He was born c. 1338 and it has been suggested that his name is first mentioned in the Colchester Court Rolls of 30 January 1352, when, on coming of age in 1350 he acknowledged the tenancy of a tenement between East and West Stockwell Street in the town.

He is said to have gained considerable fame as a roving preacher without a parish or any link to the established order[6] by expounding the doctrines of John Wycliffe, and especially by his insistence on social equality.

[2] He delivered radical sermons in many places, including Ashen, Billericay, Bocking, Braintree, Cressing Temple, Dedham, Coggeshall, Fobbing, Goldhanger, Great Baddow, Little Henny, Stisted and Waltham.

[2] He preached to them at Blackheath (the peasants' rendezvous to the south of Greenwich) in an open-air sermon that included the following: When Adam delved and Eve span,[a] Who was then the gentleman?

He voiced the feelings of a section of the discontented lower orders of society at that time,[2] who chafed at villeinage and the lords' rights of unpaid labour, or corvée.

Historian James Crossley has shown that Ball was largely portrayed negatively for four centuries after his death in theological works, plays, poems, and popular histories.

Ball was the preacher, the prophet and teacher, inspired by a spirit of hell, And every fool advanced in his school, to be taught as the devil thought well.

[11] Ball appears as a character in the anonymous play The Life and Death of Jack Straw, published in London in 1593, which deals with the events of the Peasants' Revolt.

William Morris wrote a short story called "A Dream of John Ball", which was serialised in the Commonweal between November 1886 and February 1887.

A tower chapel at the parish church of Thaxted in Essex was dedicated to John Ball under the Anglo-Catholic socialist vicar, Conrad Noel (1910–1942).

King Arthur tries to understand what forces are at work that make mankind fight wars and references the "communism" of John Ball as a precursor to Mordred's Thrashers.

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 would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord" and Ball ended by recommending "uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future."