(no subject)

[skygiants]

On a rec from nextian I relatively recently read The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During The English Revolution.

This was a dense but fascinating book that assumed about 200% more background knowledge about the English Civil War (1642-1651) and subsequent Commonwealth period than I have ever possessed, but some of it I was able to put together from context and some of it sent me down various Wikipedia rabbitholes and some of it I just accepted I was not going to understand and kept on reading.

My extremely surface understanding of the Civil War & Restoration period has always been 'fun-loving but politically & ethically untenable Catholic Royalists vs. egalitarian but devastatingly fun-hating Protestant Republicans, leading to an absolute null sum of a revolution in which I personally do not feel capable of rooting for anybody.' However, Marxist historian Christopher Hill has now made the English Civil War a thousand times more enjoyable for me by positing that in fact many of the fringe movements within the Parliamentarian Roundhead party were sort of early radical communists who wanted to tear down existing social institutions, establish communal property, and start leveling some hard questions directly at God, and also had a lot more fun than the traditional dour image of bourgeois Oliver Cromwell Protestants who disapproved of dancing & the theater &cetera.

Hill quotes from numerous philosophers, scholars, and interested citizens posing questions like "Where is your God, in heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or doth he sit in the clouds, or where doth he sit with his arse?" He devotes time to Levellers, a popular movement for broader suffrage and religious toleration; Diggers, more extremist Levellers who believed in common property and made a movement of squatting on privatized land and planting crops there; and Quakers, whom he argues were significantly more politically radical in their early days and moved away from those views as a survival tactic for the movement when the window for religious toleration began to narrow. His particular favorite is Gerard Winstanley, a Leveller/Digger philosopher who set out a whole set of principles for a model communal non-hierarchical society with universal education in which property and wages have been abolished:

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.

(to quote nextian: "i get that real "enjolras is talking" vibe off the guy")

And he did his job, I now absolutely want to read a more specific Winstanley bio; however, my actual favorite quote is from an alchemist who 'hoped in 1645 that 'within a few years,' thanks to alchemy, 'money will be like dross', and so 'that prop of the antichristian Beast will be dashed in pieces ... These things will accompany our so long expected and so suddenly approaching redemption.' This blew me away! I've read/seen so much fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold for ill-advised personal gain but WHERE is all my fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold so they can overthrow the global economy and institute an egalitarian society?

Comments

[vass]

Ooh yeah, I did a semester on those movements at university! I didn't know much about that period either, but the Diggers and the Levellers were definitely fun to learn about. And religious pamphlets like 'A Flying Fiery Roll'.

Thanks for the book rec, I should definitely read that.

[skygiants]

I now wish I had the opportunity to take a full semester on those movements as well, tbh -- would love to fill in my background knowledge!

[aella_irene]

Oooh, I must buy this book. I know a fiction series where the heroes are largely Levellers-and-associated (well, one of them has a complex grudge against Prince Rupert after the time he had to kick Rupert out of his wife's pub for groping the serving girls but generally speaking they are all Levellers.)

I once read a book where the author indignantly pointed out that while the Puritans did close down the bear pits, they did it after a child had fallen in and been eaten by a bear, so while it probably was partly due to joy killing, it was also partly due to not wanting children eaten by bears, a most laudable desire.

[legionseagle]

"That's the problem with these 'ere Puritans, 'elf 'n safety run mad."

[skygiants]

...is the fiction series any good?

I mean I support the shutdown of bear pits on a variety of principles (bad for the children, probably also bad for the bears!) but it's harder for me to get behind the disapproval of all other forms of theater ... let us have our lascivious mirth and levity!

[seekingferret]

Most of what I know about Diggers is that they had awesome music which was covered by Chumbawamba of all people.

[sovay]

Chumbawamba of all people.

I think it's more that "Tubthumping" is about the least characteristic song that could have made Chumbawamba famous, since they were, in the technical-political sense, anarchist punk.

[skygiants]

I am absolutely going to buy this Chumbawumba record.

[legionseagle]

Gerald Winstanley is (or was, in happier times when there were communal get-togethers) celebrated in festivals in Ormskirk with open air concerts and so forth.

[skygiants]

That is delightful to hear, I hope he will soon be celebrated again in such a fashion as he deserves!

[evewithanapple]

If you're looking for a more general English Civil War primer, I recommend Diane Purkiss's book on the subject - it is a BRICK and covers every aspect of the conflict you might have questions about (and some you probably don't.) My main ECW point of reference is The Devil's Whore, a BBC drama from about . . . twelve years ago (JESUS) which devoted a significant period of screentime to the Levellers and specifically John Lilburne; it was a real "I appreciate your convictions, but also get over yourself and get a damn job so your family isn't starving" situation.

[skygiants]

Thank you for the recs!! My main or at least most recent encounters with the English Civil War have been through Frances Hardinge's books, which are fantastic but also, you know, middle-grade fiction, so there's only so much historical detail that they really have the opportunity to get into ...

[esmenet]

clearly we need to be working harder on alchemy

[skygiants]

They had the right idea all along!

[sovay]

He devotes time to Levellers, a popular movement for broader suffrage and religious toleration; Diggers, more extremist Levellers who believed in common property and made a movement of squatting on privatized land and planting crops there

I know both of these groups primarily through their folk music and this book strictly through the song of the same name written by Leon Rosselson after he read Hill.

[lauradi7dw]

LR makes sense, but I had ascribed it to Dick Gaughan, having heard that first, maybe.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x0tPr_GIMd4

[qian]

I've read/seen so much fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold for ill-advised personal gain but WHERE is all my fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold so they can overthrow the global economy and institute an egalitarian society?

This is such a good idea!! I might try to fit it into my next novel. I need around four cute revolutionaries and only have ideas for three.

[conuly]

I will read the hell out of that novel.

[chestnut_pod]

Well, this is an excellent advertisement! I completely agree re: egalitarian alchemists.

[skygiants]

These visionaries must be honored!

[rushthatspeaks]

I highly recommend reading some of the Digger and Leveller texts, because they were as revolutionary in their approach to the English language as they were in other directions. Abiezer Coppe's 'A Fiery Flying Roll' has already been mentioned, and if anyone ever asks me to teach a class on the construction of prose English, I am going to have that on the syllabus as a compare-and-contrast to the King James Bible. Also, Coppe is IMO delightfully, mystically mad.

[rydra_wong]

Are you familiar with Caryl Churchill's play (which draws heavily on Hill and features Coppe as a character), Light Shining In Buckinghamshire?

[sophia_sol]

Oooh I really want to read fiction about egalitarian alchemists now, they sound so cool!!

The book as a whole also sounds very interesting. But. ALCHEMISTS.

[skygiants]

Like I'm sure there were also alchemists who were in it for personal gain but why focus on them when the ones with big world-changing philosophical ideals are so much more interesting?!

[ellen_fremedon]

(to quote nextian: "i get that real "enjolras is talking" vibe off the guy")

Have you seen this Les Mis Levellers AU?

[skygiants]

OH MY GOD, no I hadn't, and I'm overjoyed to learn that it exists, thank you!

[conuly]

WHERE is all my fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold so they can overthrow the global economy and institute an egalitarian society?

It'd never work, but that's part of the fun.

[skygiants]

It's about the idealism!

[ndrosen]

The Winstanley quote reminded me of Henry George (1839-1897), the American economist who had a mass movement going for a while; he pointed out that private property in land was based on violence and robbery, and proposed to leave the landowners their titles, but appropriate the land rents through a single tax on the value of land. I am a Georgist.

Thomas Paine had had essentially the same idea, set forth in “Agrarian Justice,” and for that matter, Herbert Spencer had written in the first edition of “Social Statics” that private landownership was unjust, and derived from violence, not consent. He asked, in response to the argument that time had made the landowners’ titles valid, “At what rate per annum do unjust claims become just ones?”

[luzula]

Thomas Paine had had essentially the same idea, set forth in “Agrarian Justice,”

I read The Rights of Man a while ago and thought there was such an interesting and unspoken tension in his ideas around property. Like, he argues that the rights of monarchy and aristocracy derive from unjust conquest, but avoids explicitly making the same argument for property. He has radical ideas of a steeply increasing tax on estates, but holds that the right of property is inviolable...at the same time as he approvingly quotes the French revolutionaries taking away all the Catholic Church's properties. It's such a mix!

[luzula]

I can recommend Sea-Green Ribbons by Naomi Mitchison, from 1991. It's about a young woman growing up in a Leveller family, she also joins the Diggers for a while.

[skygiants]

Thank you very much for the rec, I've been meaning to read more Mitchison for ages anyway and this sounds highly relevant to my interests!

[larryhammer]

Quakers, whom he argues were significantly more politically radical in their early days and moved away from those views as a survival tactic for the movement when the window for religious toleration began to narrow

This matches what Quakers tell themselves about their own history.

[skygiants]

It's an interesting part of the history that I hadn't been aware of! (Hill is also more interested in James Nayler than George Fox, though that might be because he thinks that George Fox has already been adequately discussed elsewhere.)

[pengwern]

This sounds like an absolutely amazing ook given what I know is basically.....nothing, as filtered through Discworld

[skygiants]

Same here, with a little additional filtering through Frances Hardinge -- wonderful books but not really enough upon which to build a historical grounding!

[conuly]

BTW, mind if I link to you and spread your alchemist fic prompt? Because that needs to be a prompt, and it needs to be widely shared.