‘Digging, Levelling, and Ranting: The Bible and the Civil War Sects’

This chapter explores the use of the Bible by three movements which emerged in the years of the English civil war - Diggers, Levellers and Ranters. Like all the so-called 'radical' groups of this time, these asserted the right of EVERY person - not only the university-educated divines - to read and interpret Scripture. The Bible was written by lowly men and women, they claimed, and therefore the ability to discern its 'true' meaning lay with their equivalents in later generations, people such as themselves. And when these 'inferior' people did read Scripture for themselves they found its message to be decidedly different from the one preached by those with a stake in the status quo.