If there was ever a group of
people that needed rescuing from historical obscurity it was the 17th-century radical group the Ranters.
It is clear that without the intervention of the historians around the
Communist Party of Great Britain, especially Christopher Hill and A L Morton groups
like the Ranters would have been consigned to a few footnotes of history.
Morton is well known for his
work A People’s History of England. It was the founding book of the Communist
Party Historians Group (CPHG). As Ann Talbot writes “the Communist Party
sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s
People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.[1]
The pamphlet A Glorious
Liberty is taken from A L Morton’s book The World of the Ranters[2]
Despite working under the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s ideological
straightjacket Morton, who was probably the world’s leading authority on the
Ranters sought to make an objective assessment of the Ranters who up until then
had mostly been described as “madmen”. In historical terms, the Ranters had a short
shelf life. They came to life towards the end of the civil war and changed
their political and social form into the Cromwell Protectorate.
According to Morton “The
Ranters formed the extreme left wing of the sects which came into prominence
during the English Revolution, both theologically and politically.
Theologically these sects lay between the poles of orthodox Calvinism, with its
emphasis on the power and justice of God as illustrated in the grand scheme of
election and reprobation, with its insistence upon the reality of Hell in all
its most literal horrors and upon the most verbal and dogmatic acceptance of
the Scriptures, and of antinomianism with its emphasis upon God’s mercy and
universality, its rejection of the moral law, and with it, of Hell in any but
the most figurative sense, and its replacement of the authority of the
Scriptures by that of the inner light. The political views of the Ranters were
the outcome of this theology. God existed in all things: I see that God is in
all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing, from the
highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall; and that God is the life and being of
them all, and that God doth really dwell, and if you will personally; if he may
admit so low an expression in them all, and hath his Being nowhere else out of
the Creatures.[3]
Like many of the radical
groups during the English revolution, the Ranters were a relatively new
phenomenon. It is open to debate how new their ideas were. Morton was able to trace
their antecedents down through the centuries.
Joachim of Fiore in the
twelfth century was identified as one source of Ranter inspiration. “The
Ranters, like Joachim of Fiore and the Anabaptists of the Reformation,
proclaimed the coming age of the Holy Spirit, which moved in every man. The key
difference between orthodox Calvinism or Puritanism is that in those more orthodox
creeds, the workings of the Holy Spirit were closely tied to the Holy Word —
that is, the Bible. For the Ranters and other Inner Light Groups, however, all
deuces were wild. The Ranters pursued this path, too, to pantheism: as one of
their leaders declared: "The essence of God was as much in the Ivie leaf
as in the most glorious Angel."[4]
One exciting aspect of the
Ranter storyline is their associations with other radical groups like the
Levellers. Both groups took part in a revolution, and some of their leaders
were soldiers in the New Model Army. The social base for both movements was
similar. There were, however, significant religious and behavioural differences.
One significant difference
was that the Ranters appealed far more than the Levellers to the lower sections
of the population. In class terms, this would have been a very embryonic working
class.
They appealed to the “poorest
beggars, “rogues, thieves, whores, and cut purses”. These are “every whit as
good” as anyone else on earth. Morton explains “ In Coppe and Clarkson, in
Foster and Coppin there is, in different degrees and forms, a deep concern for
the poor, a denunciation of the rich and primitive biblical communism that is
more menacing and urban than that of Winstanley and the Diggers. Like the
Diggers, and unlike Lilburne and his followers, they were ready to accept the
name of Leveller in its most radical implications, but with the difference that
for them God himself was the great Leveller, who was to come shortly “to Levell
with a witnesse, to Levell the Hills with the Valleyes, to lay the Mountaines
low”. It is hardly accidental that the Ranters began to come into prominence
soon after the Leveller defeat at Burford and would seem to have attracted a
number of embittered and disappointed former Levellers. Where Levelling by
sword and by spade had both failed what seemed called for was a Levelling by miracle,
in which God himself would confound the mighty by means of the poorest, lowest
and most despised of the earth”.[5]
Coupled with their appeal to
the poor was their attack on the rich.” The rich, Foster declared, grudge the
poor even a piece of bread, but “all things are the Lords” and he is coming
shortly to bring down their pride, who “because of your riches have thought
yourselves better than others; and must have your fellow-creatures in bondage
to you, and they must serve you, as work for you, and moyle and toyle for you,
and stand cap in hand to you, and must not displease you, no by no
meanes”.Coppe, who like Foster drew much of his imagery from the Epistle of St.
James, addressed himself to the poorest and most depressed strata of society,
at a time when the slum population of London was suffering terrible hardships
as a result of the wartime dislocation of trade and industry".
Like many of the radical
groups, their appeal was not only to the poor but to the leaders of the
revolution, namely Cromwell. Cromwell was acutely aware of the dangers of these
groups posed. If a broad section of the population could have been provoked
into carrying out large scale riots over many issues such as high food prices,
low wages and hunger it would have posed a grave danger to the regime.
While most social and
economic conditions were favourable to the Ranters, they had no real means of
carrying through their program. Although many Ranters had served in the New
Model Army, many were pacifists at heart. As this quote from Morton’s book
brings out “And maugre the subtilty, and
sedulity, the craft and cruelty of hell and earth: this Levelling shall up;Not
by sword; we (holily) scorne to fight for anything; we had as live be dead
drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’th market place; and
account these as, good actions as taking the poor abused, enslaved ploughmans
money from him... we had rather starve, I say, than take away his money from
him, for killing of men.[5] .
Ranters pacifism was an integral
part of their philosophy according to Morton “It came partly from the nature of
their theology, with its emphasis on the inevitable coming of the new age of
liberty and brotherhood. God, they felt, was abroad in the land and they needed
only to proclaim his purpose. However, it came also from the precise political
situation in which Ranterism developed. In February 1649 when A Rout, A Rout
was written, Charles had just been beheaded and the Council of State was in
effective control. In the two parts of Englands New Chains Discover’d, we can
sense the feeling of the Levellers that they had been outwitted and betrayed.
In a few weeks, their leaders would be in prison: in a couple of months their
last hope would be destroyed at Burford”.Already a sense of defeat, that
something had gone wrong with the expectation of a New England was in the air.
It was in this situation, with the left in retreat and the turning point of the
Revolution already passed, that the Ranters became prominent. With ordinary
political calculations failing. Many people began to look for a miraculous
deliverance”.
J C
Davis
Not every historian welcomed
Morton’s resurrection of the Ranters. Morton knew that it was effortless for
some politically motivated historians to dismiss the Ranters as “madmen” or
lunatics. Morton’s work on the Ranters came under severe attack.
Unsurprisingly this attack
came from the right and took the form of a full-frontal assault calling into
question the very existence of the Ranters. Leading this assault was the very
conservative historian J C Davis. It is
no surprise that Davis’s book Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the
Historians was Kenneth Baker education secretary under Margaret Thatcher’s
favourite book. According to Davis, the Ranters were impossible to define and
what they believed in, he writes "There was no recognised leader or
theoretician and little, if any organisation. The views of the principal
figures were inconsistent with each other"[6].
The debate over the Ranters
did not generate the same kind of heat as other more higher profile historian’s
spates. The importance of this did force Christopher Hill into battle. Hill reluctantly wrote a reply to
Davis.
“I must declare an interest.
This book attacks Norman Cohn, A. L. Morton, myself and others for believing in
the existence of the Ranters. 'Ranters' put forward antinomian and libertine
views at the height of the English Revolution. Suppressed in 1651, they
continued to exercise some influence into the 18th century. Professor Davis
recognises that contemporaries believed there were people whom they called
Ranters. However, he wishes to restrict them to three or four individuals.
Anything more was the creation of hostile pamphleteers. It was not an easy
negative to prove, not much easier to disprove. Some, including the present
reviewer, may think neither exercise worthwhile. But lest anybody should take
Professor Davis's book too seriously, it may be worth stating some arguments
against his case. Professor Davis starts from what he calls a 'paradigm' of
Ranter beliefs, allegedly drawn from other historians. But it is a very
selective paradigm. It excludes some beliefs that contemporaries thought
characteristic of Ranters - mortalism, for instance, the belief that the soul
dies with the body, which Bunyan thought 'the chief doctrine of the Ranters'.
It also excludes Ranter subversion of the traditional subordination of women,
which outraged Bunyan even more. Davis argues that if we are to be convinced of
the existence of Ranters, we must find 'a sect with clear leaders, authoritative
tests on entry, and controls over numbers' (43). Of course, he cannot find them”.[7]
Conclusion
It is a shame that this
debate has gone cold. It is hoped that modern-day historians return to this
subject and start to give it the treatment it deserves. Nigel Smith has started
this process with his collection of Ranter writings[8]
and the work carried out by Ariel
Hessayon is worth looking at (see, Abiezer Coppe and the
Ranters, research.gold.ac.uk.)
As Hessayon writes “Yet that
is not the end of the matter since there remains much to be done. With the
partial exception of Coppe, we still need detailed accounts of the Ranters’
reading habits and possible influences on their thought. Moreover, we await
research on the lesser-known individuals that comprised ‘My one flesh’,
together with a reconstruction of their social networks. The same may be said
of members of several other spiritual communities, notably those clustered
around Sedgwick and those named in News from the New Jerusalem. We also require
meticulous studies of Bothumley, Coppe (particularly after 1648), Coppin, and Salmon.
So it is fair to suggest that despite all that has been said about them, there
is another book on the Ranters still to be written”.
[2]
The World of the
Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution – 12 Jul 1979
by
Arthur Leslie Morton
[3]
The World of the
Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution – 12 Jul 1979
by
Arthur Leslie Morton
[4] [The article is
excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought
(1995), volume 2, chapter 9: "Roots of Marxism:www.mises.org/library/early-christian-communism
[6]
Fear,
Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians-Davis
[7]
The Lost
Ranters? A Critique of J. C. Davis Author(s): Christopher Hill Source: History
Workshop, No. 24 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 134-140
[8]
A Collection of
Ranter Writings: Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution
