[4] A shilling a head from every person above fourteen years old. [5] Tyler, “being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard” of the insult offered to his daughter, “caught his lathing staff in his hand and ran reaking home; when reasoning with the collector who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words and strake at the tylar; whereupon the tylar, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with the lathing staff that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the street, and the poor people being glad, every one prepared to support the said John Tylar.”—_Stowe’s “Chronicle.”_ [6] Some will say that this is legend; but the illustration nevertheless may stand. The courtly Froissart informs us that there was in the county of Kent[7] “a crazy priest,” one John Ball, who had long been testifying against the serfdom in which the peasantry were held, “Why,” he asked, “should we be slaves? Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? By what title do our masters hold us in bondage?” Froissart declares that Ball preached absolute communism, but there is no evidence that he went beyond the vigorous assertion of the equal right of all to freedom. “Every Sunday after mass,” writes the chronicler, “as the people came out of church, he would preach to them in the market-place (he had been excommunicated), and assemble a crowd round him ... and he was much beloved by the people.” As a consequence “the evil-disposed in these districts began to rise, saying they were too severely oppressed, that at the beginning of the world there were no slaves, and that no one ought to be treated as such, unless he had committed treason against his lord, as Lucifer had done against God; but they had done no such thing, for they were neither angels nor spirits, but men, formed after the same likeness with their lords, who treated them as beasts. This they would no longer bear, but had determined to be free, and if they labored or did any other work for their lords they would be paid for it.” [7] Other authorities make _Essex_ the chief scene of Ball’s ministrations. See “Lives of English Popular Leaders,” 2nd Series, by C.E. Maurice, 1875. Such words of the “crazy priest” and his “evil-disposed” hearers seem to us reasonable enough. Their chief fault, perhaps, is that they belong to the nineteenth century, rather than to the fourteenth. Never was a man more emphatically before his time than this same John Ball. The usual result followed. For these and the like “foolish words” he was arrested and imprisoned by Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. But those words could not die, although the first attempt to realise them in deed was—like many a first effort for justice, truth and freedom—premature and a little blind.