Chris Chapman’s Reviews > The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution > Status Update

By and large, the popular theatre for which Shakespeare wrote, was in favour of monogamous, wedded love; the aristocratic coterie theatre was more cynical and contemptuous in its attitude towards women. This may in the main be attributed to a rise in economic importance of those middling sized households, in town and country, in which the wife was a junior partner in the business.

John Boggis of Great Yarmouth asked in January 1646, 'Where is your God, in heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or doth he sit in the clouds, or where doth he sit with his arse?'

In a remarkable passage, Winstanley suggested that the doctrine of election was a mirror of the unequal social order: 'kingly government hath made the election and rejection of brethren from their birth to their death, or from eternity to eternity'.

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.

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 must 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'.

Private property is likewise a consequence of sin; but since it inevitably exists, it must be defended against the greediness of the unpropertied, who must be held in subordination. The Tudor state took over many of the functions of the mediaeval church.

Men emancipated themselves from priests, but not from the terrors of sin, from the priest internalised in their own consciences. [...] And it left a problem of social control. Protestant doctrines emphasised the separation of the elect from the unregenerate mass. Confession and absolution were abolished.

And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any one of them that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. (Acts 4:32)

While this kingly power reigned in one man called Charles, all sorts of people complained of oppression... Thereupon you that were the gentry, when you were assembled in Parliament, you called upon the poor common people to come and help you... That top bough is lopped off the tree of tyranny, and the kingly power in that one particular is cast out.

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.