Now Is the Time: John Ball Melvyn Bragg's Radical Lives

Here in this country, we have had the bloody Civil War,

and we have also executed a king who many people thought

was appointed on Earth by God.

But we have never had a true revolution,

yet there has been a consistent radical,

egalitarian tradition in literature and in politics.

These two programmes are called Radical Lives

and I'll be talking about John Ball,

the great preacher in the 14th century,

a rebel who drew his fervour from fundamentalist Christianity,

and Tom Paine, who drew his ideas from the Enlightenment

in the 18th century.

Both these men tried to uproot the systems

in which they found themselves.

Both were reviled and repudiated after their deaths

and both left an enduring radical legacy.

"When Adam delved and Eve span

"Who was then the gentleman?"

These lines, written by John Ball,

are from a momentous sermon he gave in 1381.

A sermon that transformed a rebellion that was the

closest thing this country has ever come to a true revolution.

And yet, these lines are all that some people know of him.

John Ball's rhetoric so terrified the authorities of his own time

that they attempted to erase him from memory,

and effectively, they did just that for about 300 years.

BELL CHIMES

He would later influence, as we shall see in this programme,

many of our greatest writers and political thinkers.

Yet, despite this, he is one of our unheard heroes,

and I think he is one of the most significant figures in our history.

The death of John Ball happened here,

next to the Cathedral of St Albans.

It was the end of a revolutionary voice.

This country has never had as powerful a revolutionary voice,

as uncompromising, as root and branch,

and as within a hair's breadth of success as that of John Ball.

A preacher, excommunicated, hunted by the King and his bishops

but, above all, the inspiration behind the commons,

the people of England who rose up in their thousands against a brutal

and ruling elite and almost toppled them.

It was a time of butchery and betrayals,

of the eruption of the anger of centuries across the countryside.

Anger that led to the burning of London,

murder and terror, spectacular and swift mobilisation of the people.

But, most of all, there was a brief

but golden promise of a new, free, just, equal country.

It was a promise made by John Ball,

and believed by men and women who crushed the military regime

and put crown and state under threat in just four days

in what came to be known as the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

The Peasants' Revolt is a title I reject.

Yes, there were serfs and bondmen and villeins

but there were also artisans, administrators,

one or two knights of the realm.

This was the commons of England,

the people of England whom John Ball inspired.

John Ball was born into what became one of the most,

if not the most, catastrophic centuries in English history

over the last thousand years.

At that time, more than 90% of the people lived in the countryside,

and society was very strictly stratified.

It was not unlike a pyramid.

The King at the top, then his nobles, the bishops, archbishops,

the administrators, the controllers of society at every level.

And the mass of the people owed them various forms of service

and were frankly oppressed by them

and ruled by them in many details of their lives.

And God, too, seemed to be against them. In the 14th century,

England suffered the horror of the Black Death.

Almost half the people died.

The population in England wouldn't regain its former size

for about 300 years.

And, as a consequence, labour was in chronically short supply.

Those remaining, especially labourers at the bottom of the heap,

bonded men, serfs, often slaves in all but name,

saw an opportunity to raise their wages.

They saw they could find better work elsewhere.

They saw they had a measure of freedom.

They wanted to take this chance, but they were immediately

and viciously stamped on by a series of royal statutes.

All wages were frozen and no movement of labour was allowed.

Anyone who disobeyed was likely to be fined, imprisoned,

or hunted down.

And a war with France, which was to last for 100 years,

was bankrupting the nation.

War-mongering nobles, plague and poverty

defined the 14th century.

"Ah, ye good people," Ball was to write in a letter, "the matters

"goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall do until everything

"be common and that the Lords be no greater masters than we be."

John Ball was born around 1330 here in Essex,

his family possibly came from near the village of Peldon.

Among the original medieval court documents

held here in the Essex Records Office at Chelmsford

are court rolls that mention a John Ball.

These are tenancy rolls and court rolls from the 14th century.

They are written in Latin. We are lucky to have them

because a lot of the rolls around here were destroyed by the rebels.

But here these are, and this tenancy roll talks of a William Ball,

who came from nearby Peldon to Colchester,

and his son, John Ball, who lived with his mother, Joan.

And it's proof that our man existed.

Translated from Latin, it says,

"Grant by John, son and heir of William Ball of Peldon,

"to Joan, his mother, of a tenement in Colchester

"between East Stockwell Strat and West Stockwell Strat."

"Strat" being a Saxon derivation of the Germanic word for street.

..109.50 bid, sold at 109.50. 109.50 for four, Graeme.

Colchester, about this time, was a thriving medieval wool town.

It had a population of about 5,000,

which made it one of the larger towns in England.

The town itself had a tradition of self-governance,

unlike the countryside.

And also, towards the end of the 14th century, it was a place

to which dissident churchmen gravitated.

John Ball was very much at home here,

and he spent much of his time around Colchester.

In the letters and sermons that he would later write,

Ball drew on the rural world he grew up in,

a world of country folk, farmers, shepherds, millers.

He learnt how to arouse the passions of the people by using what

they were familiar with.

"Falseness and guile have reigned too long," he wrote, "and truth

"has been set under a lock and falseness reigns in every flock."

The Church dominated 14th-century England.

There were two abbeys in Colchester - St John's and St Botolph's.

Colchester swarmed with political squabbles and ongoing battles

between the freer local people and these two monasteries.

The court rolls also show troublemaking among the young

chaplains themselves, citing drunkenness and gambling.

Like many young Colchester priests, John Ball was

trained in the priesthood in York, at St Mary's Benedictine Abbey.

He would describe himself as sometime-priest of St Mary's,

now of Colchester.

This simply because this abbey, St John's,

was connected with York and sent its young men up there.

Curiously enough, this gatehouse,

the only thing remaining of the abbey, was built after the

Peasants' Revolt to fortify the abbey

against possible further uprisings.

Across the town from St John's Abbey stands St James', East Hill.

After being ordained, it was here that as a young man John Ball began

to offer his own interpretation of the Bible's true meaning.

Over the plague years and the war years,

Ball saw the plight and the increasing

misery of the people he had grown up with around here.

He blamed the indifference and oppression of the nobility,

and the indifference and wealth of the Church.

He saw evidence for neither of those things in the Bible.

It was time for him to speak out.

Ball's quarrel was really with the Church's economic power -

its massive land-holdings and wealth.

The Church owned a third of the country's land.

Many of the bishops and senior clergy were seen as corrupt

and tyrannical.

Ball attacked them in a style both pointed and popular.

What made Ball so effective was his gift for memorable lines and rhymes.

This is from one of his letters.

"Now reigns pride in every place

"And greed not shy to show its face

"And lechery with never shame

"And gluttony with never blame

"Envy reigns with treason

"And sloth is ever in season

"God help us, for now is the time

"Amen."

Now is the time, he meant, for change.

The world as he saw it was godless and doomed.

Ball's preaching was powerful, and his fame spread by word of mouth.

His words have a millenarian tone.

His superstitious congregations believed hardship and disasters

like the Black Death might mean the end of the world was at hand,

that Judgment Day was imminent.

But John Ball was just as keen to see justice in the here and now.

Ball's vision of Christianity was a kind of democracy

in which men and women lived equally

without being oppressed either by the Church or by the State.

"We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve.

"Whereby can they say or show that they be greater lords than we?

"They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise,

"and we be vested with poor cloth,

"and by that that cometh of our labours

"they keep and maintain their estates."

This subversive rhetoric was radical stuff and must have drawn a crowd.

He clearly alarmed his superiors because in 1364,

when Ball was in his early thirties, they excommunicated him.

They wanted to stop him in his tracks

before his influence grew any stronger.

John Ball was forbidden to speak in churches,

so he waited until the service was finished and spoke in churchyards

or in markets or anywhere that people would listen to him.

And he spoke to his own congregation

in their own tongue, in English.

This at a time when French and Latin were the dominant languages

of the ruling classes.

"John Ball greeteth you all

"and doth to understand he hath rung your bell.

"Now, with might and right, and will and skill.

"God speed every dell."

The English language, itself a provocation to the authorities,

was an essential part of Ball's power.

English had remained the common tongue,

the language of the "commons",

despite the colonising, oppressive French

and the excluding strategies of Latin.

It appealed to them, and he knew it.

English was now unchained.

Through John Ball, it was re-emerging

as a new radical language.

It was also being used for literary purposes.

Langland and Chaucer were writing in English.

William Langland's poem Piers Plowman movingly describes

the terrible plight of the poor,

but Langland's verse, unlike Ball's pounding rhymes,

doesn't seek to overturn the social order.

"The needy are our neighbours,

"if we note rightly - as prisoners in cells, or poor folk in hovels,

"charged with children and overcharged by landlords.

"What they may spare in spinning they spend on rental,

"on milk, or on meal to make porridge,

"to still the sobbing of the children at mealtime."

The ploughman was a symbol of Christian virtue

in medieval literature.

Geoffrey Chaucer's ploughman in the Canterbury Tales is an example.

"A true worker and a good one was he, Living in peace and perfect charity."

Chaucer and Langland would be praised for writing in English

but others were to be condemned for it.

The scholar John Wycliffe,

who was in the process of translating the Bible into English,

would find himself persecuted for using that language.

People would have heard versions of the Bible in English

even if they hadn't read it. John Ball certainly did.

The English words in the Bible

were a powerful threat to the established order,

who ruled through Latin and French.

"Blessed be poor men in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

"Blessed be they that suffer persecution for right wiseness,

"for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs."

Unlike Ball, John Wycliffe was an establishment figure

even though he and his followers,

known as the Lollards, would later clash with the Church authorities.

The men were very different.

But they shared certain views.

Both of them went to the Bible for their authority,

and both of them were feared and hated by the church.

John Ball no doubt had his sympathisers and his followers

but he was, in effect, a lone operator.

He was known as a hedge priest,

darting across the countryside here and there.

He seems to have been quite skilled in navigating

the muddle of the Middle Ages.

He was one step ahead of his persecutors some of the time,

and other times he was caught and thrown in jail.

He was, in effect, an outlaw.

In 1376, fearing the discontent

Ball's treasonable preaching could unleash,

the Church pronounced a second excommunication,

as was the custom of the time.

And on this occasion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury,

enlisted the King - Edward III.

This was quite extraordinary.

John Ball was, after all, just a hedge priest

but the highest in the land wanted him silenced and immured.

They put him in prison and intended to keep him there.

Ball to me is very much in the tradition

of prophetic Old Testament figures.

Ball saw that the enemies of the true religion should be cut down.

The fact that King Edward III himself was cited as party to

this excommunication showed that

Ball was becoming very troublesome to the authorities.

His popularity was growing. They wanted him out of the way.

During his life, John Ball is known to have written letters and sermons,

but our only source for words

that were to send seismic shocks through church and state

are a few quotations reported in the chronicles

and illuminated manuscripts of the time.

These were written by Jean Froissart,

and clerics like Henry Knighton, Thomas Walsingham and others.

Early copies are kept here in the British Library.

These chronicles are a vital part of our literature

as well as of our history.

On the one hand we're very grateful to them for preserving

John Ball's letters and sermons and details of the events of the time.

On the other hand, we've every reason to be suspicious of them

because they were against him

and there's a sense in which a lot of this is black propaganda.

They were against, to put it mildly, John Ball,

because he was against them.

He objected to their authority

and they thought that

that meant he also objected to their God's authority.

If we look at this beautiful, magnificent, irreplaceable chronicle

by Froissart, we can see John Ball referenced several times there,

and there, and there, for instance

and here's a translation of part of it in English.

"The Archbishop of Canterbury,

"who was informed of the saying of this John Ball,

"caused him to be taken and put in prison and chastise him.

"How be it, it had been much better at the beginning that

"he had been condemned to perpetual prison, or else to have died."

No doubt whose side Froissart is on!

It was here in Essex in May and June 1381

that the tyranny and harshness suffered for decades

by the English commons, the English people, came to a head.

The Great Rebellion, in which

John Ball's voice would play such a vital part, was about to begin.

This was once the wealthy Manor of Cressing Temple.

There were 800 acres of farmland

and a large workforce, from farm tenants to bonded labourers.

The manor would be one of the rebellion's many casualties.

It was owned by St John's Hospitallers, an order both military

and religious, which had succeeded the famous Knights Templar.

The order was headed by Sir Robert Hales, the Lord Treasurer of England

and a close advisor of Richard II, the new King.

All that's left of it now are these magnificent barns.

Alastair Dunn is an historian

who has written on the Great Rebellion of 1381.

The scale of this structure really shows us there is great wealth

to be had out of the English countryside

and that wealth is in the hands of the great church

and noble landowners.

'But in May 1381, that order was about to be challenged.

'The people were about to take matters into their own hands.'

Plague, tyrannical laws, harsh conditions

and endless wars had pushed them to the brink,

and now a series of punitive taxes drove them to action.

The poll taxes came about due to the remarkable situation

of England being mired

in a war that it was not winning.

The costs of that war were spiralling out of control.

What was new about them?

What was new about it is that it was a tax on individuals.

The first poll tax was brought in

in 1377 on all adult men and women over the age of 15.

And it was a flat rate tax of four pence and above.

The yield of that still wasn't enough to fill the gaping chasm of money

that was needed to fund the army and navy.

A second poll tax was then brought in in 1379.

However, that still didn't yield enough to cover the military debts

of the English crown, and this led to the extreme measure in 1380

of a third poll tax being introduced

and this was three times more than had been charged in 1377

and every man and woman was expected now to pay 12 pence

whether they were the greatest landowner in the realm

or the smallest tenant farmer.

The effect of the poll tax was to lead to huge tax avoidance

by the ordinary people of England.

The anger against these taxes was desperate.

Some people simply could not pay, others wouldn't pay on principle.

It's reported that in a country whose population had been halved,

at least 450,000 people evaded taxes

and hid away members of their family.

The king, Richard II,

was in the hands of unimaginably wealthy advisors.

They advised him to send in the tax collectors.

These tax collectors went in with such brutality

that they inflamed the situation and lit the fuse.

The calls for equality, and above all freedom,

which John Ball had preached for years, took hold

as the people's fury over taxes flared into an organised revolt.

Village after village in Essex

and town after town came out for the revolt - Bocking,

Coggeshall, Stisted, Braintree,

Dunmowe, Gestingthorpe,

Ashen, Dedham, Little Henny,

Waltham, Chelmsford, Fobbing,

Goldhanger, Colchester, Billericay,

Great Baddow, and Cressing Temple.

How did it spread and why did it spread so quickly?

That is a remarkable issue, the speed of it.

In an era before modern communications,

some of it must have been word of mouth and rumour.

Rumour is a very important force in the spreading of news

in pre-modern societies.

I also think that the rebels organised themselves with messengers

to communicate among each other and to try and find out what is going on

and also to seek leadership.

Do you know how they were armed?

Well, we're talking about the...things like billhooks, daggers,

staves, the kind of objects that they would have had to hand.

What about bows?

I think that they would have had access to bows because

practising with bows was a feature of daily life

and adult men would have practised with a long bow.

And therefore, they probably would have had access to bows as well.

This was no rabble on the rampage.

These were village leaders, farm managers

along with the labourers and serfs.

Many of these men had fought in the wars in France.

They had a serious agenda - justice for all

and they were going after the tax collectors

and those who had sent them.

They felt that the young King, aged 14,

was surrounded by particularly greedy and corrupt advisers,

men like John Ball's enemy, Archbishop Sudbury,

and Sir Robert Hales and the King's uncle, John of Gaunt.

This fear of the rise of the commons, of the common people,

was in the literature too.

John Gower, the conservative poet and friend of Chaucer,

in his poem, Mirour de l'Omme - The Mirror of Man - wrote in French

- he wrote in English much later - that the mob terrified him.

"There are three things of such nature that they perform

"merciless destruction when they get the upper hand.

"One is floodwater, another is wild fire

"and the third is a mob of common people led by instigators,

"for they will not be stopped by reason or discipline."

In June 1381, Cressing Temple was among the many estates

attacked by the rebels.

This manor was almost completely destroyed

but these great barns were left intact.

Perhaps the rebels thought that they might find a use for them later on.

As the rebellion took hold quickly in Essex, the people of Kent

also came out for the revolt.

Erith, Dartford, Gravesend,

Frindsbury, Chalk, Rochester,

Borden, Maidstone, Sittingbourne,

Faversham, Canterbury - all were for the rebellion.

Crossing back and forth across the rivers between the counties,

the rebels agreed on their demands and made their plans.

Within two or three days, a full-scale rebellion was on.

This was unprecedented.

The commons, the people of England,

were taking on the armed might of the state.

And their organisation and communications were remarkable.

They moved swiftly towards Rochester, where they attacked

the forbidding fortress of Rochester Castle.

It surrendered to them almost at once.

It was their first great success.

By the time the rebels had seized the Castle,

a remarkable man had emerged as their military leader,

a man who was to combine forces and be inspired by John Ball.

His name was Walter Tyler - Wat Tyler.

There's not much we know for certain about Wat Tyler.

There are reports that as a young man he joined the English army

and fought with distinction at Poitiers and Crecy

under the leadership of the Black Prince.

Froissart, the chronicler, does say that he went abroad in the army.

Whatever, he was a remarkable man.

He organised the thousands of men now under his command

in military fashion and in double quick time.

And when he decided to march on London, he left a line of defence

along the South Coast to block the French from marauding England.

In his own way, he was a great patriot.

But first, Tyler led the rebels south through Kent, and crucially,

he set free John Ball from prison in Maidstone and they joined forces.

Tyler now led the military arm of the revolt

and John Ball and his preaching were to be its spiritual core.

When these two men got together,

the effect was immediate and momentous.

The rebellion changed radically.

Now it resembled a crusade.

The only contemporary depiction of Ball and Tyler in our literature

is in the Froissart Chronicles held at the British Library.

'Julian Harrison is Curator of pre-1600 manuscripts.'

Most remarkably, it actually has

what is believed to be the only depiction of John Ball himself.

There he is, he's on his horse.

His cloak actually has the name "John Ball" written on it.

Surrounded by the peasants, the armies,

carrying the standards of England and the Cross of St George.

They look very unlike peasants, don't they?

They look like soldiers who can afford armour and pikes.

They look like men ready to take on another army.

And there on his horse, there is Wat the Tyler, Walter the Tyler there.

That's him there, and again,

he's wearing robes that actually make him look rather noble.

There are very few quotations from the letters that John Ball sent out

to the rebel groups. But those we do have include encouragement

and instruction not to steal for personal gain.

"John the Miller's ground small, small, small.

"The King of Heaven's son shall pay for all.

"Be aware or be at fault. Take enough and then say halt."

Rather confusingly, or for the purposes of code,

John Ball often uses other names in his letters and sermons,

names like Shep the Shepherd

and John Nameless, John Miller,

John Trueman, John Carter.

Either he's disguising his own identity or,

and I think this is also possible,

he's saying, "This is for everybody.

"This is for all of you, you Carters, you Millers, you true men."

He takes the name of William Langland's great figure Piers Plowman,

Piers the Ploughman, he calls him

and he brings in other names from the folk past,

to say, "This represents you all.

"This reflects you all, these are you, the commons of England."

In using these familiar names, Ball turned William Langland's language

into something far more subversive.

"John Shepherd, former St Mary's Priest of York, now of Colchester,

"greets well John Nameless and John Miller and John Carter,

"and bids them to beware of treachery in the city.

"Stand together in God's name, bid Piers the Ploughman tend to his work,

"and chastise well Hob the Robber."

John Ball's letters were eagerly passed from hand to hand

and read out loud to Tyler's rebel army.

These words gave them an ever-growing strength

and moral purpose. Right was on their side. Now was the time.

Tyler and Ball's march through Kent was swift, strategic and brutal.

Though they held to John Ball's injunction against looting,

they still wrought havoc.

Whenever they found hated tax documents, they burnt them,

whenever they saw the houses of great men

who they thought were their enemies, they burnt them too

and whenever they found their oppressors, they destroyed them.

When the rebels reach here, Canterbury, the Holy City of England,

they were so inspired by the teachings of John Ball

that they wanted to make him Archbishop of Canterbury.

He refused.

Having reached England's Holy City, the symbol of the Church's power,

the rebels meted out their own justice.

They executed at least three officials in Canterbury,

beheading them.

Men regarded as traitors.

Richard and his advisers in London

were now unsettled by the scale of the uprising as they heard of it.

He sent messengers here to Canterbury to find out

what was really going on.

News of the scale of the rebellion

and its bloody consequences now reached London and King Richard.

They were confident that the King alone would understand them

and meet their demands.

The watchword throughout Kent and Essex and later in London was,

when challenged, "Who are you for?"

The answer had to be, "I am for the King and the Commons of England."

In a sermon, John Ball urged his followers to go to London

to make their case.

"He is young, and show him what servage we be in...

"and if we go together, all manner of people that now be in bondage

"will follow us to the intent to be made free,

"and when the King seeth, we shall have some remedy."

Gathering ever more recruits along the way, Tyler and Ball

and the rebels now headed towards the bleak open spaces of Blackheath,

a few miles outside London.

Some estimates say

there were as many as between 30 and 60,000 of them.

On the Feast of Corpus Christi, in June 1381,

a time of pandemonium and merriment,

the rebel army, together with local revellers from London's suburbs,

many of whom were in sympathy with the revolt, gathered at Blackheath.

It was here that John Ball gave the sermon that is now regarded

as one of the most moving pleas for social equality

in the history of the English language.

John Ball stood forward to address this mass of people

and he put forward his radical and extraordinarily ambitious plan.

He went back to Genesis, his bedrock, where Adam was digging

and Eve was spinning, in a state of paradise, equality.

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

"From the beginning, all men by nature were created alike,

"and our bondage or servitude

"came in by the unjust oppression of wicked men.

"For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning,

"he would have appointed who should be bonded, and who free."

He went on to talk about

"uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain,

"first killing the great lords of the realm,

"then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out

"everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future."

Ball's great sermon was a further rallying cry.

King Richard, shaken by the arrival of the massive rebel army,

travelled from the Tower to see what they wanted.

Richard travelled downriver from here, from the Tower of London,

down to Rotherhithe, with his ministers,

including the Earl of Salisbury.

When they got to Rotherhithe

and saw the mass of the rebel army on the shore, they took fright

and advised Richard not to leave the boat.

Instead, the Earl of Salisbury came to the edge of the boat

and spoke to the men on the bank

and said, "Sirs, ye be not in such order nor array

"that the King ought to speak with you."

In other words, they were an armed rabble, he might have thought,

and ill-dressed for the King.

These men, who had looked forward to meeting their King so much,

felt spurned, and they were furious.

And they moved away and decided they would march across London Bridge

and into the teeming walled city itself.

They approached via Southwark on London's outskirts.

They swarmed through the borough

and many local people, disaffected for their own reasons,

joined up with them.

The rebels had been snubbed.

They didn't blame the King, they blamed his advisors,

but they had been snubbed

and they walked up to London in a state of fury.

They hit on this place around Southwark,

famous, among other things, for its brothels.

One of them was owned by the Mayor of London, William Walworth,

who leased it from the Bishop of Winchester.

They burnt it down. It began the stampede of destruction in London,

but still no looting.

Ball had aimed at the brothel

because it represented the three things he detested -

the state, the power of the church and immorality.

Nevertheless, as we learn from the records, for quite a long time

the rebels kept to their notion that they were zealots for truth

and justice, not thieves or robbers.

They stormed over London Bridge.

To their surprise, the gates were opened and they met no resistance.

As they made their way through London, they opened up the jails,

releasing many who had been wrongly imprisoned, usually for debt,

but inevitably letting out some

who would use the revolt for their own criminal purposes.

On they went, along Fleet Street here to Temple,

opening the Fleet prison on the way.

Temple Church stands in the middle of Temple,

one of the Inns of Courts, where lawyers plied their trade.

They did in 1381 and they still do today.

It was here in this church that the rebels found documents,

legal documents, which they saw as working against their freedoms.

We're told that systematically, they destroyed and burnt them.

According to the chroniclers, John Ball authorised this action,

saying, "You may destroy the judges and lawyers,

"and all others who have taken against the commons."

This commandment of Ball's

has a vengeful Old Testament ring to it.

There was no doubting the strength of his resolution

and it brought yet more rural people into the city to join in.

The destruction was everywhere.

This gatehouse and the crypt of an old church are now

all that's left of St John's Priory,

another casualty of the rebellion.

Like Cressing Temple in Essex,

this estate belonged to the Knights Hospitallers of St John.

Professor Caroline Barron has made a study

of the medieval history of London.

It seems that when the rebels came to London,

the gates were locked, this was a great fortified city

with a tower in the middle

and a towering reputation for being a fortress city.

How did they get in so easily?

I think you have to remember

that London had never withstood a siege since the Norman Conquest.

So it wasn't a city used to being besieged and knowing what to do.

You have to remember also that

the Aldermen who were in charge at Aldgate and on the bridge

were inexperienced. All the Aldermen in the city were on a system

of being elected newly every year.

I think it was panic. I think they saw this mob coming

and they thought, "What are we to do?" The Aldermen probably said

"It's better to let them in than to have them fire the gates

"or destroy the bridge," and so they let them in.

Perhaps there were some people in London who may have sympathised

with the rebels, but I don't think that was the main reason,

I think it was panic.

But I think it's worth emphasising that the Londoners would not,

I think, have gathered together in a rebellion if it hadn't been for

the peasants, and the rusticky, as they were called, coming to London.

Did they gather their force in London, did people join them?

Yes, I'm sure that there were some of them

who understood the rebels' demands, perhaps, but more opportunists.

People who saw this was an opportunity to settle old scores.

There were particular objects of hostility -

the prior of the Hospital of St John, Robert Hales,

who was the Treasurer at the time.

The Hospitallers had blocked up an access point to the Thames,

which annoyed the people who lived around there,

that was near the Temple. And indeed,

that is partly why the Temple was sacked by the Londoners, I think,

was because of this annoyance about the blocking up of the access point.

The chronicles mention John Ball's injunction to the rebels

not to loot, not to steal.

They are not varlets, they are honest men.

How far was that injunction adhered to, how far was it kept?

I think the evidence, even of hostile chroniclers like Thomas Walsingham,

the Monk of Westminster,

seems to suggest they were not interested in looting.

They saw themselves as pursuing traitors rather than

acquiring opportunist loot.

The rebels marched on through the streets of London.

They were in pursuit of one of their greatest enemies.

In the afternoon of June 13th, 1381,

just a few days after they had set off,

they arrived at the Savoy Palace, now the site of the Savoy Hotel.

It was a prized target.

This was the principal residence of John of Gaunt.

The King's uncle and his closest advisor

and probably the most hated man in England.

Especially in London, where he bullied the people,

tore into the court at his own will

and treated it like a little fiefdom.

It was an opulent palace, almost beyond belief in those days,

and its great richness inflamed and mocked the poverty of the rebels.

John of Gaunt wasn't in London, luckily for him,

but the rebels sacked and burnt his palace

and took out their frustration at his absence on his clothing.

One of the chronicles tells us...

"In order not to pass by any opportunity of shaming the duke completely,

"they seized one of his most precious vestments, which we call a jakke,

"and placed it on a lance to be used as target for their arrows."

There's a dispute in the chronicles here - some say the rebels tore

the place down and some rebels there were, certainly, but the fury of it,

I think, came from the Londoners,

who had the greatest reason to detest John of Gaunt,

and wanted to destroy him and all his works.

Some of these, 32 of them, found the wine cellar

and got tucked into the wine.

Unfortunately, the wall collapsed, they couldn't get out

and there they were, drinking the finest wines in the kingdom

until they died.

But on the whole, and the chroniclers have no reason to favour him,

John Ball's moral teaching seems to have held.

There was no looting when this place was smashed to bits.

Anybody caught doing that was hauled away and beheaded.

One poor man caught with silver was thrown into an open fire.

We are told that some of the rebels carried copies of John Ball's words,

his verses, his sermons with them as they stormed through London.

Curiously enough, about 300 years later, Cromwell's soldiers

carried a small copy of the Geneva Bible with them

as they went through the Civil Wars.

At the Tower of London, King Richard met his ministers

after witnessing a day and night of destruction.

They must have feared for their lives,

sensing all too well that the fire of revolution had been lit

and lit by the radical words of John Ball.

There was a great deal of urgent discussion here in the Tower

about what to do.

William Walworth, the Mayor of London, with his armed men,

was keen to attack the rebels

while he said they were drunk and asleep so he could slaughter them.

Others were more cautious.

Lord Salisbury said they might be overwhelmed

and then the whole thing would be over

and he said to the King, "Appease them, for the moment, appease them."

The next morning, Richard called the rebels to a meeting at Mile End.

Richard asked the rebels what they wanted

and why they had come to London.

They replied much in the way of John Ball's rhymes -

they wanted freedom from serfdom, freedom from feudal power,

and land pitched at four pence an acre to restrain greedy landlords.

They also wanted the surrender of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury,

and Hales, the Lord High Treasurer.

And they wanted an amnesty.

Richard agreed to many of their requests.

Within a few hours, Freedom Charters were written, issued

and endorsed with a great seal.

And having granted these freedoms, some say Richard went even further.

It's reported that he said,

"Go after those you consider to be traitors."

It was a licence to kill.

Perhaps he was swept away in the moment,

perhaps he'd been told to give them everything they could possibly want.

Whatever it was, it had terrible consequences.

The rebels who remained in London, including Ball and Tyler,

had unfinished business.

Some of them headed back to the Tower, where they found,

among others, John Ball's old enemy,

the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury.

Archbishop Sudbury was here

in the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, in the Tower.

He was said to be chanting prayers in medieval Latin for the dead.

When the rebels stormed through the door, he said,

"Omnes sancti orate pro nobis" - "All the Holy saints, pray for us."

Sudbury, with Robert Hales and three others,

was then taken to the top of Tower Hill to be beheaded.

It took a long time to decapitate Sudbury - eight strokes of the axe.

After acts of such violence,

even the very highest in the land must have feared for their lives.

It's astonishing the speed with which this happened.

In just three days these men marched up from Kent and Essex and beyond,

forced their way into the City of London, forced their way here

into the great Tower, which had never been breached,

forced the King to talk to them

and executed those high ministers who were their great enemies.

Aware that they were on the verge of a cataclysm that could sweep up

and destroy the established order, the young King and his ministers

put forward a plan to meet Tyler, John Ball and the rebels once again.

The location this time was Smithfield, a favourite place

for tournaments and bounded by St Bartholomew's Church and Hospital.

Smithfield had been very carefully chosen by the King and his advisors.

It was a field, of course, but on one side was the city

and Walworth put his armed men behind those buildings

and, as it's said in the chronicles, enveloped the square.

But Wat Tyler and John Ball

had every reason to feel tremendously confident.

After all, the day before, the King had promised them

everything they'd asked for and he'd written charters to prove it.

What happened next is unclear, because the chronicles have

never been more dramatically on the side, obviously, of the King

and his forces, because this was a time of great danger for the King.

Nevertheless, Tyler rode forward,

confident, on a short horse, we're told,

knelt in front of the King, took his hand,

some of the chronicles say, called him brother,

shook his hand vigorously, and then made his final demands.

He wanted all the lands and titles of the aristocracy abolished.

He wanted the church to be drastically reformed, a reformation.

He wanted bishops to be gone

and he wanted the commons of England to be able to fish and hunt

without being persecuted.

What happened next is unclear.

One version says a young squire insulted Tyler,

Tyler lost his temper, threw his dagger and had a go at him,

another version says, look, this was a set-up,

it was an assassination attempt from the first.

The men of the King's retinue closed around Tyler

so his own men couldn't see them,

and in that melee, Walworth struck Tyler a massive blow across the head

and split it and across the shoulder.

Somehow, Tyler turned his horse around

and started to gallop across the field, wounded as he was,

and then fell from the horse as his men rushed towards him.

The young King, either of his own volition

or urged on by his advisors, rode out to them on his own

and spoke to them in English and said, "I am your leader"

and gave them all the reassurances he'd given them the day before.

He was their King,

and they knelt in front of him.

The rebels, completely reassured by the words of their King,

began to disperse and go back to their counties.

Almost immediately, the King broke his word, deceived them,

pursued them, and slaughtered as many as he could get hold of.

It was said that Tyler was dragged out from where he lay dying

in St Bartholomew's in Smithfield, and publicly beheaded.

Ball himself escaped from London

and made his way as far as Coventry, where he was captured.

It was thought that he was on his way to York,

where he'd been trained and he hoped to find support.

He was brought here, to St Albans

and put in the cells of the gatehouse behind me.

That was on July 13th.

At his trial, John Ball admitted sending letters to incite revolt

and he admitted his part in the uprising,

but he absolutely denied that his actions were in any way wrong.

The jury convicted him of making rebellion against the Crown

and for writing seditious letters.

He was acquitted of the murder of Archbishop Sudbury and the others.

Even so, Ball was sentenced to be hanged, taken down while alive,

disembowelled and then hacked into four parts.

The King was present at the trial.

There is a version that said that the King offered to merely hang him

if he knelt before the King.

But Ball refused.

So, on 15th July, just a few weeks after the revolt had begun,

John Ball was executed,

probably here in Rome Lands, next to the Cathedral,

and the four pieces of his body were sent to Coventry, Chester,

York and Canterbury.

Hundreds of the rebels were executed by hanging.

One chronicle reports, poignantly,

that a copy of one of Ball's letters fluttered from the sleeve

of a convicted rebel as he hung.

Richard's revenge to this challenge

to his supreme - as he thought, divine - authority was vicious.

In a speech just a few days later, King Richard made his views clear.

"Peasants you were and peasants you are.

"You will remain in bondage,

"not as before, but in an incomparably worse state.

"For as long as we are alive to achieve this

"and by the grace of God, rule this kingdom,

"we shall work with our minds, powers and possessions

"to keep you in such subjection that the abject state of your servitude

"may be an object lesson to posterity."

So did the Great Rebellion of 1381 achieve anything?

In the short term, it seemed that it didn't.

It even seemed that the people were worse off

and royal authority was strengthened.

And after John Ball's death,

every attempt was made to blacken his name.

He was totally repudiated

and even if you mentioned him admiringly in public,

you could be hung, and there's evidence that that happened.

Centuries later, artists and writers

like William Morris, who lived and worked here in Hammersmith, London,

would be proud to take up John Ball,

and his influence on poets, writers

and political thinkers, right up to today, was to be profound.

But the writers of his own times disowned him.

William Langland revised his great poem Piers Plowman

after the rebellion, almost certainly to avoid any accusation

of sympathy with the rhetoric of John Ball.

He probably feared for his life.

The poet John Gower denounced the rebellion in his work,

and his friend Chaucer made only one passing, and dismissive,

reference to it in the Canterbury Tales.

They took the side of the King

and did not speak out.

Chaucer was a court poet, of course,

and two centuries later, Shakespeare took the same side,

endorsing the social order of his time.

Shakespeare did write about a popular rebellion,

and one that seems to have been partly inspired by John Ball's ideas.

This was the 1450 revolt led by Jack Cade.

But Shakespeare poured scorn on Cade and his aspirations

in Henry VI Part II.

"When I am king, as king I will be,

"there shall be no money.

"All shall eat and drink on my score,

"and I will apparel them all in one livery,

"that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord."

Hello, Frank.

'Frank McLynn is a writer

'who has made a study of rebellions in British history.'

Did this rebellion have any effect

on the rebellions of the next two centuries?

Obviously in the 1450 Jack Cade rising,

one can see the influence

because in some ways the Jack Cade rising was almost a re-run of 1381,

the same convergence on London.

But this time, whereas in 1381,

London by and large welcomed the rebels, in 1450 they didn't,

so there was this terrific all-night battle on London Bridge.

So that was the major difference. But, um...

..when Shakespeare wrote about Jack Cade in Henry VI Part II,

some of his critics said that

the similarities between Cade and Wat Tyler were so great

that Shakespeare had confused the two risings and run them together.

What do you think the immediate consequences were

of this 1381 rebellion?

Well, the sceptics say that Richard II simply put the clock back to 1380

and the feudal system continued as before.

But, in fact, there was never again a poll tax raise

and the three poll taxes were the immediate trigger for the rising,

even when there was a dire shortage of money,

which was required for the Hundred Years War.

So some people go so far as to say that the peasants' revolt

meant that England lost the Hundred Years War.

Over the next few centuries, John Ball's ideas were slowly reclaimed,

if not always acknowledged.

Rebellions arose based, like his, on the English Bible.

The Bible-based rebellions of John Ball and Jack Cade may have failed

but in the South-East of England in the 17th century,

the egalitarian Levellers and Diggers used biblical references

to support their radical ideas.

They too went back to Genesis, just like Ball.

They fought on Oliver Cromwell's winning side in the Civil War.

Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers' leader,

shared Ball's sense of urgency and his millenarian tone -

Judgment Day was about to happen.

"This new law of Righteousness is now coming to reign," Winstanley wrote,

and "In the beginning of time, God made the earth.

"Not one word was spoken at the beginning

"that one branch of mankind should rule over another."

Ball's words rewritten.

Both Ball and Winstanley are in the class of

what I call "liberation theology"

because both thought that if you take Christianity seriously,

if you look at the teachings of Jesus and the law of love,

you must logically embrace something like socialism,

certainly social equality in some form.

Whereas Ball believed in a God that, let's say,

practitioners of orthodox religion could easily understand and follow,

if you like, the traditional God of Christianity,

Winstanley's conception of God was quite bizarre

and really pointed forward to people like Blake because he thought that

the Bible and the whole story of Christianity was really allegorical.

Would you say that Ball and Tyler were reclaimed,

came back into some kind of intellectual radical mainstream

after the French Revolution?

Yes, absolutely, yes,

because apart from the few mentions from Winstanley,

they are almost the forgotten men until the French Revolution.

And I think what the French Revolution did was to make people

take the whole idea of revolution seriously

and once you start taking it seriously, then you start

reassessing history and thinking,

"Actually, these people were much more significant than we thought,

"because they are quite clearly pointing to future possibilities."

It was during the 18th century, the Enlightenment, that John Ball,

along with Wat Tyler, was acknowledged as a radical hero.

There was an outpouring of revolutionary writing

in the wake of the French Revolution.

The young poet Robert Southey

wrote a passionate defence of Tyler and John Ball in a play.

It's now more famous for the fact that he tried to suppress it

when he became a rather less radical poet laureate.

The great political philosophers of the day

argued over the 1381 rebellion.

Edmund Burke, a radical of the right, attacked John Ball

as "a patriarch of sedition"

while Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man, said that Tyler

should have a monument erected to him in Smithfield.

I think that John Ball should have one too.

John Ball was becoming a beacon for British radicalism and socialism.

In the 19th century,

there was also a renewed interest in all things medieval.

William Morris was the founder of the Socialist League.

And he published his prose poem, The Dream of John Ball,

in his socialist newspaper in the 1880s.

The story was then printed as a book here in the Kelmscott Press

with a frontispiece of Adam delving and Eve spinning

by Sir Edward Burne Jones.

"So now I heard John Ball, how he lifted up his voice and said,

"Once again I saw, as of old, the great treading down the little,

"and the strong beating down the weak,

"in the belly of every rich man dwelleth a devil of hell."

For William Morris, what mattered

was not that the revolt of 1381 ended as it did,

but that the actions of John Ball and the rebels

would lead to freedom, even if it happened only centuries later.

It's possible, I think, to hear his insistent rhymes,

not only in the political writings of the Levellers,

but in the work of our poets.

In Milton, for example, his sonnet to Oliver Cromwell,

asking that he allow a variety of Christian beliefs.

"Help us save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves,

"whose gospel is their maw."

And William Blake, imagining of a heaven on earth

amid the dark Industrial Revolution.

"I will not cease from mental fight

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

"Till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land."

And in Shelley, whose Song To The Men Of England

asks the very same questions that Ball asked.

"Men of England, wherefore plough for the lords who lay ye low?

"Wherefore weave with toil and care the rich robes your tyrants wear?"

Now is the time, insisted John Ball.

Radicals want change and generally they want it fast.

Many later politicians

and writers in their language have reflected John Ball's insistence.

But I beg everybody here to give 100% support

to those who do not or cannot or will not pay the poll tax.

APPLAUSE

And not only politicians and writers.

We hear John Ball's simple, rhythmic, memorable prose

on the streets in chants and on demonstrations.

Let's not forget that one great legacy of the 1381 revolt

was that monarchs and governments

have almost never attempted to impose a poll tax again -

until Margaret Thatcher tried and failed in 1990.

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

That was a radical cry in 1381.

It seems a little quaint now, but the basic idea

is still everywhere around us around the globe.

And it's interesting that Ball's ideas have been taken up again

when there has been revolution.

In the French Revolution,

we have the great English radical Thomas Paine taking up Ball's ideas.

In the middle of the 19th century, we have the Chartists taking him up.

I think that what Ball gives is

an inspired ideal which didn't come off,

perhaps it will never come off,

but in its way, it's as radical as the Sermon on the Mount

and he remains somewhere deep in our past

and in some of our literature as a still, small voice, saying

"This could happen. We could all be equal. There is a world like that."

In our next programme,

I'll be looking at the life and work of the British radical Thomas Paine,

a man who lit the fuse that started the American revolution.

MUSIC: "John Ball" by Sydney Carter

# Who will be the lady, Who will be the lord

# When we are ruled By the love of one another?

# Tell me, who will be the lady, Who will be the lord

# In the light that is coming in the morning?

# Sing, John Ball, and tell it to them all

# Long live the day that is dawning

# And I'll crow like a cock, I'll carol like a lark

# For the light that is coming in the morning. #