If you want to understand the roots of Quakerism in 17th century England — the political and religious culture from which it arose—a good place to start is with Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Hill focuses on the years 1645-1653, during which “there was a great overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England.” These were the years of the two civil wars, and of two revolutions: the one which succeeded, which “established the sacred rights of property, […] gave political power to the propertied, and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property—the protestant ethic”; and one that never happened, “though from time to time it threatened, […] which might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.”
Many of the issues he addresses from this time have parallels in our own time. There is much talk these days, for example, of the disappearance of the middle class. In mid-17th century England, there were the few very rich landowners and the very many poor who were subject to these men. Hill writes of what he calls “masterless men […] the rogues, vagabonds, and beggars roaming the countryside, sometimes in search of employment, too often mere unemployable rejects of a society in economic transformation.” One could relate this also to the Great Depression.
It was, to a great extent, the consequence of this social inequality that gave rise to “a nation of prophets,” as Hill describes the several dissenting religious sects that appeared at this time, including Grindeltonians, Anabaptists, Levellers, Diggers, Familists, Ranters, Seekers, and, yes, Quakers. Besides the Quakers, who were the only one of these dissenting sects to survive, the Diggers, or True Levellers, as they called themselves, were the most influential, especially in a political sense. The Diggers were so named because of a particular event on Sunday April 1, 1649, when a group of poor men collected on St. George’s hill and began to dig the waste land there to plant and cultivate vegetables. One third of England was barren waste, which lords of manors would not permit the poor to cultivate. Gerrard Winstanley, their leader, was, perhaps, the first real communist in Europe. He argued that “the earth should be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons.” In 1652, he published The Law of Freedom in a Platform, a draft constitution for a communist commonwealth (which is now in our library). Winstanley was also a champion of education for all: education was to continue until a man was “acquainted with all arts and languages.” It was to be universal and equal: there were to be no specialized scholars living “merely upon the labours of other men.” Children should be trained “in trades and some bodily employment, as well as in learning languages” or history. Girls would learn music and to read, sew, knit, and spin. Experiment and invention were to be encouraged and rewarded.
The Seekers, another of the more influential dissenting sects, many of whom became Quakers, were led by William Erbery, who believed that men should “sit still, in submission and silence, waiting for the Lord to come and reveal himself to them.”
Hill devotes an entire chapter to the Quaker Samuel Fisher, who, like Winstanley, believed that there were two possible approaches to the Bible: to “use its stories as myths, to which each could give his own sense, a sense that need not consider the original meaning of the text; or deny the infallibility of the Bible, or submit it to close textual criticism.” Fisher’s The Rustics Alarm to the Rabbies of 1660 is considered the first example of such close textual criticism, and it remained a Quaker textbook for more than a century (I am trying to find a copy of this book, but so far, without success).
In a chapter entitled “Life Against Death,” Hill delves into the basics of the Protestant Ethic, in which there was “an emphasis on the religious duty of working hard in one’s calling, of avoiding the sins of idleness, waste of time, over-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh.” Hill claims that “protestant preachers in the late 16th and early 17th centuries undertook a cultural revolution, an exercise in indoctrination, in brain-washing, on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The mode of thought and feeling and repression which they wished to impose was totally unnatural.”
In his conclusion, Hill talks of the importance of printing in 17th century England: “We do not need persuading, today, that liberty of printing ought to be given a trial. That hard-fought battle has been won. We take the victory for granted, and are sometimes skeptical of the results now that printing has become big capitalist business. But to appreciate what it meant, to recover the intoxicating excitement — not only of being able to print what one thought, but of being able to say what one thought — we have to return to those marvellous decades when it seemed as though the world might be turned upside down.”
The world in 17th century England was, indeed, turned upside down by popular access to printing. If we take a look around at our own time, with the ubiquity of social media, for example, and with the political, social, and religious turmoil it creates, we could say with equal conviction that our world, too, is being turned upside down.
A Reminder of Recent Additions to the Library
The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg (232.96 BOR)
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit (303.4 SOL)
The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment by Aldous Huxley (201 HUX)
The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England by Jonathan Healey (941.06 HEA)
Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored and the True Levellers Standard Advanced by Gerrard Winstanley (335.02 WIN)
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy by John Gurney (320.53 GUR)