evil but as man judged it; for I apprehended there was no such thing as theft, cheat, or a lie, but as made it so: for if the creature had brought this world into no propriety, as Mine and Thine, there had been no such tide as theft, cheat or a lie, for the prevention thereof Everard and Gerrard Winstanley did dig up the Common.’39 He argued moreover that there was no evil in swearing, drunkenness, adultery and theft: ‘sin hath its conception only in the imagination’.40 He advocated absolute self-exaltation:
Behold, the King of glory is come
T’ reduce God, and Devil to their Doom;
For both of them are servants unto Me
That lives, and rules in perfect Majesty…41
Clarkson joined a Ranter group called ‘My one flesh’ who were the most uncompromisingly antinomian sect, practising free love and revelling in bouts of drinking and feasting.
The same anarcho-communistic attitudes found in the Free Spirit continue amongst the Ranters. They felt the earth was a treasury for all to enjoy and that they should have one purse. Abiezer Coppe declared: ‘All things which God created are common!’42 This extended not only to property but also to women. In Samuel Sheppard’s The Joviall Crew, or, The Devill turn’d Ranter (1651), his intended satire has an authentic ring when he describes their communism:
… our women are all in common.
We drink quite drunk together, share our Oaths,
If one man’s cloak be rent, all tear their Cloaths.
and their rebellious spirit:
No hell we dread when we are dead
No Gorgon nor no Fury:
And while we live, wee’l drink and ****
In spight of judge and jury.43
The Ranters in fact went beyond the Puritan sexual revolution which sought to replace property marriage by a monogamous partnership. Coppe declared ‘give over thy stinking family duties’, argued that fornication and adultery were no sin, and advocated a community of women.44 The Ranters asserted the right of the natural man to behave naturally.
Without birth control, this call for freedom tended to be for men only. Nevertheless, many women, who had formed an important part of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, were quick to accept the arguments of the radicals who maintained that the soul knows no difference of sex. The Quaker George Fox asked: ‘May not the spirit of Christ speak in the female as well as in the male?’45 Winstanley had insisted that ‘Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love.’46 The Ranters however advocated and practised free love and refused to be possessive; they were notorious for their celebration of wine, women and song. Coppe felt that sex had a divine power: ‘by wanton kisses, kissing hath been confounded; and external kisses, have been made the fiery chariots, to mount me swiftly into the bosom of him whom the soul loves, [his excellent Majesty, the King of glory].’ 47
The Ranters offered a unique opportunity for women to become independent and voluntary beings with a right to sensual pleasure. Not surprisingly, the Ranter teaching which seemed to offer such a lively and joyful affirmation of life and freedom attracted many women. A description of a female Ranter in the hostile tract The Routing of the Ranters (1650) conjures up wonderfully their Dionysian exuberance:
she speaks highly in commendation of those husbands that give liberty to their wives, and will freely give consent that she should associate her self with any other of her fellow creatures, which she shall make choice of; she commends the Organ, Viol, Symbal and Tonges in Charterhouse-Lane to be heavenly musick[;] she tosseth her glasses freely, and concludeth there is no heaven but the pleasures she injoyeth on earth, she is very familiar at the first sight, and danceth the Canaries at the sound of a hornpipe.48
The most celebrated Ranter was Abiezer Coppe who was born in Warwick in 1619. He left university at the outbreak of the Civil War and became an Anabaptist preacher in the Warwick area. He felt he was at one with humanity, especially the wretched and the poor. He recounts how he once met a strange, deformed man on the road, and his conscience – the ‘wel-favoured harlot’—tempted him to give this man all he had, take off his hat and bow seven times to the beggar. Coppe was no elitist, and felt the greatest privilege was to be able to give and to share.
His first important work Some Sweet Sips of Some Spirituall Wine (1649) was extremely critical of formal Christianity. But it was A Fiery Flying Roll (bound together with, A Second Fiery Flying Route), dated 1649 but published in 1650, within a year of the execution of the king, which brought him notoriety. Subtitled ‘A Word from the Lord to all the Great Ones of the Earth’, in it Coppe not only attacked organized religion but presented a vision of a purged society in which property was to be held in common. Where the Levellers had excluded servants and others from their notion of equality, Coppe extended it to embrace all men and women. Like the Diggers, he also advocated a form of voluntary communism which echoes the early Apostolic Church and the visions of John Ball: ‘give, give, give, give up your houses, horses, goods, gold, Lands, give up, account nothing your own, have ALL THINGS common’.49
Like most Ranters, Coppe was a pacifist, rejecting ‘sword levelling, or digging-levelling’.50 He insists that he never drew a sword or shed one drop of blood: ‘we (holily) scorne to fight for any thing, we had as live be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’th market place, and account these as good actions as taking the poor abused, enslived plough-mans money from him.’51 Nevertheless, he warned the wealthy and powerful: ‘Kings, Princes, Lords, great ones, must bow to the poorest Peasants; rich men must stoop to poor rogues, or else they’l rue for it.’52 He was adamant that it was necessary to chop at one blow ‘the neck of horrid pride, murder, malice and tyranny, &c.’ so that ‘parity, equality, community’ might bring about on earth ‘universall love, universal] peace, and perfect freedome’.53 Coppe joined a group of Ranters who believed that all humanity was one and that we should recognize our brotherhood and sisterhood. He joyously declared the death of sin and called for a life beyond good and evil: ‘Be no longer so horridly, hellishly, impudently, arrogantly wicked, as to judge what is sinne, what not … sinne and trangression is finisht, its a meere riddle.’54
Coppe was not content to preach merely but turned himself into a surrealistic work of art. He became a master of happenings. In London, he would charge at carriages of the great, gnashing his teeth and proclaiming the day of the Lord had come. He wanted to make his listeners’ ears ‘tingle’. But it was always with a subversive aim: ‘ I am confounding, plaguing, tormenting nice, demure, barren Mical with Davids unseemly carriage, by skipping, leaping, dancing like one of the fools; vile, base fellowes, shamelessely, basely, and uncovered too, before handmaids.’55 His supreme confidence was based on his conviction that his message came from ‘My most Excellent Majesty [in me] who is universall love, and whose service is perfect freedorne’.56
It was all too much for the government and the Protestant