Saturday, May 11, 2019

The Ranters - Religious Libertines

 Leveller's Day

Who are the oppressors, but the Nobility and Gentry; who are oppressed, is not the Yeoman, the Farmer, the Tradesman, and the Labourer? Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity.’ Laurence Clarkson 1647. 

The Levellers and the Diggers have become better known but less discussed are the Ranters who were a radical English sect around the time of Cromwell. Indeed many of them had been soldiers in the New Model Army and had felt alienated and disillusioned. The English Civil War was not primarily a war of religion, though religious rhetoric was universally deployed to bolster the political cases made by each side.

There was no recognised leader or theoretician and little, if any organisation. The views of the principal figures were inconsistent with each other. The Leveller ideal was the small, independent producer, and the Diggers expressed opposition of wage-slavery. The Ranters, of course, went much further – to them the hireling was simply a fool. It is as difficult for us to tell how many Ranters there were. The evidence is that that their movement was widespread throughout England. The Ranters flourished for a few brief years from about 1648 but by the mid-1650s they had all but faded away with many turning to Quakerism or the Muggletonians.


The Ranters offered some of the most radical ideas during the period of the English Revolution in the mid-17th century when all sorts of splits, strands and sects developed within the radical religious tradition. An earlier manifestation of their belief were the medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit or the Beghards, a 14th century heretical group.


What makes the Ranters significant, despite the obscure theological origins of their ideas, is that their attitudes were not so different from those of ordinary working people. Historian A.L. Morton described The Ranters, as “... the extreme left-wing of the sects which came into prominence during the English revolution, both theologically and politically...The Ranters, and they alone at this date, spoke for and to the most wretched and submerged elements of the population, the slum dwellers of London and other cities.” 


Apart from a small layer of the better-off, peasants and labourers took little notice of Puritan sermons, followed their own traditional standards and expressed cynicism about the whole elaborate structure of religion. Something Puritans feared almost more than Papism itself was the blasphemy of the poor who undermined their society of hard work and thrift. Even Gerrard Winstanley, disparagingly remarked that Ranters held "a general lack of moral values or restraint in worldly pleasures" Some Ranters joined Digger communities but for Winstanley, their extreme individualism, rejection of work and of the family made it hard to accept them, and he specifically warned women against Ranter promiscuity, which left them literally holding the baby.

The Ranters were also egalitarian intent upon the overthrow of the rich and powerful by the exploited and oppressed. Because the Ranters believed God to be literally in every human being, they advocated the radical equality of all people, rejected the need to adhere to the moral law emphasised by other Christians, and denounced the rich while calling for ownership in common. Ranters were pantheists who saw the presence of God in all creation. The consequences, for them, were that food and drink should be enjoyed as gifts of God. Alehouses were common venues for Ranter gatherings.

The Ranter attitude to sex was inclined towards promiscuity, and attitudes rather hostile to the family. Ranters were often associated with nudity, which they may have used as a manner of social protest, perhaps similar to similar demonstrations staged today.

The activities of the Ranters created a "moral panic" which resulted in he Adultery Act, being passed by the Rump Parliament in May 1650 and the Blasphemy Act of August 1650, directly aimed at curbing the excesses of the Ranters and their followers. The most notorious Ranters were arrested and brought to trial.

The Muggletonians, admirers of the preacher Ludowick Muggleton, originated around 1652 and its doctrines were similar to Ranter doctrines and influenced by them. Followers of Muggletonians avoid all forms of preaching or evangelism and meet only for discussion, actual worship being pointless since in their opinion God does not pay any attention to what happens on Earth. The Historian EP Thompson, jestingly described himself a ‘Muggletonian Marxist’.

The Kent and Sussex Branch coincidentally meets at The Muggleton Inn at Maidstone.

No comments: