Freehold yeomen, town workmen, and shopkeepers were irritated by heavy taxation, and vexed by excessive market tolls.

All the materials were at hand for open rebellion, and leaders were found as the days went by to kindle and direct the revolt.
John Ball, an itinerant priest, who came from St.Mary's, at York, and then made Colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury for teaching social "errors, schisms, and scandals," but was in no wise contrite or cast down.
Chief of Ball's fellow-agitators were John Wraw, in Suffolk, Jack Straw, in Essex--both priests these--William Grindcobbe, in Hertford, and Geoffrey Litster, in Norfolk.

In Kent lived Wat Tyler, of whom nothing is told till the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and captain by the rebel hosts.
From village to village went John Ball in the years that preceded the rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with revolutionary talk.

It was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text--"In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal."[35] Inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended: "Good people, things will never go well in England, so long as goods be not kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen.

By what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we?
If all come from the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?
"They are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered in rags.