Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered: The Levellers, the Civic Past, and Popular Protest in Civil War London
Philip Baker
abstract The Leveller movement, based in London, recruited its most persist- ent supporters from the capital. Nevertheless, until recently, historians have not examined the impact of the city’s history, institutions, and customs on the Lev- ellers themselves, the nature of their campaign, and the content of their program. Philip Baker argues that the Levellers should be located within a long-standing tradition of protest concerning the rights and freedoms of London’s citizenry. An analysis of the relationship between the Levellers’ political action and its cultural roots sheds light on why they took up some of the positions they did. But the Lev- ellers, far from being prisoners of London’s past, developed a politicized interest in the city’s constitutional history that was part of their wider involvement in the national constitutional conflicts of the mid-1640s. keywords: John Lilburne; John Wildman; rights and responsibilities of London citizenship; seventeenth- century elections and voting rights in Britain; influence of London’s history and political culture on the Levellers