The Levellers and the Historians: A Reassessment of Rachel Foxley’s Contribution to Revolutionary Studies

The publication of Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers marks a significant moment in English Revolution historiography. It is the first monograph devoted exclusively to the Leveller movement since H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), and this half-century gap is itself historiographically revealing. The absence of sustained scholarly engagement with the Levellers cannot be attributed to a lack of archival material or interpretive difficulty. Rather, it reflects the political and intellectual realignments that have reshaped academic history since the late twentieth century. The Levellers’ marginalisation has accompanied the rise of revisionist approaches that seek to separate political thought from social conflict, limit the scope of revolutionary agency, and displace class analysis from the centre of historical explanation. In this sense, the historiographical silence surrounding the Levellers reflects a broader ideological shift within the discipline.

Foxley’s opening chapter, aptly titled “The Levellers and the Historians,” acknowledges this context with admirable clarity. She observes that revisionist scholars “have questioned almost every aspect of the historical reputation of the Levellers” (p. 3), from the coherence of their political programme to the extent of their influence within the New Model Army. Her study is thus situated within a long-running historiographical dispute- one that has, in effect, constituted a British Historikerstreit over the nature of radicalism, republicanism, and political agency in the 1640s. Although Foxley does not explicitly present her work as a polemical intervention in this debate, her analysis inevitably engages with it, and her conclusions challenge several entrenched assumptions of the revisionist orthodoxy.

Foxley’s intervention becomes clearer when set against the intellectual climate in which revisionism emerged. Beginning with G. R. Elton and consolidated by scholars such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, revisionism rejected the structural and class-based interpretations advanced by Marxist historians including Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Rather than emphasising social conflict, revisionists focused on constitutional crisis, administrative breakdown, religious sensibilities, and the contingent decisions of political elites. The Levellers, whose programme articulated demands for popular sovereignty, legal reform, and political accountability, sat uneasily within this framework. Their radicalism was minimised, reinterpreted as derivative, or dismissed as marginal. As a result, historiography often presents the Levellers as episodic actors rather than a coherent political movement.

Foxley’s study challenges this reduction. By emphasising the intellectual originality of Leveller political thought, she shows that their arguments cannot be dismissed as mere extensions of Independent or sectarian discourse. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, the petitioning campaigns of 1646–49, and the ideological exchanges surrounding the Putney Debates reveals a movement capable of sustained organisation and theoretical innovation. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the relationship between political ideas and social forces, the extent of popular mobilisation, and the ideological diversity within the parliamentarian coalition.

At the same time, Foxley’s work reflects the constraints of the historiographical environment in which it was produced. Her emphasis on political theory, rather than the class dynamics shaping Leveller activity, partly aligns her with post-revisionist tendencies. She places the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu and, while cautioning against dissolving them into an undifferentiated political world, does not fully articulate the structural tensions that defined their position within the revolutionary process. This unresolved tension between recognising Leveller distinctiveness and situating them within a wider coalition marks the limits of her intervention.

Nevertheless, The Levellers makes a major contribution to the field. It restores the movement to the centre of debates on political thought during the English Revolution and challenges the revisionist minimisation of radical agency. In doing so, Foxley’s study helps correct a long-standing imbalance in the historiography and reasserts the Levellers’ importance in shaping the political imagination of the 1640s.

Revisionism and Its Discontents

Foxley’s relationship with revisionist scholarship is complex and, in many respects, emblematic of the broader tensions that have shaped English Civil War historiography over the past half-century. On the one hand, she challenges the more reductive claims advanced by scholars such as Gary De Krey, whose critique focuses on the chronology and coherence of Leveller organisation. De Krey argues that the term “Leveller” emerged only in late 1647 and, therefore, that no identifiable movement existed before then.

This insistence on terminological precision leads him to reduce the political developments of 1645–47 to a series of contingent alliances, obscuring the ideological continuity and strategic coherence that Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn were already shaping. As the review notes, “Movements do not wait for their opponents to name them before they exist.” Foxley’s readiness to identify a Leveller movement before it was formally named therefore challenges revisionist scepticism and signals her refusal to regard political identity as purely retrospective.

Yet Foxley’s resistance to revisionism is not absolute. Her methodological focus on political theory, rather than on the social forces that produced and sustained it, places her partly alongside post-revisionist approaches that seek to combine ideological analysis with a more pluralistic understanding of political culture. She locates the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu, emphasising the fluidity of alliances and the permeability of ideological boundaries. This approach enables her to highlight the Levellers’ intellectual originality without artificially separating them from the wider political world in which they operated. At the same time, she warns against “dissolving them into an undifferentiated part of that complex political world” (p. 6), demonstrating her awareness of the dangers of excessive integration. The Levellers were neither mere Independents nor simply one faction among many; they articulated a distinctive political programme that cannot be reduced to the sum of their alliances.

The tension between these positions, however, remains unresolved. Foxley’s analysis does not fully articulate the class character of Leveller politics or the structural limits that shaped its trajectory. Her focus on political argumentation, petitions, pamphlets, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves the social base that enabled it underexplored.

The Levellers drew their support mainly from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and sections of London’s lower middle strata, as well as those of other urban centres. These groups held distinctive economic interests and political expectations that shaped Leveller demands for legal reform, popular sovereignty, and magistrate accountability. Without placing Leveller ideology in this social context, the movement can appear as a free-floating constellation of ideas rather than a political expression of specific class forces.

This omission becomes more apparent when Foxley examines the structural limits of Leveller influence. She acknowledges the hostility of the army grandees and political elite. Still, she does not fully consider why Leveller demands became intolerable to the propertied classes that ultimately shaped the post-revolutionary settlement. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 resulted not simply from ideological disagreement or personal animosity, but from a class struggle within the revolutionary camp, as the interests of small producers collided with those of landowners, merchants, and military commanders. By failing to foreground these dynamics, Foxley’s account risks underestimating the material constraints that defined both the possibilities and the limits of Leveller radicalism.

In this sense, Foxley’s work occupies an intermediate position within the historiographical landscape. She challenges revisionist minimisation of Leveller coherence and influence, but does not fully adopt the class-centred analyses advanced by Marxist historians such as Hill, Manning, or Slaughter. Her study thus serves both as a corrective to revisionist reductionism and as an expression of the post-revisionist reluctance to engage directly with the structural determinants of political action. This duality is not a flaw, but a marker of the historiographical moment in which her work was produced, a moment characterised by methodological pluralism, theoretical caution, and an ongoing effort to reconcile political ideas with social forces. 

The Intellectual Originality of Leveller Thought

One of the major strengths of Foxley’s study is its demonstration of the originality and intellectual coherence of Leveller political thought. Against the long-standing revisionist tendency to depict the Levellers as derivative or merely reactive, Foxley convincingly argues that their political language was neither a simple extension of Independent polemic nor an improvised response to the accelerating crises of the late 1640s. Instead, she shows how Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and their associates forged a distinctive idiom that combined scriptural references, historical analogies, and emergent secular reasoning in unprecedented ways within English political discourse. Their pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals reveal a sustained effort to theorise political authority, liberty, and representation at a moment when inherited frameworks were collapsing. As contemporaries recognised, the Levellers were the revolution’s ideologues, seeking to make sense of unprecedented political developments with the intellectual resources available to them.

Foxley’s analysis is especially effective in showing that Leveller thought cannot be reduced to the religious idioms through which it was often expressed. While recognising scripture’s pervasive influence on seventeenth-century political argument, she demonstrates that the Levellers used biblical language strategically rather than dogmatically. Their appeals to “freeborn rights,” “the laws of nature,” and “the people’s consent” were not simply theological extensions, but elements of a broader shift toward secularised political reasoning. In this respect, Foxley challenges interpretations that trace Leveller radicalism exclusively to congregational practice or covenant theology. Instead, she places their political creativity within a wider intellectual transformation that was beginning to separate political and social questions from scriptural authority.

It is important to place this intellectual creativity within a broader European context. The erosion of scriptural authority after the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1543), followed by the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, destabilised the cosmological foundations on which medieval political thought had rested. As scientific inquiry undermined the Ptolemaic universe and challenged the epistemological supremacy of biblical revelation, new forms of political reasoning became possible. The Levellers were neither scientists nor consciously involved in the scientific revolution, but they operated in an intellectual environment increasingly receptive to secular explanations. Their arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality reflect this shift. They belonged to a generation beginning, however tentatively, to seek answers to political and social problems beyond the confines of theological orthodoxy.

In this sense, Leveller thought anticipates aspects of the Enlightenment. Their insistence that political authority derives from the people rather than divine sanction, emphasis on rational law over arbitrary power, and belief in the universality of certain rights all foreshadow developments in eighteenth-century political philosophy. At the same time, their critique of oligarchic power and defence of small producers and artisans echo themes later adopted by socialist thinkers. It would be anachronistic to describe the Levellers as proto-Marxists, and Foxley avoids such simplifications. Nevertheless, their political language contains early elements of later democratic and egalitarian traditions, showing that the intellectual genealogy of modern radicalism cannot be confined to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Foxley’s contribution, therefore, is not merely to rehabilitate the Levellers as significant actors in the English Revolution but to restore the intellectual depth of their political project. By situating their ideas within both the immediate revolutionary context and the longer trajectory of European thought, she shows that Leveller radicalism was neither accidental nor derivative. It was a creative and historically consequential attempt to rethink the foundations of political authority at a moment when the old world was collapsing and a new one struggling to be born.

A Movement with a Mass Audience

Foxley’s analysis of Leveller mobilisation is one of the most empirically substantial and historiographically consequential elements of her study. Against the revisionist tendency to minimise the movement’s organisational capacity and popular resonance, she reconstructs a pattern of sustained political activity that demonstrates the Levellers’ ability to reach, mobilise, and coordinate large numbers of supporters across London and beyond. Her discussion of the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (July 1646) is particularly illuminating. She identifies it as “the first Leveller text to claim a mass following” (p. 36), and treats it not as rhetorical exaggeration but as evidence of a developing political constituency. By foregrounding this document, Foxley challenges the assumption common among conservative historians that Leveller radicalism was confined to a narrow circle of pamphleteers and sectaries. Instead, she shows that by mid‑1646 the Levellers were already articulating demands that resonated widely among artisans, apprentices, small producers, and politically conscious segments of the urban population.

Her use of recent scholarship on petitioning and print culture further strengthens this argument. The figures she cites- 30,000 copies of a petition printed in January 1648, 98,000 signatures on a later Remonstrance, 20,000 copies of the Agreement of the People distributed free, and 10,000 signatures on the women’s petition of March 1649- are striking not only for their scale but for what they reveal about the infrastructure of Leveller mobilisation. These numbers indicate a movement capable of coordinating printers, distributors, ward organisers, and networks of sympathisers across multiple parishes and guild structures. They also suggest that Leveller texts circulated far beyond the immediate circles of their authors, reaching readers who may not have identified formally with the movement but who were receptive to its arguments. In this respect, Foxley’s work undermines the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal or ephemeral. Instead, she presents them as a dynamic political force whose organisational practices anticipated later forms of mass politics.

Equally important is Foxley’s challenge to the claim that Leveller political ideas were fundamentally religious in origin. While acknowledging the period's pervasive religious idiom, she argues that “there is simply no need to go hunting in covenant theology or congregational practice for Leveller political ideas of equality or ‘democracy,’ or for a prototype of the Agreement of the People” (p. 9). This intervention matters in a long‑standing historiographical debate. For decades, revisionist scholars have attempted to locate the roots of Leveller radicalism in sectarian ecclesiology, thereby reducing their political programme to an extension of congregationalist church governance. Foxley rejects this reduction. She shows that Leveller arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, through religious categories. Their political language drew on a wider repertoire: classical republicanism, common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the emergent secular reasoning that was beginning to reshape European intellectual life.

By disentangling Leveller political thought from narrowly theological explanations, Foxley restores the movement’s intellectual autonomy. She shows that while the Levellers operated within a religious culture, their political arguments were not derivative of it. This distinction matters because it repositions the Levellers within the broader history of political ideas. Rather than treating them as a sectarian offshoot, Foxley presents them as participants in a wider transformation in political reasoning- one that was beginning to detach questions of authority, liberty, and representation from the interpretive monopoly of scripture.

Taken together, Foxley’s analysis of mobilisation and her critique of religious reductionism significantly revise the historiographical landscape. They reveal a movement that was both organisationally sophisticated and intellectually innovative, capable of articulating political demands that resonated across a broad social base. In doing so, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of Leveller significance and restores the movement to its rightful place within the political imagination of the English Revolution.

Levellers and the New Model Army

The chapter on the Levellers’ relationship with the New Model Army constitutes Foxley’s most substantial and consequential historiographical intervention. For more than four decades, revisionist scholars such as Austin Woolrych, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky have argued that Leveller influence within the army was limited, episodic, or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. In this view, the army’s political actions in 1647–49 can be explained through institutional grievances, professional honour, and war experience, rather than through the penetration of radical political ideas. Foxley challenges this orthodoxy directly. She highlights the petitioning campaigns of spring 1647, the cooperation between civilian and military radicals, and the striking consistency of demands articulated by Leveller leaders and army agitators. Her analysis demonstrates that Leveller influence was neither accidental nor superficial but formed part of a sustained dialogue between civilian activists and politically conscious soldiers.

Central to Foxley’s argument is her treatment of the Putney Debates. Although constrained by the publisher’s space limitations, her discussion is judicious and incisive. She rejects the revisionist tendency to treat Putney as an isolated episode, a momentary eruption of radicalism unconnected to the army’s broader political development. Instead, she situates the debates within ongoing exchanges among agitators, grandees, and civilian Levellers, showing how the issues raised at Putney had already circulated in petitions, pamphlets, and informal discussions throughout the army. This contextualisation is crucial. It shows that the debates were not an aberration but the culmination of a political process in which soldiers actively engaged with questions of sovereignty, representation, and constitutional settlement.

The review reinforces Foxley’s argument by listing the numerous Levellers who served in the army or maintained close ties with it. Figures such as Edward Sexby, William Allen, Thomas Prince, John Harris, and the Rainsborough brothers demonstrate that Leveller sympathies were not confined to civilian circles. Lilburne’s own military record was widely known, and army chaplains such as Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison openly supported Leveller positions. These connections undermine the revisionist assertion that the Levellers were “exterior to the army.” They instead reveal a porous boundary between civilian radicalism and military activism, where ideas, personnel, and organisational practices circulated freely.

Foxley’s conclusion that Putney marked “not the end but the beginning of a potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals” (p. 158) directly challenges the standard revisionist narrative. Rather than viewing the debates as a moment of radical overreach swiftly contained by Cromwell and Ireton, she interprets them as the opening of a political space in which Leveller ideas could shape the army’s constitutional imagination. This interpretation restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary dynamic. It emphasises the agency of rank‑and‑file soldiers, the army's ideological diversity, and the possibility, however constrained, of a democratic transformation emerging from within the military structure itself.

Foxley’s intervention has broader historiographical implications. By demonstrating the depth of Leveller–army interaction, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of radicalism and reasserts the importance of ideological conflict within the parliamentarian coalition. Her analysis suggests that the army was not merely a professional fighting force but a political institution in which debates about authority, liberty, and representation were actively contested. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the extent of popular political consciousness, the relationship between military organisation and political radicalism, and the structural tensions within the revolutionary movement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on the army is a major contribution to the field. It dismantles the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal and restores the New Model Army's political complexity. By reintegrating Putney into the broader revolutionary process, she offers a more dynamic and historically grounded account of radicalism in the 1640s- one that recognises the army not as a passive institution but as a site of ideological struggle and political possibility.

Class Limits and the Cromwellian Settlement

Where Foxley’s analysis is less satisfactory is in her treatment of the class limits of Leveller politics. Although she acknowledges the hostility of the grandees and the structural pressures facing the movement, she does not fully explore the deeper social dynamics that shaped both the possibilities and the constraints of Leveller radicalism. The Levellers drew their support primarily from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and segments of the lower middle strata groups whose economic interests and political expectations diverged sharply from those of the propertied classes who ultimately determined the trajectory of the post‑revolutionary settlement. This divergence was not incidental. It was rooted in the material conditions of seventeenth‑century England, where the emerging capitalist order was reshaping relations of production, property, and political authority.

The Levellers’ programme- universal male suffrage, equality before the law, accountability of magistrates, and the subordination of rulers to the people- reflected the aspirations of those who were being drawn into the early capitalist labour market yet still retained elements of economic independence. Their demands expressed both a desire to preserve older forms of small‑scale production and a need to articulate new forms of political agency in a rapidly changing society. In this sense, Leveller radicalism was simultaneously forward‑looking and rooted in the social position of its supporters. It advanced democratic ideas but was limited by the class base from which it emerged.

Foxley recognises aspects of this dynamic but does not fully develop its implications. Her emphasis on political theory pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves underexplored the structural forces that shaped the movement’s trajectory. The suppression of the Levellers at Burford in May 1649 was not, as the review notes, “an accident of personalities but the outcome of a class struggle within the revolutionary camp.” The grandees, representing the interests of landowners, merchants, and the higher strata of the bourgeoisie, could not tolerate demands that threatened property qualifications, social hierarchy, and the stability of the emerging capitalist order. Cromwell’s actions- arresting Leveller leaders, suppressing mutinies, and consolidating state power- were not simply tactical decisions but class imperatives.

Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility but does not fully explore why Leveller ideas became intolerable to the propertied classes. The Levellers’ insistence on political equality clashed with the economic inequalities that underpinned the revolutionary elite's power. Their critique of arbitrary authority threatened not only monarchical absolutism but also the authority of those who had assumed leadership of the parliamentarian cause. Their demands for legal reform challenged the very structures that maintained property relations. In short, the Levellers’ political programme was incompatible with the class interests of those who emerged victorious from the revolution.

This omission matters because it limits Foxley’s ability to explain the movement’s defeat. Without situating Leveller radicalism within the broader class structure of seventeenth‑century England, the suppression at Burford risks appearing as a contingent event rather than as the predictable outcome of a deeper social conflict. The Levellers were not defeated because their ideas were impractical or because they misjudged the political moment. They were defeated because their demands threatened the foundations of the new order the propertied classes were constructing.

Law, Liberty, and the Freeborn Englishman

The chapter on law and liberty is among the most stimulating in Foxley’s book, offering a nuanced account of Leveller legal thought and its place within the political culture of the 1640s. Yet it contains a notable omission: Foxley does not engage with Soviet legal scholarship, particularly the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, whose analysis of early modern legal forms provides one of the most sophisticated frameworks for understanding the Levellers’ juridical innovations. This absence is striking because Pashukanis’s Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927) remains one of the few attempts to situate Leveller legal arguments within a broader theory of the emergence of bourgeois law. His insights illuminate precisely the terrain Foxley explores, and their omission leaves a gap in an otherwise rich chapter.

Pashukanis argued that John Lilburne’s legal thought anticipated key principles of bourgeois criminal law, including the requirement that punishment correspond to the crime and the prohibition of ex post facto legislation. These principles, which would later become foundational to modern liberal jurisprudence, appear in Lilburne’s writings not as abstract theoretical propositions but as practical demands arising from his own experiences of arbitrary imprisonment, judicial manipulation, and executive overreach. Pashukanis’s observation that Lilburne was “the first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment” underscores the novelty of Leveller legal arguments. It highlights how Lilburne’s struggles forced the state to articulate and formalise procedures that had previously been applied inconsistently or not at all. In Pashukanis’s reading, Lilburne’s confrontations with authority reveal the embryonic formation of legal norms that would later underpin the bourgeois state.

Foxley’s silence on this tradition is regrettable, given its relevance to her subject. Her analysis rightly emphasises the Levellers’ insistence on due process, legal accountability, and the rights of the accused. She shows how their arguments drew on common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the political language of freeborn English liberties. Yet without engaging with Pashukanis, she misses an opportunity to connect Leveller legal thought to a broader theoretical account of law's historical development. Pashukanis’s framework would have let her situate Leveller demands within the transition from feudal to bourgeois legal forms, illuminating the structural forces that shaped their arguments and why those arguments resonated so powerfully in the 1640s.

Moreover, Pashukanis’s analysis provides a counterpoint to interpretations that treat Leveller legal thought as merely an extension of religious or constitutional traditions. By emphasising the material and class dimensions of legal development, he offers a way of understanding why the Levellers’ juridical innovations emerged when they did and why they took the form they did. His reading suggests that Leveller legal arguments were not simply moral appeals or constitutional clarifications but expressions of deeper social transformations associated with the rise of market relations, the consolidation of property rights, and the emergence of a new political subject: the legally autonomous individual. Foxley gestures toward these themes but does not fully develop them, and her omission of Pashukanis leaves this dimension of Leveller thought underexplored.

This gap is particularly evident in her discussion of the relationship between law and class. Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility to Leveller legal reforms but does not analyse the structural reasons why those reforms were unacceptable to the propertied classes. Pashukanis’s framework would have clarified this point: the Levellers’ insistence on legal equality and procedural fairness challenged elites' discretionary power. It threatened the hierarchical legal order that underpinned emerging capitalist relations. Their defeat, therefore, was not simply political but juridical: a suppression of legal forms that were incompatible with the interests of those shaping the post‑revolutionary settlement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on law and liberty is rich and insightful, but her omission of Pashukanis represents a missed opportunity. Engaging with Soviet legal scholarship would have deepened her analysis, connected Leveller legal thought to broader theoretical traditions, and clarified the structural forces that shaped both the movement’s achievements and its limits.

Conclusion

Foxley’s The Levellers is, without question, a major scholarly achievement. It synthesises a wide range of recent research, challenges entrenched revisionist assumptions, and restores the Levellers to a central place in the political thought of the English Revolution. In doing so, it intervenes decisively in a historiographical landscape long shaped by scepticism toward radical agency and by a tendency to minimise the intellectual coherence of seventeenth‑century popular movements. Foxley’s work demonstrates that the Levellers were not marginal pamphleteers or episodic agitators but serious political thinkers whose ideas resonated across a broad social base and contributed meaningfully to the revolutionary dynamic of the 1640s.

One of the book’s most impressive accomplishments is its ability to integrate intellectual history, political theory, and close textual analysis without losing sight of the broader revolutionary context. Foxley’s readings of Leveller pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals are consistently sharp and historically grounded. She shows how the Levellers developed a distinctive political language that combined scriptural references, common-law traditions, and emerging secular reasoning. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, in particular, highlights the movement’s constitutional imagination and its attempt to articulate a vision of political authority rooted in popular sovereignty rather than inherited privilege. In this respect, Foxley’s work significantly revises the revisionist portrayal of Leveller thought as derivative or improvisational.

Equally important is her challenge to the long‑standing assumption that Leveller influence within the New Model Army was minimal or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. By reconstructing the petitioning campaigns of 1647, the exchanges between agitators and grandees, and the connections between civilian and military radicals, Foxley demonstrates that Leveller ideas circulated widely within the army and shaped debates about representation, authority, and settlement. Her treatment of the Putney Debates is particularly effective, situating them within a broader pattern of political engagement rather than treating them as an isolated eruption of radicalism. In doing so, she restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary process and challenges the revisionist minimisation of rank‑and‑file political consciousness.

Despite these strengths, the book has limitations. Foxley’s reluctance to foreground class dynamics leaves an important dimension of Leveller politics underdeveloped. The movement’s social base- artisans, apprentices, small producers- shaped both the radicalism of its demands and the structural limits of its influence. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 was not merely a political defeat but the outcome of a deeper class conflict within the revolutionary camp. While Foxley acknowledges the grandees' hostility, she does not fully explore the material interests that made Leveller demands intolerable to the propertied classes who ultimately shaped the post‑revolutionary settlement. A more explicit engagement with class analysis would have strengthened her account of both the movement’s achievements and its defeat.

Similarly, Foxley’s silence on Soviet legal scholarship, particularly Evgeny Pashukanis, represents a missed opportunity. Pashukanis’s analysis of Lilburne’s legal thought provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of modern legal norms and the relationship between law and class power. Engaging with this tradition would have deepened Foxley’s discussion of Leveller jurisprudence and connected it to broader debates about the historical development of legal forms.

These limitations, however, do not diminish the book’s overall significance. The Levellers represents a major step toward a more balanced and historically grounded understanding of radical politics in the 1640s. It challenges the revisionist orthodoxy, reopens questions that had been prematurely closed, and restores the Levellers to the centre of debates about political thought in the English Revolution. It deserves a wide readership, and one hopes that a more affordable paperback edition will make it accessible to students and scholars alike.

Primary and Secondary Works

Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961.

De Krey, Gary. Review of The Levellers, by Rachel Foxley. History (online). Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12111_4 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com in Bing)

Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Preface.

Kishlansky, Mark. Various works on the New Model Army and revisionist interpretations (not directly cited with title in the essay but referenced as part of the revisionist school).

Morrill, John. Works on the English Civil War and the New Model Army (referenced in discussion of revisionist historiography).

North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism. Published online, 24 October 1996. Available at: https://www.wsws.org

Pashukanis, Evgeny B. “Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law” (1927). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm (marxists.org in Bing)

Rees, John. – Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519. Available at: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519 (reviews.history.ac.uk in Bing) – Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution. PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/ (research.gold.ac.uk in Bing)

Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt.” Labour Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (May–June 1958), pp. 77–82.

Talbot, Ann. “‘These the times … this the man’: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill.” World Socialist Web Site, 25 March 2003. Available at: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html (wsws.org in Bing)

Contextual and Historiographical References

Elton, G. R. Foundational works on Tudor government and the origins of revisionist historiography (referenced indirectly).

Historikerstreit. General background on the German historiographical dispute. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit (en.wikipedia.org in Bing)

Woolrych, Austin. Works on the New Model Army and the English Civil War (referenced in discussion of revisionist interpretations).

Notes Corresponding to the Original Essay

1. Rees, John. Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
2. “Historikerstreit,” Wikipedia.
3. De Krey, Gary. Review in History.
4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface.
5. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
6. Talbot, Ann. WSWS, 25 March 2003.
7. North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism.
8. Rees, Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution, PhD thesis.
9. Foxley, The Levellers.
10. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
11. Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt,” Labour Review, 1958.
12. Pashukanis, Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927).

 

Baal's Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution by Fiona McCall ISBN: 9781409455776 317pp

This book examines the experiences of the expropriated loyalist clergy during the highpoint of the English Revolution. It offers new insight into the practices and of this significant group.

The first thing that strikes you about McCall's book is a heavy concentration on the Loyalist clergy. She, unfortunately, has little to say about the English revolution. In this circumstance, it is unclear to me whether the author chooses the title or as I suspect the editor or publishers did. Baal's Priest steers clear on any political controversy surrounding the resurgence of studies of Royalist involvement of the English revolution.

The book is groundbreaking in other aspects with it being the first major study that uses the John Walker collection of manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.  It is hard to believe that this excellent collection of oral histories has not been mined before. You have to admire her adherence to the historian's craft. She must have spent a long time in that archive. The underuse of the Walker archive by historians is a little mysterious as it appears to contain a goldmine of material. 

However, caution is needed in that this source should be approached with extreme caution.  Drawing political conclusions from a relatively unreliable source such as an archive based on oral transcripts is a challenging and complicated thing to do. A thing that Mcall has largely avoided. Some might say this detracts from her book. Oral testimonies are a valuable source of material but can take a historian only so far. As the great old Karl Marx said Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language."[1] Hopefully, McCall's book will provoke an interest in the archive.

The Walker collection began life in 1702 following the publication of Edmund Calamy's work which catalogued some ministers who were driven from their livings during the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. John Walker was given 'over a thousand letters' along with contemporary letters and legal documents dating back to the 1640s and the 1650s, They catalogue a trail of misery for large numbers of clergy who supported the royalist cause in one form or another. The strength of this book is the detailed description of the various maltreatments of Loyalist clergy at the hands of the Cromwellian regime. For any student or a general reader wishing to study the impact, the civil war had on significant sections of the population this book would be a good start. The vast majority of the accounts are incredibly detailed and were written by people who were members of the sufferer's family or their Clergymen. These  Clergymen were often imprisoned.

The Walker Archive

According to R. Freeman Bullen, "the "Sufferings of the Clergy" is two distinct works. The first part treats ecclesiastical affairs under Puritan rule part two deals with the persecution suffered by individual clergy; it is this moiety that will mainly interest the local historian. Walker had been engaged in his work for about ten years when it was finally published in 1714. This means that from 60 to 70 years had elapsed since the period of the sequestrations and that to a very great extent, Walker was dependent upon existing documents, plus tradition, for his data. His notes and correspondence still exist in the Bodleian Library, and from these, we may gather some ideas of his method. Walker conducted his research using printed and manuscript sources available to him. He also directly solicited information, via a circular sent to archdeacons to disseminate amongst parish clergy.  He received over a thousand letters in response. After his death accounts were deposited, along with his other papers, as the J. Walker archive in the Bodleian Library".[2]

In many ways, McCall faced the same problems encountered by Walker. Both had to interpret the material as best they could. Both questioned how accurate and truthful the records were. Despite some reservations, McCall is happy to treat the Walker manuscripts as a generally reliable archive of materials. Caution should be observed when viewing the Walker accounts of trauma. Those on the receiving end sought to back up their accounts in order not to be dismissed. Walker was a good enough historian to err on the side of caution himself when recording events and testimonies. There are inconsistencies within the archive and should it not be treated as verbatim. Despite McCall's aversion to politics, she does offer the reader glimpses of class relations and even class antagonisms between loyalist clergy and their tormentors.

Some of these battles were personal others followed the battle lines drawn in the revolution itself. Perhaps one of the strongest attributes of the book is its opposition to some historians attempts to "consign Civil War experiences to oblivion." As James Mawdesley from the University of Sheffield points out in his review of the book "None of this is to suggest that these clergymen only accepted their lot as poor sufferers for their king. Jonathan Swift, the grandson of Thomas Swift, the vicar of Goodrich in Herefordshire, claimed that his grandfather's setting of a trap in a river resulted in the deaths of 200 of the enemy (p. 107), and McCall has calculated that no fewer than 150 of the Walker accounts include acts of aggression by the 'sufferer' (p. 201)."[3]

McCall's book establishes that the attacks on loyalist clergy were sanctioned by the highest authorities with Parliament operating as a rubber stamp. While McCall treads carefully in her book to separate the subjective interpretation of walker's collection from the objective assessment of the material this even for a trained historian is a difficult task for the general reader it is doubly difficult.

I also agree with Maudsley when he says the book would "have benefited from being interwoven with a general account of the civil wars and republic: the execution of Charles I in January 1649 is omitted from McCall's chronology, and it is not made clear when governance without a monarchy commenced".McCall is fascinated with how memory is used to portray historical events. The trauma suffered by the Loyalist clergy and their families and supporters was really clear to see. I would, however, have liked a more balanced approach after all suffering on a large scale appeared on both sides of the barricades. It is ironic in the least as McCall points out that the clergy who suffered during the civil war and under the Cromwellian regime despite the monarchies return to power the loyalist clergy in many places fared not better than under Cromwell. Charles II was more interested in settling old scores.

Historiography.

As with a large number of modern books on the civil war, it is extremely hard to fathom McCall's historiography. She does not favour the view of an English revolution. McCall is sympathetic to the historical writing of 'Marxists' like Christopher Hill, but her historiography has more connection to historians Like John Morrill who saw the civil war as the last religious conflict of the 17th century and continuation of the Thirty years war.

To conclude, any reader looking for an attack on revisionist historians downplaying the social effects of the English Civil War will be disappointed for them this relatively mild conflict and a 'war without an enemy.' In Baal's Priests, Fiona McCall has written an important study that will hopefully provoke an interest in the Walker manuscripts. The book is solidly researched and is written in a style that is both accessible to the academic and general reader. It is hoped that if McCall returns to this subject, she is able to draw some political conclusions from her hard work. It should be seen as an excellent introduction to the subject and not the final word on royalism, or the Walker manuscripts.

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[1] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852

[2] Sequestration In Suffolk -R. Freeman Bullen. http://suffolkinstitute.pdfsrv.co.uk/

[3] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1540

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Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context 2011 Ariel Hessayon-David Finnegan Editors- Ashgate Publishers ISBN: 9780754669050

 "The term political radicalism (or simply, in political science, radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways."[1]

To Be Radical is to Grasp Things by the Root-

 Karl Marx- The German Ideology

"It is a commonplace that the past is at the mercy of the present and that in every generation there are those who deliberately distort aspects of it to reflect a vision of their own or another's making. Most historical writing about radicalism and the English Revolution can be considered fabrication - in the sense of both manufacture and invention. There have been several critical studies documenting this process, including recent work by Mario Caricchio."  Ariel Hessayon

This collection of essays explore the terms 'radical' and 'radicalism' in the Early Modern English context. The term radical or radicalism has like all things connected with the English Revolution in the seventeenth century or political struggles in the eighteenth century come under attack by a coterie of revisionist historians.

As Edward Vallance points out in his essay Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century The afterlife of John Lilburne:" this is a persuasive presentation of the historical influence of the radicalism of the civil war and one which reflects a broader scholarly unease with the conception of a 'radical tradition'. The notion of a tradition of radical thought was powerfully evoked in the classic works of British Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson. It retained some importance in the popular historical imagination.5 Academics have become increasingly critical, however, both of the use of the term 'radical' to describe pre-modern politics and of the idea of a continuum of radical ideas and movements. Scholars have pointed out that the term 'radical' – not in common political use until the early nineteenth century anyway – had a very different meaning in the seventeenth century, indicating not ideas that would dramatically transform the status quo but instead a return to fundamentals or the root. Using the term 'radical' in its modern sense then risks distorting the political outlook of historic individuals who did not necessarily view themselves as advocating anything new or novel. The notion of a radical tradition is now seen as equally problematic, as it implies both a similarity in radical thought over the ages and a degree of influence from one radical group to the next which often cannot be supported with empirical evidence.6 At best, the idea of a radical tradition is seen as a poor way of thinking about intellectual influence. At worst, the concept is seen as a historical fabrication, little more than an exercise in wish-fulfilment on the part of modern left-wing academics and journalists.[2]

Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context is an ambitious book that attempts to go beyond the conceptual categories which permeate the study of The English Revolution. The book is one of many recent studies that seek to clarify but ultimately fails what is meant by many of the concepts used in the Revolution. The 12 essays in this book are the product of the work presented at a conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2006.

Understanding radicalism is not an easy task as it is clear the term means many things to many people. Historically some early modern historians have used the term radical or radicalism to describe the plethora of groups that took part in the English Revolution. However, even conservative historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper had adopted the term. Radicals can also be found on the royalist side as well according to one historian in this book.

The term radical is a relatively modern concept. According to Professor Diego Lucci, "the historian Conal Condren has written that it was not until the late 18th century that 'radical' became a political term associated with extensive political and social reform, and it was not until 1819 that Jeremy Bentham coined the word 'radicalism'.[3]

One problem with several essays written by historians who are largely revisionists in nature is that they are more adept at telling us what they reject rather than arguing for what they believe. Readers who are looking for new historiography from this collection of essays will be brutally disappointed.

In the introduction, Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan make it clear that these articles do not identify with the "linguistic turn "school of historiography or otherwise known as the nominalist approach.

These historians in order to remove "anachronism" from historical study believe it is best to remove terms like radicalism from early modern historiography. In its most extreme form nominalist historians would also like to remove words such as 'puritan', 'royalist'  'antiquity', 'medieval', and 'modern'. In other words, formalism went mad.

The second approach, identified in the introduction, is called 'substantive' and is the polar opposite of nominalist. The functional approach is favoured by two divergent schools of historiography Whig and Marxist. These two trends have towered over the study of the English Revolution.

The authors in this collection of essays have rejected both Whig and Marxist historiography and have adopted a semi functionalist approach to the study of English radicalism.

Revisionists of one sort or another have sought over the last three decades to eradicate the influence of both Whig and Marxist historiography. As Hessayon and Finnegan observe correctly that even the use of the word radical has come under attack from a coterie of revisionist historians. So much so it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of the various strands of thought as regards the English Revolution.

A distorted defence of Marxist historiography was carried out by historians in and around the Communist Party of Great Britain.  They sought with varying degrees of success to apply a historical materialist method when writing and studying the various radical groups. Historians which included the likes of Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A. L. Morton and E. P. Thompson developed the 'history from below' genre,

One of the essential features of their approach was to establish the importance of radical groups in the English Revolution. The Communist Party historians rescued them from obscurity. However, they could not escape the influence of the Stalinist controlled party of the USSR. They were following a historical and political line that came from the Stalin led Russian Communist International during the mid1930s.

As was said before, Hessayon and Finnegan do not support the linguistic but are hostile to a Marxist interpretation. They treat the matter of radicalism from a purely academic standpoint. However, such a topic as the level of radicalism in the English Revolution requires a political understanding. That is why Hessayon is hostile to "dangerous extremists" hijacking groups such as the Levellers for their modern-day political agenda.

Hessayon levelled this very same charge at the historian Edward Vallance in a review of Vallance's A Radical History of Britain for the Institute of Historical Research website. The review crossed a line in that it was a nasty and inaccurate attack.

In Vallance's book, he said "there is another purpose to Vallance's book: a political agenda. Located somewhere to the left of New Labour in Guardian, New Statesman and John Pilger reading territory (pp. 11, 38, 40–2, 430–1, 531, 551), displaying an evident if understandable distaste for Thatcherism (pp. 52, 228, 260), A Radical History of Britain is intended as a celebration of the British people's capacity for dissent and, when necessary, recourse to direct action in defending their liberties and securing new rights (pp. 11, 13, 18, 38–9, 119–21, 181, 201, 526–7). Nor to Vallance's mind is his narrative a record of heroic failure, but rather a testament to the achievements of British radicals and revolutionary movements".

He continues "As historians, we have a collective responsibility to maintain the highest standards of scholarly rigour, especially when undertaking the challenging yet rewarding business of educating non-specialists. Furthermore, shaping aspects of the past to advance present-day political goals is a practice almost as old as the discipline itself. Anyone engaged in this enterprise, however, must take the greatest care not to legitimise the indefensible or give ammunition to dangerous extremist".

Vallance correctly sought to defend the integrity of his work. "It is rather difficult for me to respond to Dr Hessayon's review, not least because he appears to be offering a critique of quite a different book from the one that I have written. In particular, I am baffled by his repeated references to the British National Party (eight in all) within his review, where he refers to the BNP twice as many times as I do within the whole 600 + pages of my A Radical History of Britain. To put this in perspective, there are almost as many references to him within my book as there are to that far-right party.

" So it is with some puzzlement that I met Dr Hessayon's suggestions that my book may provide 'ammunition to dangerous extremists'. I realise that many readers of Reviews in History will not have looked at my work, so I provide here a key passage from p. 549: This yoking together of freedom and Britishness has continued, through the writing of George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn, to the present day, with Gordon Brown's calls for a new sense of national identity constructed around British values of 'liberty, tolerance and fair play. The BNP would certainly struggle to live up to the second of those values. It is hard to see how British radical movements such as the Chartists, which included prominent black members and supported the abolition of the slave trade, or the suffragettes, who included leading anti-colonialists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, can fit into the BNP's bleached-white vision of Britain. Yet, in the radical tradition's appropriation by the far-right, we can nonetheless see some of the dangers in claiming universal values such as tolerance, fairness and liberty as peculiarly British. More recently another right-wing group has claimed allegiance to the radicals throughout history. During the recent by-election victory of the UKIP at Rochester the newly elected MP Mark Reckless believed that his party stood in the "radical tradition," one that historically "took power away from the elites and spread it to the people. It is the tradition of Levellers, Chartists, and Suffragettes."

Vallance continues "Overall, this seems an eccentric reading of my book, especially given my left-leaning politics which will be evident to anyone who has read my New Statesman articles or heard my talks at Demos or Republic: The Campaign for an Elected Head of State. His points concerning Dr Dunn and Dr Harvey's works aside, Dr Hessayon's review offers little serious engagement with my work and, in my view, breaches the IHR's standards for scholarly debate".

If Hessayon wanted to attack Vallance properly, he could have pointed out that while Britain did have a radical tradition, this was not somehow unbroken. The theory of an unbroken radical tradition largely stems from the Communist Party Historians Group.

As Philip Bounds pointed out in his outstanding essay Orwell and Englishness: in the section titled The Dialogue with British Marxism "British Communism and the "English Radical Tradition"  he states "The idea of Englishness became an obsession for British communists after the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935. (The Communist International or "Comintern" had been established in Moscow in 1919. Its function was to determine the policies of the various pro-Soviet Communist Parties which came into existence in the wake of the October Revolution.) Meeting at a time when Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy posed an increasingly evident threat to international order, the Seventh Congress was primarily important for determining communist strategy towards the growth of fascism. The most famous speech was delivered by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, newly appointed President of the Comintern, who had become a hero throughout the world movement after being acquitted by a Nazi court on charges of burning down the Reichstag (Germany's parliament) in 1933. After defining fascism as "the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital," 5 Dimitrov insisted that communists should now give priority to defending established democratic institutions against the fascist attempt to overthrow them. This could best be done by uniting all anti-fascists, including those whom the communists had previously dismissed as "bourgeois" (e.g. liberals and even progressive conservatives), into nationally based "People's Fronts."

This political line was catastrophic and paved the way for numerous defeats of the working class. It did, however, provide the historians of the Communist Party the possibility of examining subjects such as the English Revolution and the in particular radicals without coming into conflict with the leadership in Moscow.

As Bounds continues from 1935 onwards, in a flurry of intellectual activity, many of the CPGB's leading writers made a sustained effort to excavate the history of what was usually called the "English radical tradition." The body of work that they produced can broadly be divided into two categories. On the one hand, there was a series of writings that traced the history of the plebeian revolt in Britain since the Peasants' Rising of 1381. These were supplemented by a more extensive (though perhaps not so influential) group of works which explored the influence of radical ideas on a selection of Britain's most famous writers — Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens among them.”

The Beauty of Holiness

The book opens with the chapter The Beauty of Holiness and the Poetics of Antinomianism Richard Crashaw, John Saltmarsh and the Language of Religious Radicalism in the 1640s. Nicholas McDowell essay examines the language of religious radicalism in the 1640s, with a special focus on the poems of Richard Crashaw and John Saltmarsh.

McDowell adopts a reformist rather than a revolutionary position as regards the radical groups as seen in this quote. "The most sensible discussion of radicalism in the English Revolution is the third of G. E. Aylmer's four presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society on 'Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England'. In his paper on 'Varieties of Radicalism', delivered in 1987, Aylmer quickly dispenses with the nominalist wrangling that continues to obsess historians. I quote his opening two sentences: 'Since the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before the nineteenth century, it may reasonably be asked what they signify when applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The answer is a pragmatic one: by radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church and society which would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream Puritan-Parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Assembly of Divines.'[1] Aylmer immediately and with a minimum of fuss defines the context for discussing radicalism in the English Revolution. Having dispensed with the circular debate over naming, Aylmer proceeds to get on with trying to characterise the distinguishing features of mid-seventeenth-century radicalism.[4]

McDowell follows Hessayon lead in opposing historians who have adopted the linguistic turn. He writes If we are not to call 'radical' the writers I discuss at length in the book - the 'Ranter' Coppe, the Levellers Walwyn and Richard Overton, the Quaker Samuel Fisher, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers - then what exactly are we to call them? 'Sectarian' will hardly do".

Jason Peacey's chapter Radicalism Relocated: Royalist Politics and Pamphleting of the Late 1640s is an indicator of the growing interest in Royalist politics and their use of pamphlets. Peacey is open to the idea that radical politics permeated every aspect of everyday life.

According to Diego Lucci, "Peacey stresses that radical ideas, especially in matters of religious, social and political reform, penetrated various areas of English politics and, therefore, were shared by different, and sometimes clashing, milieus. Therefore, Peacey argues that radicalism was a phenomenon largely independent from the distinctions between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and influenced both sides of the political spectrum."

Mario Caricchio's News from the New Jerusalem; Giles Calvert and the Radical experience Mario Caricchio's section concentrates on how bookselling and pamphleteering influenced political and religious debates of the English Revolution. Caricchio focuses on Giles Calvert, one of the main publishers and booksellers in England between 1641 and 1660. Caricchio maintains that Calvert's bookshop was part of a broader network of social networks.

As Caricchio said, in a 2006 essay "Radicalism and English revolution are not on a high road but at a crossroads. Historians seem to place them where a number of contexts intersect. This could be an answer to the question of the "nature of the English revolution", which, as John Morrill put it by citing Hill, required attention to be paid more to "environment" than to "heredity".[36] This is a two-sided issue. On the one hand, there is the radicalisation of conflict that shattered the unity of the "political nation" at the beginning of the 1640s and precipitated England into the civil war. On the other hand, there is the problem of late 1640s radicalism, which Morrill, envisaging a comparison between the Levellers and the Clubmen, raised in a stimulating question: how "Leveller pamphlets and petitions combined deeply regressive economic and social ideas with a core commitment to religious liberty and a political doctrine born of the experience of Independent churches, all bound together in an innovative natural rights framework"? In this question and its possible answer, popular participation and radical ideas still stand at the heart of the matter. The varieties of the English religious experience together with the widening or thickening publicity of discourses seem to be the decisive turning on the map: where the last war of religion becomes a revolution".[5]

Gerrard Winstanley: Radical Reformerby  Ariel Hessayon is a continuation of Hessayon's attack on left-wing historians. In an essay in 2006, he attacks Christopher Hills evaluation of the Digger leader Winstanley."In 1973 Hill's edition of Winstanley's selected writings was published by Penguin. His introduction portrayed Winstanley in modern dress as an advocate of 'human progress', 'reason' and 'international brotherhood'; an author whose insights 'may be of interest to those in the Third World today who face the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society'. Here again was a radical, mostly secular Winstanley whose biblical language and 'high-flown metaphorical style' was worth penetrating in the same way that readers had to get through the 'Hegelian jargon' to understand the early Marx. [76] In a subsequent essay 'From Lollards to Levellers' (1978) Hill attempted to provide both genealogy and ecology for 'lower-class' radicalism by exploring the continuity of radical ideas within an orally transmitted 'underground tradition'. His focus was on doctrinal and geographical continuities, particularly in pastoral, forest, moorland and fen areas where ecclesiastical control was less tight. But if in retrospect the 1970s represented a pinnacle in Hill's writing on radicalism, it was also during this decade that his work was most severely attacked. Indeed, Hill's preoccupation with twentieth-century ideological struggles and his moralising tone made his work vulnerable to charges of being obsessively present-centred, of putting theory above facts. And it must be said that he used evidence inaccurately and selectively, depending almost entirely on printed sources. Ultimately Hill's vision of the past is largely unconvincing, revealing much about his agenda while misleading readers unfamiliar with the evidence. To quote Montaigne: People are prone to apply the meaning of other men's writings to suit opinions that they have previously determined in their minds."

Hill, as far as I can make out, did not reply directly to any of these attacks. But I will. Attacking a historian for his politics is one thing, but accusing a historian of fabricating history is another and has no place in any historians debate. The attack on Hill and the CPHG is reminiscent of J .C. Davis in the 1980s. Davis's great theory was that most of the radical groups that existed during the English Revolution were figments of the imagination of left-wing historians such as Hill. A similar line of attack was taken by historian Alastair MacLachlan in his extraordinarily provocative book The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History. MacLachlan should be made to retract his accusations and issue an apology.

To conclude, this collection of essays continues a revisionist trend to downplay the radicals in the English Revolution. There are some worthwhile essays, but overall the book disappoints.

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[1]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_radicalism

[2] Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century Afterlife of John Lilburne

Edward Vallance- https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/74/1/1/825488

[3] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1157

[4] N. McDowell , "Writing the Literary and Cultural History of Radicalism in the English Revolution", www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/mcdowell.html> 

[5]  M. Caricchio, "Radicalism and the English Revolution", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007