oissard, liv. ii. chap. 50, 51. Walsing. p. 239.

The expenses of these armaments, and the usual want of economy attending
a minority, much exhausted the English treasury, and obliged the
parliament, besides making some alterations in the council, to impose
a new and unusual tax of three groats on every person, male and female,
above fifteen years of age; and they ordained that, in levying that tax,
the opulent should relieve the poor by an equitable compensation. This
imposition produced a mutiny, which was singular in its circumstances.
All history abounds with examples where the great tyrannize over the
meaner sort; but here the lowest populace rose against their rulers,
committed the most cruel ravages upon them, and took vengeance for all
former oppressions.

{1381.} The faint dawn of the arts and of good government in that age,
had excited the minds of the populace, in different states of Europe,
to wish for a better condition, and to murmur against those chains which
the laws enacted by the haughty nobility and gentry, had so long imposed
upon them. The commotions of the people in Flanders, the mutiny of the
peasants in France, were the natural effects of this growing spirit of
independence; and the report of these events being brought into England,
where personal slavery, as we learn from Froissard,[*] was more general
than in any other country in Europe, had prepared the minds of the
multitude for an insurrection. One John Ball, also, a seditious
preacher, who affected low popularity, went about the country and
inculcated on his audience the principles of the first origin of mankind
from one common stock, their equal right to liberty and to all the goods
of nature, the tyranny of artificial distinctions, and the abuses which
had arisen from the degradation of the more considerable part of the
species, and the aggrandizement of a few insolent rulers.[**] These
doctrines, so agreeable to the populace, and so conformable to the ideas
of primitive equality which are engraven in the hearts of all men, were
greedily received by the multitude, and scattered the sparks of that
sedition which the present tax raised into a conflagration.[***]

* Liv. ii. chap. 74.

** Froissard, liv. ii. chap. 74. Walsing. p. 275.

*** There were two verses at that time in the mouths of all
the common people, which, in spite of prejudice, one cannot
but regard with some degree of approbation:--

W