June 1, 2024

Notes on Christopher Hill's 'The World Turned Upside Down'

Some quotes, notes and scribblings on a now famous book on the age of infant Capitalism in England – “The World Turned Upside Down” by Christopher Hill. It is remarkable how contemporary these seedlings of revolution feel, the ethics, shared understandings of power, and the materialism of so much of the so called sacred world of authority. These folks were far from misunderstanding brutes, mean multitudes. They were people fighting for a better life, and they knew in their bones they deserved it.

“Now that the protestant ethic itself, the greatest achievement of European bourgeois society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is at last being questioned after a rule of three or four centuries, we can study with a new sympathy the Digger, the Rangers, and the many other darking thinkers who in the seventeenth century refused to bow down and worship it.”

Capitalism was indeed a shattering of both traditional social norms and forms – what is often hidden, is the tremendous and varying resistance to the branching infiltration of this new social logic into the lives of everyday people. This transition was not so easily ‘smoothed over’ and accepted as given, that, instead is a contemporaneous feeling.

“The New Model, the creation of which had been so fiercely opposed by conservatives, seemed to have saved the social order: this no doubt was the calculation of many M.P.s who voted for it. But the New Model, as it was to declare proudly in June 1647, was ’no mere mercenary Army’; it was the common people in uniform, closer to their views than to those of the gentry or Parliament. And the free discussion which was permitted in this unique army led to a fantastically rapid development of political thinking.”

“Familism, developing the lower-class scepticism of the Lollards, was an anti-clerical, layman’s creed.”

“Further evidence of the unpopularity of the whole church establishment is to be found in the popular iconoclasm which broke out whenever opportunity offered: in the late 1630s and 40s altar rails were pulled down, altars desecrated, statues on tombs destroyed, ecclesiastical documents burnt, pigs and horses baptized.”

“Many such poor pretences, merely to drain the people’s purses, did their officers make. It was thus nothing new when in 1642 the Rev. Edmund Calamy told the House of Commons that ’the people complain of their ministers, that they are dumb dogs, greedy dogs, which can never have enough’. They also complained that university-educated divines tended to be members of the ruling class.”

“They encouraged the expectations that Christ’s kingdom was at hand — expectations which John Milton among many others shared. What turned out to be especially dangerous was the wholly traditional view, repeated by many of the preachers, that the common people had a very special role to play in this crisis, that they were somehow more chosen than the rich and the powerful. ‘The voice that will come of Christ’s reigning is like to begin from those that are the multitude, that are so contemptible especially in the eyes of Antichrist’s spirits and the prelacy.’ The words are those of a perfectly respectable Independent divine, by no means an extreme radical, who believed the last time would begin in 1950. There were many similar sermons preached: the doctrine became almost orthodox on the Parliamentary side. A little imagination will convey to us the effect of this prospect in conditions of economic and political crisis, when Parliament itself was calling the common people to political action for the first time in history, when the accredited preachers of God’s word not only proclaimed that the millennium was approaching but told ‘you that are of the meaner rank, common people’ that they were to take the lead in forwarding Christ’s cause.”

This passage among many, throws much light on the current situation (Al Aqsa flood) in Palestine, Gaza. Norman Finkelstein has made a similar point, contrasting the religious fervor of the Nat Turner led abolisionists, who, possessed by a spiritual force, demanded their freedom at any cost.

“There was then a long tradition of popular materialist scepticism and anti-clericalism;there was the Familist tradition that Christ was within every believer; there was the sectarian tradition of opposition to a state church, to the tithes which paid for its ministers and to the patronage system which ensured that its clergy were appointed by the ruling class. There were also the millenarian hopes built up by the Puritan preachers. It is hardly surprising that the breakdown of censorship and the establishment of effective religious toleration let loose a flood of speculation that hitherto had only been muttered in secret. In England as in Switzerland ’the lower sort of people being bred in an ancient hatred against the superiors’, greedily embraced the doctrines of Anabaptism.”

A long tradition…

“The sects insisted that minsters should be elected by the congregation and paid by the voluntary contributions of its members; many of them denied the need for separated clergy at all, and would have had a gifted layman preach on Sunday whilst labouring with his hands the other six days of the week. They advocated toleration for all protestant sects, rejecting ecclesiastical censorship and all forms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in favour of a congregational discipline with no coercive sanction behind it. They attached little important to many of the traditional sacraments of the church. Their programme would have destroyed the national church, leaving each congregation responsible for its own affairs with only the loosest contact between congregations; the church would no longer have been able to mould opinion in a single pattern, to punish ‘sin’ or proscribe ‘heresy’. There would have been no control over the thinking of the middle and lower classes.”

“The New Model was the match which fired the gunpowder. But once the conflagration started, there was plenty of combustible material lying around. To appreciate this we must look at the development of radical and heretical ideas in England, some religious, others secular; some inherited from the Lollards, some imported from the continent, all modified in the rapidly changing society of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Chapter 2 attempted to survey some of these traditions; chapters 6, 7 and 8 pick out others. In the hectic and exhilarating freedom of the 1640s and 50s all these elements were cast into a melting pot from which unprecedented new compounds were to emerge.”

“The Reformation, for all its hostility to magic, had stimulated the spirit of prophecy. The abolition of mediators, the stress on the individual conscience, left God speaking direct to his elect”

“But for seventeenth-century English radicals the religion of the heart was the answer to the pretensions of the academic divinity of ruling-class universities. Emphasis on private interpretation was not however mere absolute individualism. The congregation was the place in which interpretations were tested and approved”

“… no magistrates may forbid preaching of the gospel by gifted laymen; that ’the variety of forms in the world is the beauty of the world’. He told M.P.S to their faces that it was not Parliament’s job to reform the church: that was for members of congregations, among whom ‘a poor plain countryman, by the spirit which he hath received, is better able to judge of truth and error touching the things of God than the greatest philosopher, scholar or doctor in the world that is destitute of it’. In 1641 Sir Edward Dering ‘started with wonder and anger’ when ‘a bold mechanical’ said ‘I hope your worship is too wise to believe that which you call your creed.’ It took some getting used to.”

“There is overwhelming contemporary evidence that the strength of the sectaries lay with what Lilburne called ’the base and obscure fellows of the world.”

“In 1646 a trooper in Northamptonshire ’laid his hand on his sword and said ‘This sword should never be laid down, nor many thousands more, whilst there was a priest left in England.”’ In the following April troopers in Suffolk were saying they would never disband ’till we have cut all the priests’ throats’. Three months earlier, when a group of Presbyterian ministers visited the New Model Army at Oxford, ’the multitude of soldiers in a violent manner called upon us to prove our calling,… whether those that are called ministers had any more authority to preach in public than private Christians which were gifted’."

“‘How many men are made poor by making a few ministers rich?’”

“‘We were before ruled by King, Lords and Commons, now by a General, a Court Martial and House of Commons; and we pray you what is the difference?’”

“At the beginning (say they), when God hadfirstmade the world, all men were alike, there was no principality, then was no bondage or villeinage: that grew afterwards by violence and cruelty. Therefore why should we live in this miserable slavery under those proud lords and crafty lawyers, etc.?”

“Echoing Sir Thomas More, the author denounced the rich thieves’ who ‘make a combination and call it a law, to hang a poor man if he do steal, when they have wrongfully taken from him all his maintenance’. They make themselves thieves by Act of Parliament’ The property of the rich should be shared among the poor, and redivided at least once a year. To give unto every man with discretion so near as may be an equal share of earthly goods,’…”

“They simply strengthened the demagogic arguments of Oliver Cromwell, who lumped Levellers and True Levellers together as ‘a despicable and contemptible generation of men’, ‘persons differing little from beasts’. ‘Did not the levelling principle tend to reducing all to an equality, … to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord? … a pleasing voice to all poor men, and truly not unwelcome to all bad men.”

“The millenarian clergyman Nathanael Homes rejected ‘a levelling anarchy’. William Hartley complained in 1651 that sectaries were branded as Tompson’s party, Levellers’. The word Leveller is a term of abuse cast upon many a person for holding forth of righteous principles.’ Yet even he felt he had to go out of his way to disavow communism.”

“One must insist, to restore the balance, that the constitutional Levellers were a very radical left wing of the revolutionary party. Some of those who loom larger in this book were much less intellectually consistent and principled than the Levellers: their rejection of capitalism was often backward-looking, negative and unrealistic. The group of whom this is least true, I shall argue, was the True Levellers. It is important to see them in this historical perspective.”

“Communal cultivation could allow for capital investment in improvements without sacrificing the interests of commoners. There was land enough to maintain ten times the present population, abolish begging and crime, and make England ‘first of the nations.”

“The economic arguments against those who merely defended commoners’ traditional rights in the waste were overwhelming. England’s growing population could be fed only by more intensive cultivation, by bringing marginal land under the plough. Enclosure by men with capital, brutally disregarding the rights of commoners, did at least do the job; in the long run, its advocates rightly claimed, it created more employment. But in the short run it disrupted a way of life, causing intense misery; and the employment which it did ultimately create was not of a sort to attract free commoners. Collective cultivation of the waste by the poor could have had the advantages of large-scale cultivation, planned development, use of fertilizers, etc. It could have fed the expanding English population without disrupting the traditional way of life to anything like the extent that in fact happened. The Diggers sowed their land with carrots, parsnips and beans - crops of the sort which were to transform English agriculture in the seventeenth century by making it possible to keep cattle alive throughout the winter in order to fertilize the land. ‘Manuring’ is the crucial word in Winstanley’s programme. (True religion and undefiled is to let every one quietly have earth to manure.’) Winstanley had got a solution to his own paradox: ’the bondage the poor complain of, that they are kept poor by their brethren in a land where there is so much plenty for everyone, if covetousness and pride did not rule as king in one brother over another’.”

“Winstanley told lords of manors that ’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’.”

Echoes of Australia in the statement above..

“The philosophy which started which a vision seems to have had ended as a kind of materialist pantheism, in which God or abstract Reason can be known only in man or nature; and man is more important than abstractions. Winstanley pushed this tendency to its logical conclusion. With a nod both towards the magical tradition and towards experimental science, he wrote: ‘To know the secrets of nature is to know the works of God… And indeed if you would know spiritual things, it is to know how the spirit or power of wisdom and life, causing motion or growth, dwells within and governs both the several bodies of the stars and planets in the heavens above; and the several bodies of the earth below, as grass, plants, fishes, beasts, birds and mankind. For to reach God beyond the creation, or to know what he will be to a man after the man is dead, if any otherwise than to scatter him into his essences of fire, water, earth and air of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in his compounded body.’”

“‘There is no man or woman needs go to Rome nor to hell below ground, as some talk, to find the Pope, Devil, Beast or power of darkness; neither to go up into heaven above the skies to find Christ the word of life. For both these powers are to be felt within a man, fighting against each other.’”

“Winstanley, by a remarkable imaginative feat, transmuted this apocalyptic vision into a theory of rationalism and democracy. The key lies in his equation of God with Reason, and Reason with the law of the universe. In the third age, now beginning, ’the Lord himself, who is the Eternal Gospel, doth manifest himself to rule in the flesh of sons and daughters’. Their hearts will be retuned to the Reason which pervades the cosmos, to ’that spiritual power that guides all men’s reasoning in right order to a right end’. Every man subject to Reason’s law becomes a Son of God. He no longer ’looks upon a God and a ruler without him, as the beast of the field does’; his ruler is within, whether it be called conscience or love or Reason. This is Christ’s second coming, after which ’the ministration of Christ in one single person is to be silent and draw back’ before the righteousness and wisdom in every person.”

“Men conscious of their helplessness, their frustration, could easily be convinced that they were sinful. Because they were sinful they were discouraged from trying to remedy their situation. If they confessed to a priest and paid the appropriate fees, they could be absolved and set free from their sins - until the next time. The medieval church had evolved a workable system of social control, aided by the useful invention of Purgatory. But it over-reached itself in the sale of indulgences, remission of the penalties of sin for cash down.”

“Tawney was referring especially to Calvinism when he spoke of ’the central paradox of religious ethics - that only those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world upside down who are convinced that already, in a higher sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they are the humble instruments’.”

“This double sense of power - individual self-confidence and strength through unity - produced that remarkable liberation of energy which is typical of Calvinism and the sects during our period. Men felt free: free from hell, free from priests, free from fear of worldly authorities, free from the blind forces of nature, free from magic. The freedom might be illusory: an inner psychological self-deception. Or it might correspond to outer reality, in that it was likely to be felt by men who were economically independent. But even an illusory freedom might give a man the power to win real freedom, just as mimetic magic did help primitive man to grow his crops.”

“English and Scottish Presbyterians anticipated Hobbes in teaching that it was the function of civil government to restrain the depravity natural to all men. Henry Parker, a political associate of the Presbyterians and a theoretical predecessor of Hobbes, wrote in 1642 that ‘man being depraved by the Fall of Adam grew so untame and uncivil a creature that the law of God written in his breast was not sufficient to restrain him from mischief or to make him sociable’.”

“The idea that it is just to visit the sins of the fathers upon all succeeding generations is part of the primitive complex of ideas which produced the blood feud, and is well suited to a society based on inherited status.”

“There were indeed inherent contradictions in combining a theology which stressed that the elect were a minority with a moral preaching designed to reach all men. All the orthodox would have agreed with William Crashaw’s dictum: The greater part generally is the worst part.’ Thomas Hooker in 1632 could ‘speak it by experience that the meaner sort of people, it is incredible what ignorance is among them’. Perkins and other Puritan theologians solved this by teaching that God would accept the will for the deed; that although we cannot save ourselves by our efforts, nevertheless a passionate desire to be saved was strong presumptive evidence that one was in fact among the elect.”

Difficult to perceive the true dimensions of ones life from which such beliefs were given reality and substantiation. We cannot just assume that all were uncritical, that one didn’t toil and labor in their secretly felt contradictions. What wonder.

“The elite were the elect.”

“Protestantism began by looking like a great liberation of the human spirit. But within a decade of Luther’s protest he was faced by a peasant revolt which attacked property and social subordination, as Luther understood them, altogether; and within another decade the Anabaptists of Munster rose against the whole existing social order. Printing had made protestantism possible because it facilitated the rapid spread of popular theology among the literate, especially in towns. Where the Lollard Bible circulated in tens of copies, Tyndale’s New Testament circulated in hundreds and the Geneva Bible in thousands. But printing also ruined protestantism as a single coherent creed because the reading of books is even less possible to control than the reading of manuscripts. The pocketable Geneva Bible could be privately digested and privately interpreted. Once the masses of the population were called into political activity, whether in sixteenth-century Germany or seventeenth-century England, some were bound to demand salvation for themselves. The German and Dutch Anabaptists failed in their attempt to storm heaven.”

“If sin was an invention, what then justified private property, the division of society into classes, the state which protected property? Nobody could stop such questions being generally discussed in the 1640s. Winstanley reversed the traditional formula: it was not the Fall that caused property, but property that caused the Fall. ‘When self-love began to arise in the earth, then man began to fall.’ ‘When mankind began to quarrel about the earth, and some would have all and shut out others, forcing them to be servants; this was man’s fall.’ State power, armies, laws and the machinery of ‘justice’, prisons, the gallows, all exist to protect the property which the rich have stolen from the poor. Exploitation, not labour, is the curse. We must abolish wage labour if we are to restore prelapsarian freedom. Buying and selling, and the laws that regulate the market, are part of the Fall.”

“He shared the hope of alchemists and magical writers, that the abundance of Eden might be recreated on earth, in Bacon’s case by experiment, mechanical skill, and intense cooperative effort.”

“Francis Osborne in 1656 reflected that once implicit faith in the creed authoritatively established by a state church was abandoned, ’the unbiassed rabble … emancipated out of the fetters their former creed confined them to,’ would question the existence of heaven and hell no less than the Divine Right of Kings of which the Puritan clergy had taught them to be sceptical.”

“Until men had worked out a much stronger sense of history, of evolution, atheism could only be a negative, epicurean creed in a static universe. Atheists could hardly work for a transformation of society: for the revolutionaries God was the principle of change. If they lost belief in God, what remained? This is what made Milton insist on human freedom and responsibility, in his desperate attempt to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men. The backwardness of history and natural science made it impossible to break through to a theory of evolution in which God would become an unnecessary hypothesis.”

“We can recognize them as being in the modern world. But not wholly. However radical the conclusions, however heretical their theology, their escape-route from theology was theological - even Winstanley’s.”

“But they also marked a refusal of deference from the young to the old, from sons to fathers. No one who has read Thomas Ellwood’s vivid account of his struggle with his father can doubt that die fiercest and most anguished battles were those waged within the home, between the generations. This aspect of the rise of Quakerism in gentry families perhaps deserves further consideration.”

“When kingdoms came to be Christian, then kingdoms began to be churches; yea, churches came to be kingdoms, and national churches began. Then also Antichrist came to be great.’”

“Winstanley agreed that holy communion was not a sacrament but eating and drinking in any house, ‘in love and sweet communion with one another’”

“The analogy of modern drug-taking should enable us to understand that - in addition to the element of communal love-feast in such gatherings - the use of tobacco and alcohol was intended to heighten spiritual vision. Some years later the millenarian John Mason was excessively addicted to smoking, and ‘generally while he smoked he was in a kind of ecstasy’. (Tobacco was still a novel and rather naughty stimulant, though by 1640 it had risen to first place among London’s imports.)

“They ‘sung and whistled and danced’. Bunyan thought Ranters talked too much: this is indeed one contemporary meaning of the verb ’to rant’. Bunyan’s comment may have its bearing on Quaker silence.”

“Swearing was an act of defiance, both of God and of middle-class society, of the Puritan ethic. ‘Many think to swear is gentleman-like,’ as Bunyan put it. Courtiers and members of the upper class could get away with swearing: royalists in the civil war were known to their opponents as ‘Dammees’. For the lower classes swearing was expensive: we recall the ‘debauched seaman’ who after being fined at the rate of 6d. for an oath put 2s. 6d. on the table and had his money’s worth. Lower-class use of oaths was a proclamation of their equality with the greatest, just as Puritan opposition to vain swearing was a criticism of aristocratic and plebeian irreligion. But lower-class class and Ranter swearing was also a revolt against the imposition of Puritan middle-class standards, interfering with the simple pleasures of the poor for ideological reasons. Bibliolatry led to a phobia about swearing; rejection of the Bible made it possible again, and with it a release of the repressions which gave the Puritan middle class their moral energy.”

“John Holland, a hostile but not obviously unfair witness, says Ranters call God Reason (as Gerrard Winstanley had done). One of them said that if there was any God at all, he himself was one. God is in everyone and every living thing, said Jacob Bauthumley: ‘man and beast, fish and fowl, and every green thing, from the highest cedar to the ivy on the wall’. ‘He does not exist outside the creatures.’ God is in ’this dog, this tobacco pipe, he is me and I am him’; he is in ‘dog, cat, chair, stool’.”

“The existence of evil was a subject to which Ranters paid a good deal of attention: simple believers found their arguments difficult to answer. If God is omnipotent, some Ranters asked, why does he permit evil? Others denied that there was any such thing as sin; if there was, it must be part of God’s plan. The day of judgment is either ‘an invented thing’, ‘a bugbear to keep men in awe’, or it had begun already. There was no life after death: ’even as a stream from the ocean was distinct in itself while it was a stream, but when returned to the ocean was therein swallowed and became one with the ocean: so the spirit of man whilst in the body was distinct from God, but when death came it returned to God, and so became one with God, yea God itself.’”

“Fortunately, ’the anti-christian law of compelling me to church’ was no longer in force, since the act of 1650 abolished compulsory Sunday church attendance.” - Imagine that, in LAW!

“So we see radical religion passing into rationalism.”

“It may have been this experience with Ranters which convinced Winstanley of the need to have laws and rules in his ideal community, and punishments to deal with the idle and the ignorant, the unruly and the ‘self-ended spirits.”

“Nayler had the right to say that, arrived at through his great suffering and shame. (‘I found it alone, being forsaken. I have. fellowship there with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth’) But those phrases, ‘what is expedient’, what edifies’, closed the door on much that had been courageous and life-giving in the early Quaker movement. Heresy and schism were endemic among Quakers for the rest of the century. The enormous problem of disciplining this amorphous movement fell principally to George Fox. For all protestant churches the appeal to conscience, to the inner voice, conflicted with the necessity of organization and discipline if the church was to survive. Luther’s rejection of his own principles when quoted against him was only the first of many examples.”

“After the revolutionary decades, after Winstanley, Hobbes, Writer and Fisher, the Bible would never be the same again. But to university divines, Fisher, like William Dell, must have seemed to be committing treason to the clerical caste, by using the apparatus of scholarship to expose the scholarly mysteries to public obloquy: the rabbis particularly disliked being alarmed by rustics. Fisher deserves greater recognition as a precursor of the English enlightenment than he has yet received.”

“Chemistry became almost equated with radical theology. Webster himself hailed Erbery as ‘chemist of truth and gospel’. Francis Osborne in 1656 said that the Socinians were ’looked upon as the most chemical and rational part of our many divisions’. Samuel Fisher in 1662 praised ’that chemical divinity, that God is declaring forth the mysteries of his kingdom by’.”

“Not only did England enter the epoch of the Industrial Revolution with a ruling elite ignorant of science; the scientists of the Royal Society themselves abandoned the radicals ’enthusiastic’ schemes for equal educational opportunity. So the reservoir of scientific talent in the lower classes which these schemes had envisaged remained untapped, and ‘England advanced towards the technological age with a population ill equipped to take the fullest advantage of its resources.”

“Mr Thomas quotes attacks made during the Revolution, sometimes by women themselves, on their limited educational opportunities, their confinement to domestic duties, their subjection to their husbands and the injustices of a commercial marriage market.”

“Quakers - following the example of Familists and some Baptists - practised marriage by declaration before the congregation, with no other civil or religious ceremony.”

“What happened to the ideas which radicals for a brief period publicized, and which then returned to obscurity, we do not know. But Mr A. L. Morton has established that Blake at least inherited ideas similar to those of the Ranters, as well as knowing his Milton intimately.”

“I shall assume without argument that there is such a thing as the protestant ethic: 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. This ethic was most easily absorbed by the industrious middle classes in town and country - yeomen, craftsmen, merchants, some gentlemen. It gave a moral energy, a conviction of righteousness, that enabled them to carry out heroic feats of political revolution, and to endure that more humdrum day-to-day struggle to save and accumulate the capital which was indispensable to business success. It also convinced many of them that it was a religious duty to impose regular, disciplined labour on the lower classes (and occasionally, more daringly, on the idle upper classes): at least to create social conditions which discouraged idleness. This meant opposing observance of saints’ days, and the traditional village festivals and sports, as well as sexual irresponsibility.”

“‘Fanaticism’ and ’enthusiasm’ were the bugbears of polite and scholarly restoration society. The carefully cultivated classicism of the age of Dryden and Pope was (among other things) the literary form of this social reaction. For the radicals Latin and Greek had been the languages of Antichrist, as they were the languages of the universities, law, medicine, the three intellectual elites. Dr P. W. Thomas has shown us how the classical principles of regularity and propriety had appealed to isolated royalist intellectuals during the decades of defeat. They saw themselves as preservers of literary culture in a time of barbarism.”

“The latter were savage because they had no assurance that what they wanted to defend could be preserved by any other means than savagery.”

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