History

Levelling up is nothing new

The 17th-century Levellers had radical ideas to reform the country david horspool

Levelling up meant something different in the 17th century.

In the heady days of the Commonwealth, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Levellers was the name opponents gave to a group of agitators from the new Model Army who saw an opportunity to remake the political landscape.

They proposed, among other things, to give many more people the vote – all men over the age of 21, in fact, with a few exceptions: no servants, no royalists, no beggars and, of course, no women.

In some ways, with their guns and printed books, these people do seem ‘early modern’, as historians describe the period. But there can be few better illustrations of how different our worlds really are than the reaction to this programme, which looks to us unexceptionable, or too restrictive.

To many, even those who had fought for Parliament and gone along with the unprecedented trial and execution of an anointed monarch, the Levellers’ ideas seemed dangerously radical.

They had previously been summed up in the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough’s famous words, ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; the poorest man in England is not bound at all in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.’

Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton, rejoined that only property – what he called ‘a permanent fixed interest’ – gave a man rights in ‘disposing of the affairs of the kingdom’.

But if the Levellers’ political ideas scared the Parliamentary grandees, the social innovations with which they were linked terrified them. I say ‘with which they were linked’ because many Levellers were at pains to distance themselves from those connections. Three Leveller leaders, John Lilburne, William Walwyn areas Diggers planted were commons, not enclosed land. That didn’t stop the locals objecting, and violently driving them off both times. So were there any Levellers who really wanted wholesale redistribution of wealth in Republican England? Cromwell certainly thought so.

But even the politicians to whom he referred – members of ‘Barebone’s Parliament’, named after one of its more radical religious members, Praise-God Barebone – were a mixed bunch, whose most radical social measure had been to restrict tithes and the rights of landowners to nominate clergy to local parishes. It was not Year Zero stuff.

For that, your best bet is the Ranters, given a new lease of life by Christopher Hill and his followers in the early 1970s.

Men such as Abiezer Coppe positively embraced the implications of levelling – up, down, in any direction really: ‘Behold, behold, behold, I the eternal God, the Lord of Hosts, who am that mighty Leveller, am coming (yea even at the doors) to Level in good earnest, to Level to some purpose, to Level with a witness, to Level the Hills with the Valleys, and to lay the Mountains low…’

Faced with a White Paper like that, we might ask for more details. Fortunately, this kind of Levelling wasn’t at the door. Nor, indeed, was the milder version espoused by Lilburne and co.

For that, we had to wait until the 20th century. Levelling up really is a long-term project.

and Richard Overton, wrote a manifesto, the Agreement of the People, republished while they were held in the Tower in 1649. In it, they declared, ‘It shall not be in the power of any Representative, in any wise, to … level men’s Estates, destroy Property, or make all things Common.’

‘Levelling’ could refer literally to the cutting-down of hedges enclosing private land, as well as to the more general idea of making all men equal, in financial as well as political terms. That was what Cromwell feared, referring to a group of politicians who wanted to ‘fly at liberty and prosperity, insomuch as if one man had 12 cows, they held that another that wanted cows ought to take share with his neighbour’.

Was that really how some people thought? Yes it was, as a new book, The Restless Republic by Anna Keay, vividly reminds us. One group called themselves ‘True Levellers’, though we know them better as the Diggers. Although their leaders were inspired by religious revelation, they had a very practical solution to what they saw as a fallen world: farming. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, thought that if the poor of England were allowed to sow crops on the country’s common land, ‘making the Earth a Common Treasury … they may live together as one House of Israel’.

Winstanley’s True Levellers are often described as communist, and they did try to hold the land they cultivated collectively. But they weren’t as threatening to property-owners as their opponents feared. Winstanley tried to put his ideas into practice twice in Surrey, where he had moved after his haberdashery business failed. But, at St George’s Hill and on Cobham Heath, the

English Levellers (1649)

The Restless Republic by Anna Keay (William Collins) is out now