Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/358

 little claim, whilst it is very appropriate to Ball. This Yorkshire priest, who came to live at Colchester soon after the year 1360, had been excommunicated by Archbishop Islip, and was apparently four times condemned and imprisoned by Islip and his successors. Langham wrote to the Dean of Bocking to denounce "one John Ball, pretending that he is a priest,"who persisted in" preaching manifold errors and scandals." He called upon the Dean to admonish the said Ball, with "other and singular rectors, vicars, and parochial chaplains who adhered to him." Ten years after he was once more proceeded against, this time by Sudbury, and imprisoned in Maidstone jail. He was there again in the spring of 1381, when the men of Essex began the universal strike.

On the occasion of his last committal he is said to have told the Archbishop, on receiving sentence of imprisonment, that he would be set free again by twenty thousand of his friends; and it would seem to have been anything but a coincidence that the men of Kent, when they presently rose at the instigation of their brethren in Essex, marched straight to Maidstone, broke into the Archbishop's prison, and carried John Ball in triumph to Canterbury. Sudbury in the meantime had gone to London, where Ball may have seen him beheaded a few weeks later. There is no necessity to infer that Sudbury's death was in anyway due to the personal vengeance of the man whom he had subjected to ecclesiastical discipline; but all the circumstances constrain one to believe that the Colchester priest had been planning