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John Ball (c. 1338 – 15 July 1381) was an English Lollard priest who took a prominent part in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. ==Biography== He was born and lived in St Albans, Hertfordshire, later moving to Norwich and then to Colchester during the plague years of the Black Death. The country was exhausted by death on a massive scale and crippling taxes; the Black Death was followed by years of war, which had to be paid for. The population was nearly halved by disease and over, and onerous flat-rate poll taxes were imposed. Ball was imprisoned in Maidstone, Kent, at the time of the 1381 Revolt. What is recorded of his adult life comes from hostile sources emanating from the established religious and political social order. He is said to have gained considerable fame as a roving preacher—a "hedge priest" without a parish or any link to the established order—by expounding the doctrines of John Wycliffe, and especially by his insistence on social equality. He delivered radical sermons in many places, including: Ashen, Billericay, Bocking, Braintree, Cressing Temple, Dedham, Coggeshall, Fobbing, Goldhanger, Great Baddow, Little Henny, Stisted and Waltham. His utterances brought him into conflict with Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was thrown in prison on several occasions. He also appears to have been excommunicated; owing to which, in 1366 it was forbidden for anyone to hear him preach. These measures, however, did not moderate his opinions, nor diminish his popularity. He took to speaking to parishioners in churchyards after the official services in English, the "common tongue", not the Latin of the clergy, a radical political move. Ball was "using the bible against the church", very threatening to the status quo. Shortly after the Peasants' Revolt began, Ball was released by the Kentish rebels from his prison. He preached to them at Blackheath (the revolting peasants' rendezvous to the south of Greenwich) in an open-air sermon that included the following: When the rebels had dispersed, Ball was taken prisoner at Coventry, given a trial in which, unlike most, he was permitted to speak. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans in the presence of King Richard II on 15 July 1381. His head was displayed stuck on a pike on London Bridge, and the quarters of his body were displayed at four different towns. Ball, who was called by Froissart "the mad priest of Kent," seems to have possessed the gift of rhyme. He voiced the feelings of a section of the discontented lower orders of society at that time, who chafed at villeinage and the lords' rights of unpaid labour, or ''corvée''. Ball and perhaps many of the rebels who followed him found some resonance between their ideas and goals and those of Piers Plowman, a key figure in a contemporary poem putatively by one William Langland. Ball put Piers and other characters from Langland's poem into his cryptically allegorical writings which may be prophecies, motivating messages, and/or coded instructions to his cohorts. This may have enhanced Langland's real or perceived radical and Lollard affinities as well as Ball's. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Ball (priest)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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