John Ball Stirs Up The English Peasants’ Revolt
Times were tough in England in 1381. Rebellion was brewing. All that was needed was a spark and the country might be set ablaze. And then John Ball showed up with a blowtorch.
(This is part one of three about the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381)
English peasants were fed up, and for good reason. Lots of good reasons, actually.
War: France is always a good place to start when trying to figure out what’s going on in medieval England. The two kingdoms had been fighting the Hundred Years’ War since 1337, and although the English had dominated France for the first phase of the war, things had started to turn by 1381. Also, the pope had relocated to Avignon in France back in 1305, which made the papacy something less than completely neutral in the conflict.
Wages: After the Black Death first descended in 1347, half the population died. This meant that labor prices skyrocketed. Shockingly, rich landowners were not happy to pay these higher wages. Lucky for them, they controlled parliament, which passed the Statute of Laborers in 1351, which mandated that wages go back to the level they had been before the Black Death.
Leadership: England had a new king, the 14-year-old Richard II. He began his reign at age ten, and it’s never good to have a kid on the throne. Medieval people almost always loved their kings and queens. When things went badly, they didn’t blame the king for it; they blamed the king’s advisors. In this case, most of the animus was directed as the king’s uncle, John of Gaunt, the richest and most powerful (and thus most hated) man in the kingdom. People thought he was pushing the boy-king around too much.
Taxes: People are always complaining about taxes, but the peasants were hit with a new tax that most thought was particularly unfair: the poll tax, levied in 1377. A poll tax is a regressive tax, so it’s super rough on the poor. This tax worked out to be roughly three days’ pay for a skilled laborer. That wasn’t enough tax revenue for the government, so they tripled the tax rate. The peasants hated paying this new tax, especially to pay for a war that the country was starting to lose.
Preaching: Into this mix rode a fiery, radical preacher named John Ball. He was critical of the feudal system, the class structure that ordered society into ranks of nobles, clergy, and peasants. Ball preached that God loved everyone equally, so they should be treated equally. Ball thought that the social classes should be abolished, and everyone should share everything equally. 500 years before Marx, John Ball was a commie, kinda.
John Ball preached his message of social equality all over southeastern England. The Archbishop of Canterbury did not appreciate this at all, so he threw him into prison. John Ball was in and out of prison multiple times, and he was forbidden to preach. He kept on preaching anyway and eventually got excommunicated.
John Ball’s preaching was a hit with the peasants. Unsurprisingly, the lower down you were on the social order, the more the “burn it all down” line of thinking appealed to you. His most famous line was,
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
If all were equal before God and would be equal in the next life, then why not be equal now?
The establishment did not support this way of thinking. Not at all. But in the spring of 1381, the world was about to be turned upside down…
As a leader, a big part of your job is listening to complaints from your team. Sometimes they’re asking for your help on something specific. Sometimes they’re just venting frustration about something that’s annoying. Sometimes they’re trying to tell you that the world has changed, but your organization hasn’t caught up with the new realities yet.
They might not use the term “structural change,” but if they’re talking about something that is pervasive in your industry and splashed across the headlines in the press, you might sit up and pay attention. The peasants of medieval England were getting squeezed too hard, and it pushed them over the boiling point. They told their leaders, but the leaders brushed them off.
An open-door policy and active listening are important for your team to bring you their concerns, but more important is the hope, the belief, the expectation, that you’ll actually do something about it. When you see a pattern in the concerns of your team, you have to put the pieces together and come up with a plan of action. Forward-looking action is almost always better than just watching while someone plays with matches by some gasoline.
