What Made the Levellers Revolutionary? Reconsidering Leveller Political Economy

The article addresses the neglect of matters of political economy in Leveller scholarship, which for some time has focused on political and constitutional issues. It foregrounds Leveller approaches to trade and taxation, tithes and enclosure, and the relief of poverty before, during, and after the Leveller zenith of 1647–49. These concerns were as central to Leveller thinking as the issue of the parliamentary franchise, and the Levellers’ attention to such issues helps explain their contemporary appeal. Demanding the elimination of monopolies, tithes, and feudal land tenures, the Levellers projected a vision of flourishing English local and national economies built upon the work of the “laborious and industrious” people. Moreover, their approaches to poor relief were primarily intended not to control the poor but rather to assist them in returning to household independence. The Levellers’ attack on trade restrictions, their preference for taxation that fell predominantly on the wealthy, and their assault upon the tithe income of the state clergy and lay impropriators all struck at the resources of the social elite and at rationales for their predominance. Indeed, the Levellers were social revolutionaries: they both challenged contemporary institutions and practices that they found injurious to the “middling sort” and the “meaner sort” and proposed incompatible alternatives. Their emphasis on the country’s future as a trading and manufacturing nation anticipated the commercial revolution that accompanied the political revolution of 1688–89. Finally, the consistency over time of Leveller argumentation about matters of political economy suggests caution in imposing restrictive Leveller chronologies.