The Ranters – part one
I. The Ranters and their historians
It is well-known that the Ranters got a hostile press from just about everyone, both in their own day and for more than three centuries thereafter. Hence Abiezer Coppe (1619–1672?), whom some contemporaries regarded as a fiery sectarian preacher turned diabolically possessed mad libertine, was portrayed by the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood as a lascivious blasphemer ultimately and justly debilitated by alcoholism and sexually transmitted disease. So blackened was Coppe’s name that in the late eighteenth century he was still remembered as one of the ‘wildest enthusiasts’ of a ‘fanatical age’. Nineteenth century critics fundamentally concurred with this verdict, calling Coppe a ‘strange enthusiast’ and the ‘great Ranter’. In the same vein Alexander Gordon (1841–1931), a Unitarian minister and authority on Protestant nonconformity, dismissed Coppe as an insane if somewhat pathetic fanatical proponent of ‘distorted antinomianism’, given to flights of mystical fancy that were occasionally expressed in ‘passages of almost poetical beauty’. Early twentieth-century commentators were little different, calling Coppe ‘an Anabaptist who later joined the Ranters’. In the 1930s he was variously described as a ‘Familist’; a ‘zealous anabaptist’ turned one of the ‘wildest’ of the Ranter sect and author of a book full of ‘curious ravings’; a ‘Distorted Antinomian’; and an ‘indefatigable dipper’ who became a ‘Ranter’. The following decade he remained ‘one of the most notorious of the Ranters’.
Just as Coppe was vilified in particular, so the Ranters at large long remained maligned. Partly this was because they neither sought nor succeeded in establishing an enduring legacy. Their leading lights imprisoned, their most inflammatory writings suppressed and publicly burned, their influence dissipated, the Ranters initially had no advocates to refashion their past and rehabilitate their reputation. Unlike Baptists, Quakers and even Muggletonians, who carefully collected, collated and copied manuscript letters, testimonies and treatises, as well as meticulously compiling records of their fellow believers’ sufferings, almost no one attempted to legitimate the Ranters by preserving their records for posterity. Moreover, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century denominationally committed historians – largely preoccupied as they were with constructing complicated if unbroken genealogies of religious dissent – were repeatedly at pains to distinguish the Ranters’ blasphemous opinions and seemingly scandalous activities from those of their much eulogised founding fathers, mothers and precursors during the English Revolution and beforehand. Consequently Quaker scholars, even allowing for polemical exaggeration and distortion, frequently denounced the Ranters as a dangerous pantheistic aberration and disorganised degenerate movement whose extreme mystical doctrines and immoral excesses had threatened to spread like a contagion across the nation had it not been for the spiritual antidote afforded by George Fox’s ministry and Quakerism. This alone had cured many wayward souls infected by ‘a serious outbreak of mental and moral disorder’.
Nor did the Ranters fare better within the two broad prevailing historiographical trends of the period that were largely responsible for the piecemeal rediscovery or recovery of what is now usually called English radicalism. One was bourgeois, liberal and teleological, essentially concerned with identifying democratic and republican ideas that emerged in response to acute social and economic tensions during the English Revolution, together with tracing their growing influence during the American and French Revolutions. The other was Socialist and Marxist, with an emphasis on secular class struggle under the shadow of capitalism. Neither, however, effectively integrated the Ranters within their conceptions of radicalism. Indeed, the Ranters at first received scant attention from Marxists and their fellow travellers, mainly because they found it awkward incorporating their supposed practical antinomianism and pantheistic doctrines within orthodox, scientific interpretations of the Revolution. ‘Arrogantly and snobbishly’ lumped with self-appointed Messiahs on the ‘lunatic fringe’ by Christopher Hill, it was other scholars who originally stressed the Ranters’ humble origins, ‘bold class hatreds’, and powerful demands for social justice – including the ‘common ownership of all goods’. The most notable was Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) provided an incipient contribution to the psychoanalysis of prophetic and messianic figures, as well as a welcome reprint of key passages from selected Ranter texts. Presented as the celebrated ‘leader of the drinking, smoking Ranters’ and a ‘future adept of the Free Spirit’, here Coppe’s most significant work, the ‘vigorous and colourful’ A Fiery Flying Roll (1649), was characterised as the product of a literary eccentric since it was full of ‘curious ravings’ and ‘stylistic idiosyncrasies’. Envisaging the Ranters as ‘mystical anarchists’ prone to extravagant behaviour, Cohn eventually located them within a loose tradition spanning from the Brethren of the Free Spirit (13th and 14th centuries) and Spiritual Libertines (16th century) to Charles Manson and his murderous ‘family’ (1969).
By the late 1960s several unpublished dissertations had been written on the Ranters. Though most researchers were based in North American universities, one was completed at Oxford by J.F. McGregor under Hill’s supervision. McGregor suggested that Ranterism was indicative of a ‘climate of opinion, expressed in antinomian ideals’ that ‘could not be translated into social terms’ because it was a ‘philosophy of individualism’. According to McGregor, after 1651 Ranterism existed as a largely fictional image in contemporaries’ minds, although the Ranters also survived indistinctly as a ‘mood of disaffection’. Then in 1970 A.L. Morton published The World of the Ranters.
Morton was a former chair of the briefly influential Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, an organisation whose objective had been to create a tradition of Marxist history in Britain. Having previously speculated that William Blake (1757–1827) and that ‘strange genius’ Abiezer Coppe ‘shared a common body of ideas and expressed those ideas in a common language’ – particularly the seeming resemblances between Coppe’s Fiery Flying Roll and Blake’s Prophetic Books and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – Morton elaborated on the Ranters’ ‘crazy extravagances’ and Coppe’s outrageous courting of London’s unrevolutionary underclass. For Morton, the Ranters ‘formed the extreme left wing of the sects’, both theologically and politically. Combining a ‘pantheistic mysticism and a crudely plebeian materialism’ with a ‘deep concern for the poor’ and a ‘primitive biblical communism’, the ‘Ranter Movement’ spectacularly manifested itself in late 1649, peaked the next year and then splintered under the hammer of ‘savage repression’. Its sudden emergence at a moment when the ‘radical, plebeian element’ had been politically defeated signalled ‘all the signs of a revolution in retreat’ from the forces of bourgeois respectability. In contrast to the rural Diggers, the Ranters were primarily an urban movement, appealing to the ‘defeated and declassed’, drawing support from London’s ‘impoverished artisans and labourers’ (including those on the margins of criminality), as well as ‘wage earners and small producers’ in numerous towns.
All the while, Hill became increasingly sympathetic to the Ranters, recognising that they too perhaps had ‘something to say to our generation’. Consequently, they underwent a remarkable transformation in The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Thus, together with the Diggers and other ‘daring thinkers’, the Ranters were lauded by Hill for boldly defying early modern European bourgeois society’s greatest achievement – the Protestant ethic. Accordingly, just as antinomianism was reconfigured as ‘Calvinism’s lower-class alter ego’, so Ranter swearing was seen as an act of defiance against God and the ‘imposition of Puritan middle class standards’. Furthermore, Hill likened the Ranters’ tobacco smoking and ‘communal love-feast[s]’ to drug-taking and free love, overstating – as he later admitted – their participation in a (Puritan) ‘sexual revolution’. Under the heading ‘a counter-culture?’ he claimed that the ‘Ranter ethic’ – as preached by Coppe, ‘leader of the drinking, smoking, swearing Ranters’, and Clarkson – ‘involved a real subversion of existing society and its values’. Only the experience of defeat put a check to the ‘intoxicating excitement’. For ‘what had looked in the Ranter heyday as though it might become a counter-culture became a corner of the bourgeois culture’. That this was a post-1960s manifesto thinly disguised as ‘History from below’ was precisely the point.
Over a decade passed before an uncompromising reaction to Morton’s and Hill’s interpretations was published. This was J.C. Davis’s Fear, Myth and History (1986), provocatively chosen by Kenneth Baker, then Margaret Thatcher’s Education Secretary, as his favourite book that year. Davis argued that abusive terms like ‘Ranter’ were ‘witness to some sort of social struggle rather than functioning as precise cognitive signifiers or markers’. Furthermore, he detected ‘a tension between the word “Ranter”, as revelatory of the perception of seventeenth-century commentators, and the thing Ranter, as perceived by twentieth-century historians’. Assuming that he was dealing with a heterogeneous collection of individuals rather than a homogenous group, Davis proceeded to test the proposition that Ranterism was either a ‘reasonably consistent set of doctrines’ maintained, however fleetingly, by a handful of people or the ‘broader movement’ that contemporaries ordinarily reported. To help identify a small core of ‘Ranter ideologists’ linked by common theological doctrines and a shared social programme, he proposed two essential components of Ranter thought: antinomianism and pantheism. He then set about eliminating the Ranter fringe (‘new messiahs’, ‘new prophets’ and ‘new victims’) before tightening the core to dispense with several alleged Ranters – the millenarian and visionary George Foster, (fl.1650), the former army chaplain Joseph Salmon (fl.1647–fl.1656), and the preacher Richard Coppin (fl.1646–fl.1659). There followed an examination of the Ranter core, which consisted of the Leicester shoemaker Jacob Bothumley (1613–1692), Abiezer Coppe, the anonymous author of A Justification of the Mad Crew (1650) and the preacher, polemicist and sectary Lawrence Clarkson (c.1615–1667?).
For Davis, the evidence suggested that ‘the Ranters did not exist either as a small group of like-minded individuals, as a sect, or as a large-scale, middle-scale or small movement’. Consequently, he was forced to justify why if there were no Ranters so many contemporaries believed the contrary. Accordingly Davis ascribed literary conventions to the ‘sensational’ literature; ‘short, racy, disapproving and at the same time prurient’. He maintained that Ranterism was ‘a powerful and dangerous slur’ which had to be directed ‘away from the Commonwealth towards it enemies’. Amidst the ‘reckless fabrication and repetitive exploitation of material’ he noted two themes – the influence of atheism and the relationship between Ranterism and royalism. Moreover, sectarian exploitation of the term by Baptists, Quakers and Muggletonians kept this image of ‘deviance’ alive. There was thus ‘no Ranter movement, no Ranter sect, no Ranter theology’.
The fierce but inconclusive debate that immediately followed generated a great deal more heat than light, its most enduring legacy being destructive rather than constructive: concerns, given the problematic nature of the evidence, that it may prove impossible to establish the Ranters’ existence to everyone’s satisfaction. Even so, it is sometimes forgotten that Davis, like Morton and Hill, depended entirely upon printed documents.
Yet for all its faults, in the furore generated by his book it has generally been ignored by Davis’s critics that parts of his argument are persuasive, and that some of what he said is correct. Davis was right to warn against taking Lawrence Clarkson’s autobiography The lost sheep found (1660) or polemics by Baptists, Quakers and Muggletonians at face value. Likewise, several pamphlet and newsbook accounts of ‘Ranters’ were either completely fictional or mainly invented. The majority, however, mention names that can be corroborated from court records and seem to accurately reflect charges brought against the accused. The term Ranter should therefore be used cautiously to indicate hostile yet shifting contemporary attitudes towards individuals who normally knew each other (usually through conventicles, Baptist congregations or as members of spiritual communities); believed themselves to have been liberated from, or passed beyond, the outward observance of gospel ordinances; maintained that all things sprang from God and that God was in all living things; espoused similar theological notions that were regarded as blasphemous, especially that sin was imaginary and that to the pure all things are pure; justified transgressive sexual behaviour, drunkenness and cursing through scriptural precedents and interpretations; demanded that Christians fulfil their charitable obligations by giving to the poor, sick and hungry; and enacted shocking gestures as prophetic warnings of the impending Day of Judgement. While none of this was exclusive to the Ranters, and while there was no Ranter archetype that conformed precisely to all aspects of this characterisation, collectively it embodies the central features of their perceived ideas, outward conduct and self-fashioned identities.
With the publication of two ‘Ranter poems’, Nigel Smith’s important collection of Ranter Writings and Andrew Hopton’s edition of Coppe’s selected writings, literary experts have gradually shown one way out of the impasse reached in the Ranter debate by focussing on typography, genre, imagery, mimicry, parody, vocabulary and modes of address. Archival based biographical studies of the major personalities with an emphasis on mapping social networks offer another exit. The following posts in this series will therefore highlight the fruits of this relatively new research by identifying the Ranters, exploring their origins, examining how they were seen by contemporaries, accounting for their activities, discussing their beliefs, assessing their possible sources, and reviewing the ways in which their texts were expressed and suppressed. Accordingly, the next post will focus on identifying the Ranters and their origins.