The Levellers



The history of science is one of my interests so I was reading stuff about
Harvey and the circulation of the blood in an intellectual history of the 17th
century the other day when I got side tracked by an essay dealing with the
philosophy of Gerrard Wistanley and the Diggers. I have always been interested
in the Diggers because of the song
'The World turned upside down'.
That led me a general interest in the Interregnum and the Levellers in
particular which I have been reading since, both in books and on the Web.


One great site is the
Early English Dissenters.
It explains the difference between all the different protestants. Who knew? I
mean I had a very Catholic education and they were just 'them' . But I digress,
The thing about the Levellers is their position as early Liberal thinkers. Ok
they weren't exactly paragons of enlightenment; their view on manhood suffrage
explicitly excluded women, servants and the poor. Not exactly
democracy
as we know it but a damn site better than anything else floating
around in the 1640s.
And they may have failed and it may have taken another couple of centuries to
achieve their aims but we do ultimately owe the right not to incriminate
ourselves to
John Lilburne,
thanks to his Star Chamber protest in 1638.
BTW his father Richard Lilburne, was the last Englishman to claim the obsolete
privilege of ordeal by battle in a civil suit in the 1630s. I think the word
here is

QUIXOTIC !

Anyway, this interest in Puritan politic has also led me to reading Milton's
'Paradise Lost', which is not going too well so far.