The ‘poorest he’
In October 1647, in the celebrated Putney debates, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough stood before the assembled Grandees of Parliament, and declared, ‘For I really think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.’
Rainsborough was the spokesman at Putney for the Levellers, a political movement that derived support from soldiers in several regiments of Cromwell’s New Model Army, and radical tradesmen in the City of London. The intention of the Levellers was to ‘set all things straight, and to raise a party and community in the kingdom.’
General Ireton for the Grandees replied to Rainsborough.Only those with a ‘permanent fixed interest [ie owning land] in this kingdom,’ he argued, should have a part in disposing of the kingdom’s affairs.
The Levellers were determined that the English revolution should not overthrow a tyranny of kings only to see it replaced by a tyranny of landed gentry. A year earlier Richard Overton had pleaded, ‘let not the greatest peers in the land be more respected with you than so many old bellows-winders, broom-men, cobblers, tinkers, or chimney-sweepers, who are all equally freeborn.’ [1]
Free and common use
Overton called for enclosed lands to be returned to the people:
That all grounds which anciently lay in Common for the poor, and are now impropriate, inclosed and fenced in, may forthwith (in whose hands soever they are) be cast out, and laid open again to the free and common use and benefit of the poor. [2]
In the main Leveller manifesto, the principle demands were for an extension of voting rights to everyone over 21 (except that is for beggars, servants, Royalists, and women), annual Parliaments with an elected representative for every 400 people, the application of laws equally to all people, and freedom of religious conscience.
They also proposed that all taxes should be abolished, saving only a tax on land: ‘an equal rate in the pound on every reall and personall estate in the Nation.’ [3]
However, in their manifesto, the Levellers were careful to dissociate themselves from more radical demands which they claimed would ‘level men’s Estates, destroy Property, or make all things Common.’ This was a reference to the programme of the ‘True Levellers’, known also as the ‘Diggers’.
Sources
G E Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution, 1975.
[1] Richard Overton, An Arrow Against all Tyrants, 1646.
[2] ‘Certain Articles for the Good of the Commonwealth’ in Appeale from the Degenerate Representative Body, 1647.
[3] John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, Richard Overton, An Agreement of the Free People of England, 1649.
