a process designed to make an example of him as the intellectual author of sedition rather than simply a rebel killed in the field.

Trial and Execution at St Albans

Ball was captured at Coventry in mid July 1381, after fleeing London once the revolt collapsed following Tyler's death. He was brought before royal justices and tried, with the outcome never seriously in doubt given his decades-long record of defying Church and secular authority alike.

He was executed at St Albans on 15 July 1381, hanged, drawn and quartered, the standard punishment for treason, and reportedly in the presence of King Richard II himself, who was touring the region to oversee the suppression of the rising in person. His remains were displayed at four separate towns as a deterrent, the usual practice for those condemned as traitors.

Readers exploring what pushed a priest to risk excommunication and eventually execution for this message will find the underlying economic pressure, wages, rents and the labour laws that followed the Black Death, set out in H&C's existing research on the decades before 1381, linked below alongside The Labour Machine, our study guide on exactly this period.

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This article is part of the Peasants' Revolt 1381 series. Explore all articles at the full cluster timeline.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Timeline of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381: the full dated chronology of the rising Ball preached into being.

→ Causes of the Peasants' Revolt: the immediate and long term causes behind the anger Ball had been naming for fifteen years.

→ Who Was Wat Tyler?: the rebel commander who led the revolt Ball gave its voice to.

→ Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt: the thirty year story connecting plague, labour shortage and rebellion.

→ Statute of Labourers 1351: the law that first tried to force wages back down, and the resentment Ball later gave words to.

People Also Ask

What did John Ball say at Blackheath?

He preached on the text "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?", arguing that servitude had no basis in God's original creation and had been introduced by unjust men. The sermon became the rebellion's best remembered statement of principle, quoted by chroniclers hostile to the revolt itself.

Why was John Ball excommunicated?

He was excommunicated around 1366 for preaching sermons the Church judged heretical and seditious, specifically his argument that social rank and serfdom were human corruptions rather than divinely ordained. Excommunication should have ended his ability to preach, but he continued regardless for the next fifteen years.

How did John Ball die?

Ball was captured at Coventry in mid July 1381 after the revolt collapsed, tried before royal justices, and executed at St Albans on 15 July 1381. He was hanged, drawn and quartered, the standard punishment for treason, reportedly in the presence of King Richard II.

What was John Ball's relationship to Wat Tyler?

The two led complementary roles within the revolt. Tyler commanded the rebel forces and negotiated directly with the king, while Ball supplied the moral and theological argument that framed the uprising as a demand for a fairer social order rather than simply a tax protest.

Was John Ball a real historical figure?

Yes. Unlike some figures whose role in 1381 is debated, Ball's career as a preacher, his excommunication around 1366, his repeated imprisonments, and his execution at St Albans on 15 July 1381 are all documented in contemporary and near contemporary chronicle sources.

Why is the Blackheath sermon still quoted today?

Its rhyming, question based structure made it memorable and quotable even for chroniclers who despised what it argued, and its underlying claim, that inherited rank has no basis in nature or divine order, has been reused by reformers and radicals in nearly every century since 1381.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Dan Jones (2009) Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, HarperPress, a widely cited modern narrative account covering Ball's role in the rising.
• The Anonimalle Chronicle, a near contemporary account that records versions of Ball's preaching and the rebellion's demands, held in modern translation by major research libraries.
• Thomas Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae, a monastic chronicle from St Albans itself, the site of Ball's execution, offering a hostile but detailed near contemporary account.
• The National Archives, Kew, holds legal and judicial records relating to Ball's trial and the wider suppression of the revolt.

Note: the precise wording of Ball's Blackheath sermon survives only through hostile chroniclers writing after the event, and should be read as a close paraphrase of his argument rather than a verified verbatim transcript. This is the current scholarly consensus rather than a settled certainty.

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