An Irish Diary

Turbulent Priest – Frank McNally on John Ball, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the last of the English Villains

An Irishman’s Diary

An illustration of John Ball on a horse encouraging the rebels of 1381, from a circa 1470 manuscript in the British Library

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Wed Jul 14 2021 - 19:01

Long before John Bull, there was John Ball, a real-life English hero and the religious wing of the great Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Forbidden to preach his seditious sermons in church, he instead became a "hedge priest", touring village greens with such welcome messages as that, in opposing the hated poll tax and other injustices of the time, the common people had God on their side.

Eventually he was arrested, convicted of treason, and given a two-day stay of execution in hopes that, with the gallows looming, he would change his mind.

But again he refused. So history records that on July 15th, 1381, 640 years ago today, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at St Albans, in the presence of a teenage King Richard II.

Ball was said to have had the “gift of rhyming” and delivered at least some of his sermons in verse. Thus it is that one of his couplets, reputedly the keynote of a speech to rebels at the height of the uprising, has come down to us unedited through eight centuries, although it needs some explaining now.

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“When Adam delved and Eve Span,/Who was then the gentleman?” Ball asked rhetorically of his fellow uprisers. “Delved” still means “dug” today, as by tradition Adam did in the Garden of Eden, while for “span”, we would now say “spun”, which is how – with some poetic licence – Eve was presumed to have busied herself back then.

But the key message was the second part of the verse: that in the beginning, there were no upper classes. It was the same idea that 400 years later would be rewritten, less poetically, in the opening line of the American Declaration of Independence.

A much longer but now forgotten – some critics would say deservedly – work of poetry inspired by the Peasants' Revolt was Vox Clamantis, a 10,000-line epic, also in couplets, by one John Gower. Gower was a contemporary and friend of Chaucer. And posterity has decided that the best thing about his tedious poem is that it accidentally emphasises Chaucer's talent.

Still, it did include a long subsection in which the leaders of the 1381 revolted were transformed into animals, domestic and otherwise, with satirical intent. Hence some commentators have seen it as a model for George Orwell’s satire on the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm. Indeed, after they found themselves on different sides of the 20th-century socialist movement, Sean O’Casey even used that as a stick to beat Orwell’s back.

So did Dominic Behan, in a long letter to this newspaper in 1972. Having the gift of rhyming himself, Behan was more likely to reference John Bull in his songs, as he did in The Patriot Game. But writing under his Irish name Dominic O'Beacain, with an address given as "Saoirse, Middlesex", he cited John Ball in a diatribe against Orwell that accused the latter of everything from betrayal of the socialist cause to plagiarism.

As for Animal Farm, he declared (paraphrasing O’Casey): “A similar tale appears at the time the English language was beginning to be timidly lisped in a welter of French and Latin. It appears in a poem called ‘Vox Clamantis’, written by Gower […] when he was frightened near to death by the peasants led by Wat Tyler and John Ball”.

The immediate spark for the 1381 revolt was the poll tax, introduced in 1377 to pay for the continuing 100 years' war with France and then quickly multiplied.

The longer-term causes were feudalism and the social pressures, including labour shortages, that had followed the Black Death of 1348.

Among other things, the rebels wanted an end to the villenege system. The original villeins, as the word used to be spelt, were farm servants effectively owned by the lord of their manor. They could be sold or transferred to other lords, although they also owned shares in the land they worked.

The word’s association with “rascality, wickedness, and worthlessness” was a later evolution and, as Brewer’s Dictionary notes, the result of “aristocratic condescension and sense of superiority”.

After crisis talks with the rebel leaders in 1381, the king had promised abolition of villenege. Then he reneged on the deal.

But gradually the labour shortages and other legacies of the Black Plague swept the old English feudal system away.

It was mostly gone by the mid-16th century, although as late as 1574, apparently, Queen Elizabeth "found some stray villeins" on royal land and had to declare them emancipated.

Since then, there have been no villains left in England, officially anyway.

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