History and ideology : Milton, the levellers, and the council of state in 1649
Martin Dzelzainis seeks to clarify the views of Milton and the Levellers in relation to the “Norman Yoke,” the belief that the Conquest had installed an alien legal system that continued to restrict the natural rights of free subjects. Although Milton was in 1649 asked by the Council of State to respond to two incendiary Leveller pamphlets, he never seems to have done so in print (although other polemicists did). Many modern commentators have sought to interpret this silence as evidence of Milton’s views. Dzelzainis argues that Milton, recently appointed as secretary for foreign tongues, could not easily have refused the request. He shows that the Levellers’ own anti-Norman posture was at the time being modified; thus Milton’s anti-Norman rhetoric after 1649 is no indication of support for the Levellers. Furthermore, such rhetoric was applicable to those who opposed the Rump, including Presbyte77. See Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge, 1991), xxi–xxv. 78. See James Tyrrell, The General History of England, 3 vols. (London, 1700–1704), 1:110–11, 115–16, 150; 116 (second pagination); for more on Whig responses, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s “History of Britain”: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 176–78. 79. Tyrrell, General History, 1:vi (second preface). This content downloaded from 207.46.13.128 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:14:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity
Twenty-five years ago J. G. A. Pocock first argued that the Norman conquest was the rock upon which all arguments for the continuity of the common law finally came to wreck. Believe in the conquest qua conquest, and you could not believe that English law represented a continuous stream of unviolated custom or fail to see it as very much the offspring of Norman parentage. In the English revolution, the Levellers exemplified the logical necessity of Pocock's argu ment. Having seen the conquest for what it was, the group criticized the common law as none other than a Norman yoke and surrendered all appeals to history. By re-examining the Leveller use of history, this essay tests that proposition, turning it not upside down but on its side, and suggests an alternative conclusion both about the Levellers and the doctrine of continuity itself.
The Free Anglo-Saxons: A Historical Myth
Historians have been reluctant to give obsolete historical theories much attention, except those of their colleagues. Live historiographical issues call up the resources of pugnacity which distinguish the tribe; but the interpretive conflicts of the past have until quite lately been passed over in silence. Thus philosophers, devoid of such inhibitions, have made everyone familiar with the philosophic background of Leveller thought, while its historical trappings have scarcely achieved that decent burial which is too often the function of the doctoral thesis. This examination, or inhumation, will be concerned with these Leveller views of English history, and particularly of the Norman Conquest. That event early in the Civil War Richard Baxter found being canvassed by " a few hot-headed, conceited sectaries in the regiments of horse," whose conclusion was that the Conquest had in fact imposed the social system of early Stuart England upon the Anglo-Saxons. Few of the Leveller writers demonstrated more than the haziest notions of pre-Conquest England; but few of them seemed to care. It was enough to damn Charles and his colonels as the descendants of William and his lords of the manors. But how the Norman Conquerors were elected charter members of a historical Gehenna makes an intricate puzzle. The most obvious clues to the sources of the Conquest myth may be found in the crowded margins of the Leveller pamphlets. There we find Coke and Samuel Daniel, John Speed and the shadowy figure of Andrew Horn. But all of these drew in turn on the works of medieval legists and chroniclers; and the systematic utilization of lawbook and chronicle arose from the complex stimulus of the Reformation. Again, the obvious: medieval libraries were dispersed, their treasures indifferently available to scholars and soap-sellers. Yet the survival of medieval manuscripts and books was not wholly subject to the chances of pillaging. The tastes of the acquirers of monastic property, and the convictions of those attempting to stanch the flow of manuscripts to ignoble uses, dictated what was willingly sacrificed and what was likely to be preserved. A survey of the survival of manuscripts in the library of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, suggests a pattern of preservation. On an average, one out of eleven items in the fifteenth-century catalogue of the library has survived. Of sententiae, however, the ratio is only one in nineteen; of collections of sermons, one in twenty; of law books, one in 22. There is no Aristotelean or scholastic philosophy at all. On the other hand, one-sixth of the works of Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, and Ambrose, and nearly one-half of the monastic histories and chronicles have survived.1 The men whose mission was to salvage the wheat from monkish chaff made no secret of their preference for histories and chronicles. England might well be content, thought John Bale, if " the byshop of Romes lawes,