London - Edward Rutherfurd [258]
To Ducket this sounded unlikely, and he might have been tempted to argue, if there had not, just then, been a movement on the southern edge of the gathering. Some men were drawing up an open cart. A whisper seemed to be running through the whole camp; and already people were starting to get up and walk, as if drawn by some unseen hand, towards the cart. “Come on,” said Carpenter.
They got a good position, well forward, and did not have to wait long. Only minutes later, Tyler appeared; riding beside him on a grey mare came a tall, large-boned man in a brown cassock who, having dismounted, leaped up on to the cart. Straight away, he raised his hands and, in a deep voice that carried right across the heath, called out:
“John Ball greeteth you well, all.” And fifty thousand souls fell silent as a mouse.
The sermon of John Ball was unlike anything that Ducket had ever heard before. The theme was very simple: all men were born equal. If God had meant there to be masters and servants, He would have made it so at the Creation. Unlike Wyclif, who said that all authority must derive from God’s Grace, the popular preacher went much further. All lordship was evil; all wealth must be held in common. Until it was so, things would never go well in England.
But what language! Truly this preacher knew how to speak to the English heart. With rhyme and heavy alliteration he called out the phrases that could be remembered by every hearer. “Pride reigneth in palaces,” he cried. “Government is gluttony. Lawyers are lechers.” And at each phrase, Ducket could see Carpenter beside him nodding and muttering: “This is true. This is just.”
“Why is the lord warm in his manor and poor Peter Ploughman frozen in the field?” Ball demanded. “Now is the time,” he cried menacingly, “for John Trueman to chastise Hobbe the Robber. Take courage today. You shall smash them. With right and might. Will and skill.” It was the thick, strong, echoing language of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Then, returning to that simple biblical theme, he chanted loudly, so that not a man there could fail to hear, that couplet for which his sermons were famous, and which has remained like a haunting cry in the folk sayings of England ever since:
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
As he came to his conclusion with a loud Amen, the crowd let out a mighty roar. And Carpenter, his eyes solemnly shining, turned to Ducket and said: “Didn’t I tell you everything would be all right?”
Ducket had hoped to persuade Carpenter to return home after this, but the craftsman would not hear of it. “We must wait for the king,” he declared. So, cursing under his breath, Ducket remained to spend the night in the huge camp under the stars. As he moved about the camp, talking with these men from the countryside, he learned much. Many, like Carpenter, meant no harm at all. They had come to help the king set the world to rights. All that was needed, they assured him, was to rid the land of all authority. “Then,” they assured him, “men will be free.”
To Ducket the idea seemed strange. In London, he knew what freedom meant. It meant the city’s ancient privileges, the city walls which protected Londoners from the king’s soldiers or foreign traders and craftsmen. It meant that an apprentice could become a journeyman, and perhaps a master. It meant the guilds, the wards, the aldermen and mayor, as fixed in their places as the celestial spheres in the heavens. True, the poor folk might protest about the rich aldermen from time to time, especially if they evaded taxes. But even they knew the need for authority and order: without these, where was London’s freedom?
Yet in these countrymen he divined a quite different sense of things: an order not made by Man, but vaguer: the order of the seasons. The order of Man, to them, was not a necessity, as it was to the Londoner, but an imposition. “Who needs a master on the land?