Hello and welcome to the History of England, episode 119, when Adam Delved and Eve Spam.

So I want you to picture the scene. We're at the little hill of Black Heath, on the South

bank of the Thames, just five miles from the Tower of London. Camped around the hill is a chaos

of temporary shelters as far as you can see, the stench of open sewers and latrines fills your

nostrils. The light and smoke of a thousand campfires surrounds you, all the sights and sounds

that come from tens of thousands of ragged people on the march. Somewhere else on the hill

is the sound of cheering. And if you follow the sound, you'll come to a massive group,

all sitting round, listening to a wild-looking hedge-priest haranguing them, on his favourite text.

And when Adam Delved and Eve Spam, who was then the gentle man?

From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced

by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased him,

to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world, were ever pointed, who be serf, and who be

Lord. We can imagine the crowd shouting out and cheering agreement at words that connected them

with all the injustice and frustration and resentment they live with every day, that their fathers

had lived with, and generations back to the dimly forgotten time of the good king,

Edward the Confessor, whose true and good laws had once defined a land of people who were free.

The wild-looking hedge-priest was a man called John Ball, and he believed all this to the core

of his being, and had made this text the work of his life. He'd already been thrown off his

living, he'd already been hauled in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury and thrown into jail,

but now here at last, was his life's work, come to harvest.

At last his chance had come to sweep away the parasitic structure of abbot's bishops and archbishops,

and create a new free society of equals. And so he kept tapping into the fiery hot furnace of

...