Christopher Hill
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
1972
Synopsis: “Popular revolt,” Hill begins, “was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition.” This is a fact that students of American history do well to remember. Although “the long-term consequences of the Revolution [of 1640] were all to the advantage of the gentry and merchants,” Hill believes ideas were generated and things were begun among the “lower fifty per cent of the population” which subtly influenced the world we live in. (13) The result was not the upside-down utopia of communal brotherly love they hoped for, but the echoes of their ideas are perceptible in our world, Hill suggests.
The value of this book for me is partly in the history, which is at the extreme far edge of the period I’m studying, and partly in the way Hill approaches his material and the story. He gently warns against applying presentist categories, saying for example that it’s “misleading to differentiate too sharply between politics, religion, and general scepticism...a Quaker of the early 1650s had far more in common with a Leveller, a Digger, or a Ranter than with a modern member of the Society of Friends.” (14) The “flood of radical ideas” unleashed by the Ranters and their associates make up a second layer of the Revolution. Though this is “another revolution which never happened,” Hill sees himself as part of the new generation, rescuing these radicals “from what [his] predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe’.” (15-16)
Although most of the story involves religious thought and many of the social arguments were made using religious terminology and metaphor, Hill says that as far back as the early sixteenth century, there was “a tradition of plebeian anti-clericalism and irreligion” that helped express class tensions. (25) A previously static agricultural society with “no land and no man without a lord” (39) was giving way to a world of enclosures, where “rogues, vagabonds and beggars” roamed the countryside. (40) In the City, “a large population, mostly living very near if not below the poverty line, little influenced by religious or political ideology [was] ready-made material for what began in the later seventeenth century to be called ‘the mob’.” (41) The forests harbored outlaws and witches. (47) “Disafforestation and enclosure could thus be regarded as a national duty, a kindness in disguise to the idle poor, as well as of more immediate benefit to the rich encloser.” (51) Hill suggests the poor saw the irony in this as easily as we do, and clearly understood that “a wage-earner who had lost his common rights would be much more dependent on his employer than one who had not.” (52)
“The traditional insecurity of medieval life had been intensified by the new insecurity of the capitalist market,” which intensified competition and undercut the social safety-net of village life. (88) But this economic shift did not mean a new secular order was at hand. Thomas Edwards, writing in 1646, thought “religious toleration is the greatest of all evils...It will bring in first scepticism in doctrine and looseness in life, and then atheism.” King Charles I had agreed, saying “Religion is the only firm foundation of all power.” (98) Oliver Cromwell, who “combined some genuinely radical religious beliefs with the normal social assumptions of a country gentleman,” (401) “lumped Levellers and True Levellers [Ranters] together as ‘a despicable and contemptible generation of men’, ‘persons differing little from beasts’.” (122) For radicals advocating “Collective cultivation of the waste by the poor” (130), “Collective manuring of common lands was a religious act.” (131-2) But this was clearly a different religion from the one their betters used to keep them down.
“It was clearer to [Gerrard] Winstanley [1609-1676] than to most radicals,” Hill says, “that the state and its legal institutions existed in order to hold the lower classes in place.” (269) But the “Ranters were said to hold that the Bible ‘hath been the cause of all our misery and divisions...of all the blood that hath been shed in the world’;” (262) so Winstanley was definitely in radical company. Attitudes like “Rejection of church marriage by Clarkson, Winstanley, Ranters, Quakers, was in one sense a traditional lower-class attitude...But the Ranters, by rejecting sin, proclaiming free love and raising the matter as one for public discussion, went further.” (320) And in a complete rejection of the British imperialism that became so familiar that it seemed inevitable in the nineteenth century, “some radicals denied the civilizing mission of white Anglo-Saxon protestants.” (336) But popular as these ideas might be on the street, “in the 1650s Oliver Cromwell was trying to use an aggressive imperialist foreign policy as a means of reconciling royalists to his rule, not unsuccessfully.” (338) The state was still doing what Winstanley recognized as its job.
Hill says the severity of the official crackdown on common people after the restoration is illustrated by the fact that “the game laws were made...ferocious against all but the well-to-do: after 1671 gamekeepers had the right to search houses and confiscate weapons.” (349) “The Revolution,” he says, “began with Oliver Cromwell leading fenmen in revolt against court drainage schemes; its crucial turning point was the defeat of the Leveller regiments at Burford, which was immediately followed by an act for draining the fens, and it ended with the rout of the commoners and craftsmen of the south-western counties in the bogs of Sedgemoor.” (360)
“For a short time,” Hill concludes, “ordinary people were freer from the authority of church and social superiors than they had ever been before, or were for a long time to be again.” (361) Although they never had control of the revolution, radicals used the unprecedented freedom of the press that existed briefly during the 1640s and 1650s; they “criticized the existing educational structure, especially the universities, and proposed a vast expansion of educational opportunity. they discussed the relation of the sexes, and questioned parts of the protestant ethic.” (362) But they frightened the aristocrats who who were steadily regaining control of society from the military. Parliament believed that “Ignorance, and admiration arising from ignorance, are the parents of civil devotion and obedience.” (quoting Clement Walker in 1649) M.P. Luke Robinson (1610-1669) agreed, saying “I would not have a people know their own strength.” (366)
“The radicals were so effectively silenced,” Hill says, “ that we do not know whether many held out in isolation with Milton. We do not even know about Winstanley,” who historians generally believe became a moderate Quaker in his old age. (370-1) By Newton’s time, “the opinion formers of this society censored themselves. Nothing got into print which frightened the men of property.” (385) Although he says they believed in the gradual evolution of knowledge and relied on experience rather than received truth, Hill says “the tragedy of the radicals was that they were never able to arrive at political unity during the Revolution: their principles were too absolutely held to be anything but divisive.” (373) Perhaps this is a little harsh: they had all been brought up in a world of absolutes; their new approach would take a couple of generations to settle in. Although the Quakers did not want to overturn the world,” they did want “life to be lived better, more honestly.” (374) They achieved some of that, and carried the ideals forward even when they didn’t live up to them. Milton and Bunyan also carried some of the spirit forward. “We need not bother too much about being able to trace a continuous pedigree for these ideas,” Hill says. “They are the ideas of the underground, surviving, if at all, verbally: they leave little trace.” (381) “Milton had intellectual affinities with the radicals but was set apart from them by his patrician assumptions, [while] Bunyan shared the social and political attitudes of the radicals but not their theology.” (405) So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of these ideas came together two generations later in Benjamin Franklin, who read Pilgrim’s Progress as a boy in Boston, before running away to Quaker Philadelphia to become a printer. It’s not the end Hill had in mind, but it’s not a bad end.
