Peers, equals, and jurors: New data and methods on legal equality in Leveller thought

Abstract We consider the Levellers' conception of equality relative to their contemporaries during the Civil War(s) period. We compile a corpus of hundreds of seventeenth−century pamphlets and combine this with novel word embedding techniques trained on millions of Early Modern English documents to make statements about word “meanings.” We focus on understanding of the phrase “peers and equals” (and its variants). We provide quantitative and qualitative evidence, in line with extant literature, that the Levellers—John Lilburne specifically—had a prevailing interest in equality in a way that is different to that expressed by other groups of the time. But contrary to current scholarship, we show that the Levellers and Lilburne were animated primarily by a particular institutional manifestation of legal equality: their interest in parity or the status of peers primarily pertained to the jury.