Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings

by Arthur Leslie Morton (Compiler)

The Levellers speak to us direct across three centuries.

So writes Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, in his foreword to this selection of Leveller writings. Indeed, many of the Levellers’ ideas are relevant today, despite the lapse of three hundred years.

This unique assembly of seventeen original Leveller texts, of which some six are reprinted for the first time, presents the living picture of this great movement which stirred the rank and file of the Cromwellian army and spread thence widely among the common people. The Levellers were eventually suppressed and dispersed - but their message lives on. Not least among their achievements was that they were the first, in their opposition to Cromwell’s reconquest of Ireland, to protest against an aggressive colonial war.

The editor, A. L. Morton, author of A People’s History of England

Genres: History

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Arthur Leslie Morton was an English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is best known for A People's History of England, but he also did valuable work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study The English Utopia.