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Jul. 26th, 2021 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOn 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 quotenextian: "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?
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?
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Date: 2021-07-26 11:01 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2021-07-26 11:12 pm (UTC)https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x0tPr_GIMd4
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Date: 2021-07-26 11:18 pm (UTC)I've heard covers that took years to straighten out, especially in the folk tradition. I heard it performed first by either Billy Bragg or Patti O'Doors and I can't remember which.
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Date: 2021-07-29 02:17 am (UTC)