The Ranters Routed?

Article by Michael Smith. Edited by Helen Doherty. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard. 

‘On the 16 of November 1650, A great Company of these new Generations of Vipers, called Ranters, were gathered together near the Soho as Westminster, where they exercised themselves in many royatous and uncivil actions; and after some hour spent in feasting and the like, they stripped themselves quite naked’ – The Ranters Bible (1650) 

‘there was no Ranter movement, no Ranter sect, no Ranter theology’ – J. C. Davis, Fear Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians 

The proliferation of religious sects during the 1640s is one of the most defining features of the period. It caused much controversy among contemporaries and a fetish for heresiographies, logging every new sect along with their particular and peculiar beliefs and practices. Many that were recorded were ridiculous and clearly fantastical such as the ‘Adamites’ who allegedly went about naked or the ‘Persians’ who like beasts worshipped the rising sun. Their creation and numeration were evidently an exercise at worst of scare-mongering and at best buffering religious and moral boundaries, representing the extreme ‘other’ to which they were opposed. When historian J. C. Davis extended this concept to the illusive sect of the ‘Ranters’, he sparked much controversy and there were many rejections of his argument. He was accused of many things from being too stringently sceptical, to being moved by ideological opposition to the seventeenth-century radicals and the historians who had resurrected them. 

Davis’ central argument in his work Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians was that the Ranters were essentially the literary creation of religious conservatives and radicals alike to project their fears about the future of religion. Indeed their reputed beliefs were amongst the most radical of the period and seemed to embrace all of the theological concepts that the conservatives accused the radicals of, and that the radicals were, in turn, keen to prove they did not endorse. Allegedly pantheists, they saw God within all things and they called upon their followers to channel Jesus within themselves. Furthermore, and perhaps even more shockingly, they were reputed to embrace Antinomianism, believing that having received God’s grace already they were free from following the moral law of the Bible. This lead them to disregard the moral standards of the time and even act out sins of sexual promiscuity, swearing, and blasphemy to show that they were no longer restricted by them. 

Davis drew upon sociological studies of how the modern media exploits and even manufactures news to inform our ideas about right and wrong to make his argument. As such, he claimed that despite the relatively conservative nature of the Puritan Revolution politically, the religious settlement was left ambiguous with a level of toleration for religious radicals. Conservatives saw toleration as the end not only to ecclesiastical order but moral and social order altogether. What is more is that the ‘respectable’ sects were keen to distance themselves from these accusations, and as such, Davis argues that the creation of the Ranters was useful to both groups. For conservatives they were the physical manifestation of everything they were opposed to and attacked in hope of turning the tide of the revolution. For the sects the Ranters were a good way to demonstrate their own relative ‘orthodoxy’ and were a stick with which to beat the wayward members of their own congregations. Baptist and Quaker congregations used the label of ‘Ranter’ to discipline such members into the Restoration period. 

To demonstrate his point Davis noted how the Ranters were such a stereotype that they could hardly be believed.  Embracing almost all of the beliefs and practices that were feared by society at the time; allegations of letting women preach, sexual immorality, following no law and worshipping such base objects as ‘pewter pots’, were, Davis claims, all accusations levelled at even the most conservative supporters of toleration, such as the Independents, amongst whom Oliver Cromwell numbered. He argues, therefore, that their beliefs and practices should be understood within the early modern rhetorical tradition of inversion, formerly manifested in the theatrical practices of Carnival. As such, it was an exercise in setting boundaries by exemplifying all that society was opposed to and so defined itself against. Themes such as the ‘woman-on-top’ were common in this discourse and much of it was borrowed from the image of the ‘Atheist’ (which could be a rejection of God philosophically or at least acting as though there were no God) as well as from a rich anti-heretical tradition of medieval writing which associated religious with sexual transgression. 

Davis’ ideas were vehemently refuted by many, but perhaps no more so than Christopher Hill in his article ‘The Lost Ranters? A Critique of J. C. Davis’ where he claimed that Davis expected too much organisation for a seventeenth century group with a shared theological outlook. As such Hill forwarded the concept of a more fluid Ranter ‘milieu’, rather than sect or movement, with a number of recognised beliefs and practises including; hostility to organized churches, materialism, mortalism, rejection of hell and the devil, scepticism about the special sanctity of the Bible and about God, and a rejection of original sin. As well as, and perhaps most famously preaching and, by some, practicing sexual promiscuity. Hill claims that Davis was too stringent in denying ‘Ranterism’ to any but a small group of radicals, notably Lawrence Clarkson, Abiezer Coppe and Jacob Bauthumley, and that despite Davis’ claims that sexual promiscuity was merely a slight made against all sects and heretics, Coppe’s work demonstrates his advocacy of such libertinism. Hill suggests that a great number of people were involved in this Ranter ‘milieu’ claiming that men from Cromwell’s chaplain Peter Sterry to the son of the Lord Mayor Isaac Pennington moved in Ranter circles, and claims that the fact that so few were actually prosecuted was that without a belief in the afterlife few quibbled to recant when commanded. Hill argued that if a contemporary called a man a ‘Ranter’ that the historian was wrong to outright disregard it. 

In response Davis argued that his critics wanted to have their cake and eat it. They did not want to impose modern tests of a sect or religious movement upon the theological discourses of the seventeenth-century, but wanted to see in them organisations and consistent ideologies a kin to modern movements. In his counter-attack, ‘Fear, Myth and Furore: Reappraising the “Ranters”’, Davis upheld his belief that the Ranters did not represent anything near a consistent ideology and argued that Hill’s ‘milieu’ was an untested concept, and one that in reality had little to distinguish itself from the understanding of a ‘sect’ or ‘movement’. He maintained that it was incumbent upon the historian to question the documents that he is studying and that scepticism was healthy for the progress of historical research. Credulity in this area was no different to believing that witches existed or that atheism proliferated in the seventeenth-century, merely because contemporaries said so. As such, Davis even refuted the position of J. F. McGregor and Nigel Smith of ‘a core of reasonably consistent ideas held by a small group of people and articulated by them over a brief period of time.’ 

To this end Davis examined and reinterpreted the careers and writings of Clarkson, Coppe and Bauthumley. The last he determined was no pantheist or libertine, but concerned with spiritual authority and ‘believed in the inescapability of a lifelong struggle against sin and wickedness.’ The first, Clarkson, he argues came closest to the pantheist antinomianism that the term ‘Ranter’ requires, but argues he was an isolated individual whose “autobiography”, The Lost Sheep Found, ‘is no valid source for the events of 1649-50’. Finally, in examining the writings of Abiezor Coppe, Davis found that he was neither a pantheist nor an antinomian. Coppe, he argues, was an extreme anti-formalist rejecting the divine sanction or importance of any religious ceremony or church structure. He claims that Coppe’s Some Sweet Sip represents this in that Coppe claims that obsession with forms and structure was to the death of religion as it was ‘fleshy’, thus from man, not God and must necessarily perish. Coppe took the conventional puritan distaste for the investiture of spiritual meaning and consequence in forms to its logical extreme, setting the “formall, externall, or outward” against the “powerful, glorious, and inward”. Furthermore, A Fiery Flying Roll by Coppe is shown to reject the hypocrisy he saw embedded within conventional godly religion of the time, which allegorised certain parts of the Bible and the Law and understood others literally. As such, he did not necessary condone sexual licentiousness, or the acting out of sin –  cursing, swearing and blaspheming for example – but believed these to be trifling matters, used by the formalists to distract attention from the substantive moral obligations of Christianity such as the levelling of society. Davis notes how Walter Craddock, a mainstream preacher and man in the employ of Cromwell’s extremely broad ‘national church’, had asked the same questions in his Gospel Libertie, in which he pondered why ‘if Christians were going to adopt a legalistic and literalist application of Scripture to church forms and polity, should they not also adopt the same attitude in applying Scripture to social morality: and then “Why do we not also sell our lands and give to our brethren?”. 

Davis’ radical reinterpretation of the ‘Ranters’ as merely a figment of the fervent imaginations of both seventeenth century conservatives and radicals presents us with many interesting questions concerning historical research and study.  He presents a convincing case, though I feel there is room for a development of Hill’s ‘milieu’ theory, perhaps seeing ‘Ranterism’ as a philosophical and theological outlook that existed alongside outward profession of conventional faith, or even sincere belief in such conventional ideas and forms. However, it does make us reassess how we understand the past and those things that we take for granted. Terms, such a ‘Ranter’ or ‘Puritan’ should be applied as carefully as labels as ‘Communist’ or ‘Fascist’ (not that the latter two are in any way counterparts for the former two). How far do these labels accurately define those people which we are studying? How useful are they to understand their outlook and point of view? How much baggage and how many pre-conceived ideas do they bring with them that cannot be said to be true in every case?

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