Jerome Friedman - Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution
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Jerome Friedman - Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution
[Ohio University Press 1987] There can be no doubt that the Ranters were the most radical and the most peculiar sect of the Cromwellian interregnum. Coming into prominence about 1649, the Ranters captivated the minds of many Englishmen for the next decade. They were the incarnation of the Hobbesian nightmare of masses running wild in the streets, and even Gerard Winstanley, the leader of the equally detestable and feared Diggers, considered the Ranters an abomination. Other contemporaries and subsequent authorities have been no more friendly. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote that the Ranters were the dregs of the Seeker movement. Rufus Jones, the mild mannered and tolerant historian of mystical sectarianism, concluded "The Ranters got a bad name from everybody who came into contact with them, and there is no question that it was a degenerate movement." In their own day, George Fox fumed about the immorality of those Ranters he met in prison. He observed how they drank, smoked, derided common concepts of God and, worst of all, "they sang, whistled and danced." Despite such disagreeable statements, the Ranters were important for a variety of reasons. For a few crucial years Ranter leaders found a large following in London's urban poor, though Ranter activity was also reported in virtually every corner of England as well. The Ranters' appeal was to the lowest strata of English society: the urban poor and the landless rural population, street people, criminals, and prostitutes. The Ranter message was varied. Religious institutions were a sham and God was within you. There was no heaven, no hell, and, hence, no need to live as if there were. All governance and property were theft, corruption, and extortion. All institutions emanated from and fostered class dominance and were thus of no significance to the poor Englishman. There were neither licit not illicit forms of behaviour, just deeds. In a word, the Ranters were the first recognizable movement expounding the ideas that might be called class conscious anarchism. Tame and civil Ranters wanted merely to destroy all religious institutions. More radical Ranters called for the abolition of all government and private property, and the most extreme of all hoped for a universal conflagration to destroy everything. The Ranters were more than mere malcontents feeding upon the inability of a revolutionary society in turmoil to reach political and religious consensus. They were also the heirs of the long and wonderful traditions of ancient and medieval heretical dualism found in the Brethren of the Free Spirit and in the Cathari, Bogomils, Messalians, Paulicians and Gnostics before them. Much as the Gnostics were considered a plague by early Christians, and the Cathari, Bogomils and Paulicians in later centuries, the Ranters, too, were thought by their contemporaries to be an infection and social disease. Ranters were neither polite nor modest and caused a good deal of trouble, but they were not dismissed by their contemporaries as they have been ignored by historians. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was aimed exclusively at prosecuting and persecuting the Ranters, and almost every Ranter treated in these pages was tried, found guilty in a court of law and sent to jail. Some, like Bauthumley, were more unfortunate; for speaking blasphemy his tongue was bored through with a hot poker. 
It is difficult to make too many generalizations about the Ranters for most were fierce individualists who found no need for common confessions or lists of dogmas. Some, like Coppe or Robins, were probably insane, and Tany was absolutely mad. Freeman and Norwood were upstanding gentlemen dreaming of a free England, while others such as Coppin were theologians of high caliber. Bauthumley was a spokesman for a religious quietism lost in the din and drumming of Presbyterian politics and intolerance. Foster was a political arsonist ready to pitch England into a worldwide bonfire in which all would be destroyed so that a new society, Phoenix-like, could emerge from the ashes. All the while, Clarkson preached redemption through sin as the surest path to salvation. [...]
Philosophical Ranters, [...] more than other Ranters, were concerned with the religious, conceptual, and intellectual implications of dualism and its meaning for creation, good and evil. They were the premier religious thinkers of the movement, and both Bauthumley and Coppin were required reading among Ranters. The Sexual Libertines accepted the philosophical foundations of dualism but were more concerned with how mankind should live life on earth while awaiting death and the merger of the soul with God. That they are called Sexual Libertines tells us something about the conclusions they drew. Thus, whereas philosophical Ranters were overwhelmed by the dualism of matter and spirit, good and evil, and were often very ascetic, the Libertines accepted the same dichotomy but decided to make the best of their temporary sojourn in this corrupt world of physical matter. The Libertines Coppe and Clarkson were many things, but no one called them ascetic.
Revolutionary Ranters were philosophical dualists who drew social implications from their thought. Hence, most were concerned with the religious, political and economic institutions all of which were understood to be Satan's tools for the control of mankind in this evil world. To be a revolutionary Ranter simply meant that one wished to put an end to Satan's control of the world by any means possible. Where Parliament wished to use the army against the King, the Ranters wished to use the army against everyone starting with the King and then Parliament, and then the nobility and then. . . . Gentlemen Ranters were a branch of the revolutionists but with one important difference; they were officers in the army and enthusiastic about the army's ability to hasten the destruction of England.
Divine Ranters were individuals considered Ranters by contemporaries and by their followers as well; but they differed somewhat from other Ranters in that they believed they were the actual living God. To an extent these Ranters represented the Free Spirit wing of the Ranter antecedents rather than the influence of medieval dualism. Additionally, some were insane. Thomas Tany, or Theauraujohn His Aurora, as he preferred to be called, was the consummate Ranter, combining all Ranter elements into a bizarre and fascinating intellectual system which included his own language, logic, grammar and sources. Some might point out that Tany was stark raving mad but Nietzsche was not well balanced and Schopenhauer was very depressed and finally he committed suicide.
Tales of Two Parsons concerns the lives, loves and writings of two notorious Ranters, John Pordage and Thomas Webb. Alone among the Ranters, these two gentlemen held appointments as pastors until, for a variety of incredible offenses, they were thrown out of their positions.
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