At the beginning of 1831, then, John Ball was lying in the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone. Yet it was not in Kent that the rising actually began. Five thousand men of Essex, according to Walsingham, took the first step to revolt. The monkish chronicler makes merry with their equipment. “Sticks, rusty swords, hatchets, smoke-dried bows the color of old ivory, some with but an arrow apiece, and many arrows with but one feather!” “Think of this ragged regiment,” he contemptuously writes, “aspiring to become masters of the realm!” Placards and flysheets of a quaint and grotesque rather than of an inflammatory character, called upon the people to assert their rights. Knighton of Leicester gives some remarkable specimens, transcribed from the old black-letter manuscripts, purporting to be issued by “Jack the Miller,” “Jack the Carter,” “Jack Trueman,” and “Jack Straw.”[8] For the most part they are written in a kind of doggerel rhyme, as in the Miller’s appeal: “With right and with might; with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill before will; and might before right, then goeth our mill aright.” “In the rude jingle of these lines,” writes the late Mr. Green, “began for England the literature of political controversy. They are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants; their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; the scorn of the immorality of the nobles, and the infamy of the Court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.” [8] The contemporary poet, Gower, has described one aspect of the rebellion in some Latin verses which amusingly indicate the names most common among the populace:— _Watte_ vocat, cui _Thome_ venit, neque _Symme_ retardat, _Bette_ que, _Gibbe_ simul, _Hykke_ venire jubet, _Colle_ furit, quem _Gibbe_ juvat, nocumenta parantes, Cum quibus ad damnum _Wille_ coire vovet, _Grigge_ rapit, dum _Davve_ strepit, comes est quibus _Hobbe_, _Larkin_ et in medio non minor esse putat, _Hudde_ ferit, quos _Judde_ terit, dum _Tebbe_ juvatur, _Jakke_ domos virosque vellit, et ense necat. Some of the chroniclers represent “Jack Straw” as only an _alias_ of Wat Tyler, but they were evidently two different persons.