“At the beginning we were all created equal; it is the tyranny of perverse men which has caused servitude to arise, in spite of God’s law; if God had willed that there should be serfs He would have said at the beginning {289} of the world who should be serf and who should be lord.”[390] [Illustration 55. “WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN.” (_The motto of John Ball’s speech illustrated from the MS. 2 B._ vii. _Fourteenth Century_).] What made Ball powerful was that he found his best weapons in the Bible; quoting it he appealed to the good sentiments of the lowly, to their virtue, their reason; he showed that the Divine Word accorded with their interest; they would be “like the good father of a family who cultivates his field and plucks up the weeds.” The same ideas are attributed to him by almost all the chroniclers. Froissart uses to describe his doings almost the same words as the statute already quoted. He represents him when he found a congregation of people, especially on Sundays, after mass, preaching in the open air sermons similar to that in the “Chronicon Angliæ”: “This preest,” says Froissart, “used often tymes on the sondayes after masse, whanne the people were goynge out of the mynster, to go into the cloyster and preche, and made the people to assemble about hym, and wolde say thus: A ye good people, the maters gothe nat well to passe in Englande, nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that there be no villayns nor gentylmen. . . . What have we deserved or why shulde we be kept thus in servage? we be all come fro one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shewe that they be gretter lordes than we be, savynge by that they cause us to wyn and labour for that they dispende . . . They dwell in fayre houses, and we have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours they kepe and maynteyne their estates. . . . Lette us go to the kyng, he is yonge, and shewn hym what servage we be in. . . . Thus Johan sayd on sondayes whan the people issued out of the churches in the vyllages . . . and so they wolde murmure one with another in the feldes and in the wayes as {290} they went togyder, affermyng howe Johan Ball sayd trouthe.”[391] So the enthusiastic multitude promised to make him archbishop and chancellor of that kingdom in which he dreamed there should be “equal liberty, equal rank, equal power” for all; but he was taken, drawn, hanged, beheaded, and quartered,[392] and his dream remained a dream.