Research Notes · Peasants’ Revolt 1381
John Ball: ‘Now Is the Time’ and the Language of Revolt
Long before London burned in June 1381, John Ball had already spent years testing the authority of church and social hierarchy in the language of ordinary people.
The record begins before the revolt
A mandate in Archbishop Simon Langham’s register, folio 62v, names John Ball in 1366 and orders clergy in the deanery of Bocking to prevent him preaching in churches or churchyards. The significance is chronological: Ball was already a known problem to ecclesiastical authority roughly fifteen years before the rising.
He continued preaching outside ordinary institutional structures. By 1381, church authorities had imprisoned him at Maidstone. Rebel forces later freed him as the Kentish rising gathered momentum.
‘When Adam delved and Eve span’
Thomas Walsingham attributes to Ball the famous question asking who, in Eden, was then the gentleman. Whatever the exact wording used at Blackheath, the force of the idea is clear: hierarchy was being measured against an imagined original human equality.
Ball’s surviving reputation also rests on letters and slogans that used ordinary names, agricultural metaphors and compact rhymes. Their authorship is not always securely established. What matters is that this language circulated through the rebellion and gave geographically separate groups a shared vocabulary.
What the sources do — and do not — prove
Walsingham is the principal source for the Blackheath sermon and was hostile to radical preaching. The Anonimalle Chronicle does not independently reproduce that sermon. The safest conclusion is therefore not that every sentence attributed to Ball is verbatim, but that his preaching, imprisonment, liberation and association with radical egalitarian language are securely embedded in the surviving record.
Ball was captured after the rising and executed in July 1381. The exact judicial file does not survive, so the detailed wording of his prosecution is lost even though the outcome is known.
Why Ball matters
Ball shows that 1381 had an intellectual history as well as an economic one. The revolt drew on grievances over tax, labour and lordship, but it also possessed a language capable of turning those grievances into a claim about how society ought to be ordered.
That is why the words mattered. They allowed local anger to recognise itself as part of something larger.
Primary sources used in the original Samuel Stephen Chronicles episode: Walsingham, Historia Anglicana; Knighton, Chronicon; the Anonimalle Chronicle; Lambeth Palace Library, Register of Archbishop Simon Langham, f.62v; The National Archives, JUST 1/103 m.28.
