The Ranters carried certain tendencies of their time in religious belief and social action to extraordinary lengths. The social immanence of God justified a startling degree of license in the moral sphere, especially where sexuality was concerned. 'Ranting' - uncouth, vehement, blasphemous behaviour - was the order of the day. The Ranter was a baffling combination of the mystic and the hooligan.

The Ranters were a group of religious libertarians who flourished in the three years following the execution of Charles I in January 1649. They represented one extreme response to the religious and social problems which had come to a head in the conflict between King and Parliament in the 1640s. Ranters believed that God dwelt inside them, as an inner light whose authority was above all laws. Salvation existed here on earth, and any act was justifiable so long as it was performed under the working of the spirit. Sin was thus made to disappear. The consequence was, for some Ranters, sexual licence, and for others, blaphemy and swearing. [Although to represent it by these two points is to over-simplify it far too much. - daWB] The Ranters did not call themselves so, and the term itself, in its variant forms, 'Rantipoler', 'Rantizer', 'Rantism', was loosely applied to anyone of extreme opinions. There is further confusion in that some of the Ranters' expectations and expressions were shared by other radical and religious groups of the period. Nevertheless, it seems that there was an identifiable body of individuals between 1649 and 1651 which was subject to a thorough persecution by the government. The breakdown of royal authority at the start of the 1640s, especially the collapse of censorship, resulted in an enormous intensification of radical Puritan activity, and it has become customary to think of the Civil War and Interregnum years giving rise to a milieu in which a heightened popular consciousness became aware of many different religious and political ideas and practices.It was this milieu which spawned Ranterism, and through which the [so-called - daWB] Ranter spokesmen, Coppe, Clarkson, Salmon and Bauthumley passed, on their way to their own millenial and egalitarian solutions.

Abiezer Coppe, perhaps the most notorious Ranter, was born at Warwick in 1619. He went up to Oxford, where he showed Presbyterian leanings, and left without a degree at the beginning of the war. […] By 1646, Coppe had turned Baptist and was preacher to an army garrison at Compton House in Warwickshire. It seems that Coppe had a sizeable following with many converts in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. He was capable of 'admirable good oratory', and recommended the necessity of rebaptism and of reproaching the ministry in defiance of ordinances. During the next two years he met Richard Coppin, whose influence set Coppe on the road to his eventual Antinomian stance. Coppin was often confused with the Ranters because he knew many of them, and because his Antinomianism was of the egalitarian variety. Though he was imprisoned in 1655, he took no part in the most demonstrative Ranter activities.

In 1648, Coppe provided the preface to the anti-clerical John the Divine's Divinity, and a year later, another preface for Coppin's Divine Teachings. […] 1649 also saw the publication of Some Sweet Sips, of some Spiritual Wine, as fiercely critical of formalised religion as the two prefaces, and excitedly Antinomian, but also stressing the sublimity of God in man and in nature. It is Coppe's first deeply pantheistic statement.

Some time towards the end of 1649, Coppe experienced his true awakening when, in [Richard] Baxter's words, 'God gave him over to a spirit of delusion that he fell into a Trance, and professeth himself that he contrived it three or four days, that he fell into it, and that he was in Hell'. This was an extreme form of melancholy which Baxter felt was 'worse than mad in his delusion'. But Coppe's subsequent recourse to swearing, the claimed language of God in him, attracted some support, and recieved printed expression in late 1649 with the publication of A Fiery Flying Roll, bound together with A Second Fiery Flying Roule, so adding a crushing denunciation of the rich to Coppe's apocalyptic hopes. Parliament was sufficiently worried to respond with an order condemning the Roll's 'horrid blasphemies, and damnable and detestable opinions', and authorising the collection and burning of all copies of the tract, while those responsible for it were to be investigated. The broadsheet carrying the order is dated 1 February 1650, but Coppe himself had already been arrested in Warwick early in January, and transferred to Coventry gaol on the 10th.

During the second week of March, Joseph Salmon arrived in Coventry with the intention of visiting the imprisoned Coppe. Salmon had been in the army and had preached in London. His first pamphlet, Anti-Christ in Man (1647), was written from a Seeker position though it looks forward to the birth of the spirit in man. […] Salmon seems to have known most figures in the Ranter milieu, not only Coppe and Wyke, but also Coppin, possibly Bauthumley, and certainly Webbe, with whom he corresponded. Salmon began to preach in Coventry, and Bulstrode Whitelock reports of his 'wicked Swearing, and uncleaness, which he justified and others of his way, That it was God which did swear in them, and that it was their liberty to keep company with Women, for their Lust'. Arrest for Salmon followed quickly.

Nevertheless, another Ranter arrived to preach. This was Andrew Wyke, who had come with his mistress, Mrs Wallis. Wyke came from Colchester, where he had been active, according to Gangraena, as a preacher and a dipper, refusing to answer questions put by the Assembly of Divines in 1646. Wyke was held in custody, during which time he is reported to have written his first work, The Innocent in Prison Complaining, though this does not seem to have survived. Wyke's behaviour in Coventry was as astonishing as Salmon's, as he 'kissed a Souldier three times, and said, I breathe the Spirit of God into thee, and many the like abominable blasphemies'. Wyke was attempting to leave Coventry when he was arrested and imprisoned with the others, though both he and Salmon were able to attract a considerable audience by preaching through the grates of the prison on Sundays.

Salmon and Wyke were originally fined two shillings each for common blasphemy by Coventry Corporation, but their connection with Coppe caused their cases to be referred to London. In gaol, Wyke wrote letters protesting against his imprisonment. Salmon also wrote to friends outside, and he later claimed to have produced Divinity Anatomized, his most Ranter-like pamphlet, whilst still locked up. Like Coppe, he was prepared to make a protest of belief even in captivity.

The government was not particularly worried by events in a provincial city, but it was concerned when it became apparent that Ranters were active in the capital. Coppe had, in fact, been acquainted with the London Antinomian group which used nakedness in its rituals, My One Flesh, through publisher and bookseller, Giles Calvert. Calvert was instrumental in the publication of Ranter literature, as well as much other sectarian material, including Winstanley, Saltmarsh, a re-edition of some Familist writings, and later on, many Quaker tracts. Calvert acted as an important link between individuals. He was not unsympathetic to any one group, and it was also through him that Laurence Clarkson was able to contact My One Flesh, the sexually oriented centre of Ranterism.

Clarkson, or Claxton, was born at Preston in 1615, and drifted from Anglicanism to Presbyterianism, Independency and Antinomianism. He served as army chaplain under Paul Hobson until 1644, when he became an itinerant preacher in East Anglia. In 1645, he was arrested with the Baptist, Hanserd Knollys, and charged in Suffolk with dipping. The following year, he had turned Seeker, and was unofficial preacher to the troop of Cornet Nicholas Lockyer, soon to become a Leveller agitator. This account comes largely from Clarkson's account of his religious career which he published in 1660, The Lost Sheep Found. Clarkson goes on to relate how he was paid £14 for penning a Leveller piece, A Generall Charge or Impeachment of High Treason, in the name of Justice Equity, against the Communuality of England, in 1647. It argued that Parliament derived its power from the people, and crudely imitated the dialogue form developed by Richard Overton. Clarkson at least knew Winstanley, and accused him of being a self-seeking tithe-gatherer in disguise. It is impossible to tell whether Clarkson was one of the Ranters the Diggers ejected from their commune, and whom Winstanley felt had sacrificed inner Reason to outward lustings. Clarkson then joined the Ranters in London publishing A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness in 1650, in which he justified adultery by means of a close extrapolation of the phrase from Isaiah, 'I will make darkness light before them.'

The Rump was more worried by the threat to social order than by shades of theological opinion, and it established a committee on 14 June to investigate the Ranters, and to find a means of dealing with them. John Weaver was nominated chairman, and authorised to interrogate and hold offenders. On 21 June, Weaver reported back to Parliament, having questioned several people. A Single Eye had come to his attention, and an order was given for searching out its author, while the committee was charged with the responsibility of drawing up a Bill which would quell Ranterism. What emerged was the Blasphemy Act of 9 August 1650. It outlawed the essential opinions held by the Ranters, and enforced this with severe penalties. An 'Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable' opinion consisted, it was decided, of denying 'the necessity of Civil and Moral Righteousness amongst Men', of affirming that man or any creature was God (which was not a Ranter tenet), and that God lived inside living beings. To this last was added the qualifier, 'and nowhere else', whereas most of the Ranters who wrote, particularly the moderate ones, like Salmon and Bauthumley, that God lived everywhere in all of creation.

The Act also outlawed 'Uncleanness, prophane Swearing, Drunkenness, Filthiness, Brutishness, … Stealing, Cozening and Defrauding others, … Murther, Adultery, Incest, Fornication, Sodomie', and professing that 'Heaven and Happiness consisteth in the acting of these or such things'. These later sections meant that the Act compounded the intentions of the Adultery Act of 10 May 1650, as Coppe pointed out. Parliament may have aimed at precise terminology, or it may be that some of the blasphemies identified by the committee were too close to the beliefs held by members, for the House voted out a clause which made illegal the attribution of sins 'only through the Darkness that is in Men'. The debates over the penalties are equally interesting. The Act finally instituted six months imprisonment for a first offence, with banishment for a second, and death if the offender returned. Parliament voted out clauses which would authorise the punishment of publicans who harboured Ranter meetings, and officers of the law who were lax in their investigations, as well as vetoing the adoption of the army's punishment for blasphemy: being bored through the tongue.

As it turned out, the authorities were content just to keep Ranters locked up until satisfied with their recantations. Many were quickly released on a promise of future good behaviour. One pamphlet, entitled, Strange News from Newgate and the Old-Baily (1650), described the interrogation and confessions of one J. Collins and one T. Reeve, both of whom were given six months imprisonment. Though the ringleaders and pamphleteers did present a more serious problem, the administration of the Act was again inconsistent. Wyke was released on bail as early as 28 June, giving surety that he would appear before the Council of State when required. Salmon was interrogated by Robert Beak, the officer supervising the captured Ranters in Coventry, and the staunch Puritan soldier and politician, William Purefoy. As he recalls in Heights in Depths he was able to satisfy both of his integrity and return to conformity, though he had been held for six months.

At the command of Parliament, Coppe had been transferred from Coventry to Newgate prison in London early in April. Purefoy was ordered to bring Coppe to trial on 19 July, though Parliament was still pressing for the completion of the case of A Fiery Flying Roll's author on 27 September. Coppe actually held up his trial by throwing balls around the court room from the dock. He was returned to Newgate, and remained there for the first half of 1651. Early in January of that year he published his first 'recantation', A Remonstrance of the Sincere and Zealous Protestation, which is more of a protest, expressing indignation at being imprisoned for opinions which he had never held, and for acts which he had never committed. In May, Coppe wrote Copp's Return to the wayes of Truth, which did deny the tenets levelled at the Ranters in the Act, though Coppe's language is as ambiguous here as was Salmon's in his recantation. John Dury, the ecumenicist, was impressed by Coppe's apparent reformation but John Tickell was far from convinced when he witnessed one of Coppe's sermons at Burford later in 1651.

The committee had examined A Single Eye towards the end of July 1650. Clarkson describes his arrest at a meeting in Bishopsgate soon after this in The Lost Sheep Found; he had displayed his gift of the gab in resisting arrest, for which he became famous,

he framed an excuse to return back to the house, pretending he had left something of great use behind him, and so escaped away at a back door; but is re-taken, and at this day in prison

On 27 September, Parliament published a broadsheet condemning A Single Eye, and authorising its collection and burning. The same publication announced the outcome of Clarkson's trial. At his interrogation before the committee, we know that Clarkson had stood on his right to refuse to answer questions, as Lilburne had done before him, but his persecuters were convinced of his guilt, and sentenced him to three months imprisonment, with labour, to be followed by banishment. […]

Ranter gatherings occurred sporadically throughout the 1650s, though without the intensity of the early years of the Commonwealth. The subsequent history of each of the major Ranters shows a return to separatist activity, though with a quietist emphasis in most cases. Bauthumley guardedly preached at Leicester and managed to become a corporation official after the Restoration […] Coppe and Wyke returned to the Baptist community. Wyke evntually took a living in Ireland, while Coppe continued to preach in Baptist conventicles, though he thought it prudent to change his name to Higham, under which he earnt his living as a physician. […]

Salmon returned to Kent and became popular in the locality of Rochester, there laying seeds for what became a Quaker community. He preached on Sundays in the Cathedral, and recommended his sucessor, Richard Coppin. It appears that Salmon then emigrated to Barbados, where he may have been in trouble for organising separatist meetings.

Clarkson obtained a living in King's Lynn after his release, but left, so he claims, to rant once more in East Anglia. Towards the end of the 1650s he met the Muggletonian prophet John Reeve, and was converted. In his Muggletonian affirmation, Look About You, or the Right Devil Discovered (1659), he rebuked any who regarded sin, including lying with women, as justifiable as he had done previously. These were 'white ranting devils' who sinned under the pretence of religious liberty. The Muggletonians were Joachites and believed in the Doctrine of the Two Seeds, where all the right and wicked descended from Cain, and all the poor, oppressed and devout descended from Abel, so Clarkson retained his egalitarian element. He tried and failed to challenge Muggleton's authority in the movement in 1661, and died a debtor in Ludgate prison in 1667.

Contents
Foreword John Carey
Preface
Introduction
Abiezer Coppe
Preface to John The Divine's Divinity (1648)
Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spirituall Wine (1649)
'An additonal and Preambular Hint' to Richard Coppin's Divine Teachings (1649)
A Fiery Flying Roll and A Second Fiery Flying Roule (1649)
Letter from Coppe to Salmon and Wyke
A Remonstrance of The sincere and Zealous Protestation (1651)
Copp's Return to the wayes of Truth (1651)
Laurence Clarkson
A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness (1650)
From The Lost Sheep Found (1660)
Joseph Salmon
A Rout, A Rout (1649)
Letter from Salmon to Thomas Webbe (3 April 1650)
Heights in Depths (1651)
Jacob Bauthumley
The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650)
Notes
Index
Index of Biblical References

Between the close of the eleventh century and the first half of the sixteenth century it repeatedly happened in Europe that the desire of the poor to improve the material conditions of their lives became transfused with phantasies of a new Paradise on earth, a world purged of suffering and sin, a Kingdom of the Saints.

The history of those centuries was of course sprinkled with innumerable struggles between the privileged and the less privileged, risings of towns against their overlords, of artisans against merchant capitalists, of peasants against nobles. Usually those risings had strictly limited aims - the securing of specific rights, the removal of specific grievances - or else (like the famous Jacquerie) were mere outbreaks of destructive rage provoked by sheer misery. But risings could also occur which had quite a different scope. The Middle Ages had inherited from Antiquity - from the Jews and early Christians - a tradition of prophecy which during those same centuries took on a fresh and exuberant vitality. In the language of theology - which seems here the most appropriate language - there existed an eschatology, or body of doctrine concerning the final state of the world, which was chiliastic in the most general sense of the term - meaning that it foretold a Millennium, not necessarily limited to a thousand years and indeed not necessarily limited at all, in which the world would be inhabited by a humanity at once perfectly good and perfectly happy. Offering so much solace of a kind which the official teachings of the medieval Church witheld, this eschatology came to exercise a powerful and enduring fascination. Generation after generation was seized at least intermittently by a tense expectation of some sudden, miraculous event in which the world would be utterly transformed, some prodigious final struggle between the hosts of Christ and the hosts of Antichrist through which history would attain its fulfilment and justification. Although it would be a gross over-simplification to identify the world of chiliastic exaltation with the world of social unrest, there were many times when needy and discontented masses were captured by some millennial prophet. And when that happened movements were apt to arise which, though relatively small and short-lived, can be seen in retrospect to bear a startling resemblance to the great totalitarian movements of our own day.

Such a comparison is bound arouse misgivings. Is it more than a mere retrojecting on to a vanished civilisation of preoccupations which in reality belong to today alone? If I think so, that is not because I would deny that in the unpredictable kaleidoscope which we call history each transient constellation has its unique and irreductible peculiarity. But in the history of social behaviour there certainly are some patterns which in their main outlines recur again and again, revealing as they do so similarities which become ever more recognisable. And this is nowhere more evident than in the case of highly emotional mass movements such as form the subject-matter of this book. It has happened countless times that people have grouped themselves in millennial movements of one kind or another. It has happened at many different periods of history, in many different parts of the world and in societies which have differed greatly in their technologies and institutions, values and beliefs. These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirtuality to the most earthbound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it. But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.

Contents
I Introductory
Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic
The apocalyptic tradition in medieval Europe
New masses in pursuit of the Millennium
II The Earliest Messianic Movements in Medieval Europe
Tanchelm and the Eudes de l'Etoile
The poor in the first crusades
III The Saints Against the Hosts of Antichrist
Saviours in the Last Days
The demonic hosts
The psychic content of a social myth
IV In the Backwash of the Crusades
The Pseudo-Baldwin and the 'Master of Hungary'
The last cusades of the poor
V The Emperor Frederick as Messiah
Joachite prophecy and Frederick II
The resurrection of Frederick
Manifestos for a future Frederick
VI An Elite of Self-Immolating Redeemers
The genesis of the flagellant movement
Revolutionary flagellants
The secret flagellants of Thuringia
VII An Elite of Amoral Supermen (1)
Earliest traces of the 'Free Spirit'
The Amaurians
The sociology of the 'Free Spirit'
VIII An Elite of Amoral Supermen (2)
The spread of the movement
The way to self-deification
The doctrine of mystical anarchism
IX The Egalitarian State of Nature
In the thought of Antiquity
In patristic and medieval thought
X The Egalitarian Millennium (1)
Marginalia to the English Peasant's Revolt
The Taborite Apocalypse
Anarcho-communism in Bohemia
XI The Egalitarian Millennium (2)
The Drummer of Niklashausen
Thomas Müntzer
XII The Egalitarian Millennium (3)
Anabaptism and social unrest
Münster as the New Jerusalem
The messianic reign of John Leyden
Conclusion
Appendix
The 'Free Spirit' in Cromwell's England: The Ranters and their literature
Notes
Bibliography
Index