 In addition to his work in past writing, his current position is at Manchester Polytechnic Institute, and he's been there since 1978 as a lecturer in history. One of his evening pastimes is in reading science fiction. So he spends his days in the past and his nights in the future. So now for an adventure into the twilight zone, Professor Stephen Davis. Right. Thank you very much. In this talk, I want to talk about five things mainly. Firstly, who the levelers were. Who were these guys called levelers? I don't want to say too much about that because if I do, I'll be giving you a history lecture, which is not what I'm at. Secondly, more importantly, right. Thank you. Service and order here. What their ideas were. Thirdly, their tactics and methods. How did they go about getting their ideas put into effect? How did they proselytise? How did they spread them? Fourthly, how they've been treated by historians. And in this context, I'm going to make some passing remarks about what this shows more generally about the need for libertarian historiography and rediscovery or reinterpretation of the past to conform more closely with the truth. And finally, what we can learn from the levelers. What have they got to teach us today in the 20th century libertarian movement? Now, in recent years, the British left has become very fond of finding its roots. And they're always writing things now about past forgotten groups. One of the groups now most fond of are the levelers. And Tony Ben, for example, has made a speech called the levelers in the English democratic tradition. Recently, there was a big bean feast held at Berthard Church, which is a site with levelers of connotations. And he and Ken Livingston are on the platform talking about how the Labour Party was the heir to the level of traditions. And there's lots of pamphlets produced like these two here, one by a woman called Dudley Edwards, this one by another woman called Nora Carlin. And I'd just like to read briefly what Nora Carlin says at the end. She says, it is time that the tradition of the English Revolution was reclaimed and it can be reclaimed only by the working class movement of today. It is a tradition, she says, that runs from the levelers and diggers through the chartists and the right of the trade union movement through popular democratic movements, late 19th century radicalism, the rise of the Labour Party and the development of the revolutionary socialist alternative to our own struggles today. So what she and all these other people are claiming is that they are in some sense the heirs of the levelers, they are following their footsteps and they're putting them as a model to follow. Hopefully you'll soon realize that this is in fact brazen faced impudence and cheek even by the standards of people like Ken Livingston and that in fact what is taking place is a classic case of socialist misappropriation. Now, who then were these levelers? By the way, one point I must make clear is they didn't call themselves levelers. That was a word given to them by their opponents at the time as an insult. We just use it for convenience because it's the only name that we have for them. Well, in the 1640s in England a little local difficulty broke out between the King and Parliament which in 1642 resulted to actual warfare breaking out in England, the Civil War which went on until 1647 and then broke out again the second time in 1648 to 52. Now this was essentially a struggle for power between two parts of the elite. It was like a gang warfare between two mafia families and it had two effects which were not intended by the people who first took part in it. The first was it radically undermined authority in the minds of the great mass of the English people. You're not going to have very much respect for the state, the government or for people in power if you can see them fighting like mad and their armies are marching all over the countryside burning your crops, taking your animals and generally creating a great deal of mayhem and disturbance. Secondly it led to the complete collapse of censorship. Now until 1642 in England the government had a monopoly of printing. It was a criminal offence to have a private printing press. All printing was done through a thing called the stationers company. But in 1642 that whole system just collapsed like a burst balloon and it led to a fantastic explosion of publishing because publishing became overnight very very cheap. Anybody could get into print. It was a bit like the situation Fred Stitt reckons we're going to be in a few years time with the computers and the result was literally thousands upon thousands of pamphlets putting forward all sorts of radical ideas. There are in fact no fewer than 60,000 of them in the Thomson Tracks collection in the British Museum. And these pamphlets of course all reacted upon each other. People wrote pamphlets rebutting what other people had said and hence as a result of this a radical movement appeared. The movement first in London but it then spread outside London in particular into the ranks of the parliamentary army and this primarily is the movement that we call the levelers. And they became one of the most powerful political forces in England in the 1640s. Why? Because having beaten the king the parliamentary side were left with the problem of what to do next. Because the king being a well, due to the word that was used a lot this morning an asshole a fool in other words would not compromise. And as a result they, victors, the parliamentarians had to decide what kind of society they were going to have and this is where the levelers came up. They had, if you like, an answer, a very well worked out one. I should say briefly who some of the leaders were. The names that you find when you read about the levelers are people like John Lillburn who's the best known one. Richard Overton, William Walden who is perhaps my own personal favourite amongst these people. Other people like John Wildman who had the most amazing career. He ended up as a double agent and William Third's postmaster general but then we can't all be perfect. And what the point I need to make is that this movement led by these men had a clear programme, very clear philosophy and it was all worked out in pamphlets, petitions, manifestos, programmes and documents. Only a mere, very small fragment which are in print. There's a fantastic amount of literature lying there in the Thomson Tracks collection which has never been published or properly analysed. Now what were the ideas of the levelers to get to the meat of my talk? They can be simply summarised under three heads. The primacy of natural law, radical individualism and non-aggression. These all came together to form their basic political premise of self-propriety or self-ownership. All their other political doctrines sprang from this. This doctrine is most clearly expressed by Richard Overton in a pamphlet he wrote called, An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny Shot from the Prisoner Viewgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords. They just don't do books and titles like that these days. And anyway, Overton says, Sir, I like that. To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any. For everyone as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else he could not be himself. And on this no other may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation in the front, to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties and I over no man's. I may be but an individual. Enjoy myself and my self-ownership. And not presume any further. If I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's right to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom. And as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, everyone with a natural innate freedom and propriety, even so are we to live. Everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege. So you can see that in that passage, a very stirring passage, you have all these three ideas. Natural law, which is created by God according to Overton, but he hardly mentions God in fact in the rest of that pamphlet. The idea of self-propriety that people own themselves. The idea of individuals, the autonomy of the individuals being the fundamental premise of ethics. Now, what follows from this? Well, several other consequences come from this. Firstly, the one I just said, individual sovereignty. As Overton says, all powers and rights are ultimately vested in the individual, all of them. Not as Rousseau and other people would have it in something called the people. There's no doctrine here of popular sovereignty. You have a doctrine instead of individual sovereignty. Secondly, all power over people exercised by the state is delegated. Governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. A government, a state, a king has only got power to make laws, to raise troops, to do anything because the people over whom he rules have freely given him temporarily and with the right to withdraw to their wish a portion of their self-propriety. Again, this is stated very clearly by a man called Thomas Rainborough, who was a supporter of the Levellers in the army and on a great debate which they had at Putney Parish Church. He said, the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he. And truly, sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. And I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under. When you think about the implications of that statement you realize they are very radical indeed. The power of governments therefore is limited in two ways. Firstly, what has not been delegated to them, they don't have. If the people do not delegate rights to them the government has no right to do whatever it may be. Let us say, to give an example, the level is so much concerned in to determine what man's religion should be. Secondly, it is minute. The actual sphere of government power under this system is almost nonexistent. For the obvious reason that the only powers of the government is going to be able to exercise are the ones that everybody, but everybody agrees they should do. And you are going to, if you have all the people in this room it had great difficulty establishing what that should be. So you are going to have, I think, very difficult to get people to agree precisely what that sphere of government is unless you define it very tightly, very, very narrowly. So that is the second consequence. Radically limited government. Minimal state, in other words. What are the functions of the state? Well, in one of their manifestos called agreement of the people, they said that the power of the state was for two purposes. The conservation of peace and commerce with foreign nations. The preservation of safeguards and securities of lives, limbs, liberties, properties in the states contained in the Petition of Right, which is a sort of bill of rights that has been drawn up in 1626. And to the raising of monies as shall be conducing to those ends. That sounds like a giveaway, but in fact, as I will explain later, they also had a libertarian theory of tax, so that's not as dangerous a clause as it may seem. So that's the purpose of governments. They are there purely for two things. To protect people's rights from aggression. To protect trade and commerce with foreign nations and to preserve peace. Now, a further consequence of this theory is that law is not made by the state. One of the most important ideas that the levelers have is the idea that law is somehow part of nature. Or as they said in 17th century England, common law. I.e., common to all men and all times and places. John Lillburn was particularly keen on this. One of his great panthers is called Legal Fundamental Liberties, in which he says, the true law by which men are governed is not that which comes from king or parliament or lords. It is that which is created in nature and which writes its voice in the heart of man. In other words, the idea is that law is something which is found not made. It is not a creation of the state. It is instead the product of the reaction between human reason and the natural order which is orderly and made to be comprehended by reason. Finally, a good society is one where aggression is at a minimum. To the levelers, the definition of the good society was one where aggression between individuals was restrained, which was governed instead by free agreement, free contract. And if this is achieved, the levelers argued constantly by respecting freedom. One of their main arguments was that you would never achieve a peaceful, harmonious, prosperous or good society through the use of force or aggression or encroachment upon people's rights. Now, this was very unusual, because most people in the 17th century thought that the good society was a society where your particular religious group was on top because you knew that you were right and had God on your side. So it was screw the Catholics, screw the Protestants, screw the Unitarians, and they just used to take turns at doing this. And the levelers' idea was, no, you must not do this at all. You simply let people to get on with it. Now, what does this mean, this sort of philosophical program, in terms of practical politics? Now, we know about this because the levelers were not just political theorists who wrote marvelous tracks and find political ideas. They were also practical men. And to go to the point that Leon Lowe was making the other day, they had actually worked out a practical program to have these ideas of theirs put into effect. We know this particularly because of three main documents which are called the Agreements of the People. The levelers argued that the established state order in England had no legitimacy, firstly because it was not based upon the principles I've set out, and secondly because there had been this incredible civil war. And thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed in fighting and battle, which in terms of the population of 17th century England was a lot of people. And therefore they said the current state of affairs had no legitimacy, the constitution was broke. Therefore they said the people have got to agree to a constitution for a new government, hence the Agreements of the People. Rather like the United States Constitution, which if you remember begins with the words we the people. Laugh considering who the people were, drew it up, never mind. Now, what was this program? Well, as I said, the first point was the adoption of a new constitution. Firstly they wanted to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords completely. No hesitation about that. Then they wanted to reform Parliament. You need to realize that even by this time in English history there were incredible anomalies like a constituency called Old Therum, which is a big hill outside Salisbury, and nobody lived in it, but it had two members of Parliament. And another place called Dunnich, which is the town of East Anglia, at least it was a town, it slipped under the sea. And by the time that we're talking about now, the church graveyard was left, but those ghosts still elected two members of Parliament, or rather the landlord who underlanded. So they wanted to redistribute the seats to make it fairer so that there was a reasonable allocation of seats to population. They also believed in democracy with certain limitations. They were not prepared to give the vote to people who were servants, living in servants or domestics, mainly for practical reasons. The problem with that was that these servants would have to vote, as they were told, and that would effectively be giving multiple votes to certain people. And also in each real that most servants, in fact, left house and set up as householders when they were about 20 to 29 anyway, effectively what they were proposing was manhood suffrage. They also proposed, I think which I think we could really do within Britain today, in some cases anyway, which is no re-election of MPs. Parliament would sit for one year, and the idea was that you could not stand re-election until at least two more parliaments had gone. The idea is to prevent the emergence of a class of professional politicians. As I say, a very worthwhile cause in my opinion. Now, furthermore, they had a great number of other things which they wanted to do. This was, firstly, complete religious toleration, which we may think is okay, but which is fantastically radical at the time. They say in the Third Agreement, we cannot trust our representatives to continue in force or to make any laws, oaths or covenants to compel by penalties or otherwise any person to anything in or about matters of faith, religion or God's worship, or to restrain any person from the profession of his faith or exercise of religion. In other words, rather like the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, complete freedom of religion, even for Catholics, which in 17th century England was, well, just not thought of. And for Jews and non-Christians as well you may notice. It doesn't say the Christian religion. It means anybody. Secondly, no conscription. They say again that the government shall not have the power to impress or force people to serve in the armed forces because nobody can engage in an activity where he's going to kill somebody unless he does so by his own free will. Thirdly, no arbitrary law. Laws must be passed by Parliament or made through the courts. There must be no laws which are made in an arbitrary or unruly manner which are unequal in their application. Laws must apply equally to everybody. They must be in English, which is a sore point in 17th century England because the law courts worked in French. These days they work in lawyeries, which is even worse. No privileges given to private corporations, no monopolies, no patents were to be allowed. Parliament was not to have the power to give special privileges or grants to people. It says that all privileges or exemptions of any persons from the law, the ordinary course of legal proceedings or any form of patent grant charter monopoly, and so it goes on shall be null and void and shall never be recreated. This meant amongst other things that feudal land tenure with its special rights and privileges was abolished or would have been abolished had this been done. They also had something remarkably like the Fifth Amendment. It says it shall not be in the power of any representative to punish or cause to be punished any person or persons for refusing to answer to questions against themselves in criminal cases. So you have effectively a Fifth Amendment. They wanted complete free trade. The relevant clause there is it shall not be in their power to continue or make any laws to abridge or hinder any person or persons from trading or merchandising into any place beyond the seas where any of this nation are free to trade. And it shall not be in their power to continue excise or customs upon any sort of food or any other goods, wares or commodities. Both of them being extremely burdensome and oppressive to trade and so expensive in the receipt that the monies expended therein would extend very far to always deferring the public charges, as well as the supply side as well. Another one after that was no limited liability. They said it shall not be in their power to continue law whereby men's real or personal estates shall be exempted from payment of their debts. No doctrine of limited liability in the duties of modern industrial societies. No compulsory taxation. The level of line was that all compulsory taxes due and duties should be abolished. The only taxes which should be permitted under their scheme of affairs was what was called a subsidy and that's rather confusing. A subsidy however meant a kind of special once off tax so that the government would say we need to build a bridge over the Thames here and they would levy an equal tax, and everybody in the kingdom and the money could only be used for that specific purpose. It was highly limited. No capital punishment except for murder. You may know that in the 17th century you could be hanged for theft or for a whole range of offences, even adultery by 1647 when this was written. So no capital punishment except for murder and treason. Instead they said recompense should be the normal punishment. Any crime should be recompensed made to the injured party. Decentralized government all effective administration such as it was was to be done by what were called hundreds which are small local government units, small counties. No standing army permitted. That goes along of course obviously with no conscription but not even a standing mercenary army. Armies must be raised purely for specific purposes by paying people to fight. No central or state courts. Instead there should be local courts in each locality. Non-intervention no foreign intervention abroad not even in Ireland, which again was unheard of in 17th century England. If there's one thing that almost everybody in England agreed on at that time it was that the Irish were savages and that they deserved to be put to the sword and ravaged and burnt in any way that was possible but they were against even that. They wanted England to withdraw from Ireland and a complete non-interventionist foreign policies be followed. And finally, no change in the constitution or attempt to introduce communism. They specifically say that to it shall not be in the power of any representative, that means parliament I may say, to render up, give or take away any part of this agreement or level men's estates destroy propriety or make all things common. And if anybody tried to do that they were to be guilty of treason as subject to the punishment of death. So that briefly is their program. There were other things they wanted as well if I went on to all the sort of good ideas I had, I'd be here at half past five basically. So those are the main points. Now, how did they want to achieve this? What sort of movement were they? Now, you often read, and I am afraid I have actually said to my students that they were the first political party. Having done some more research on the matter I think this is just not true. They weren't a political party. They were something else, rather interesting considering the kind of discussions we've been having about tactics. What would happen was that somebody they would read one of these level of pamphlets say one of John Lillburn's pamphlets or one of Overton's and they would then be they would set up a discussion group almost invariably in a pub where better. And this discussion group would become effectively a cell. They would advocate the program. They would push out the pamphlets. They would give money and subscriptions to support the business of publishing and to help bail people out of jail which is quite a frequent need I may say. They would march and go on big processions and so on. Most importantly, they would help collect signatures for petitions. The petition became in the hands of the levelers the great educated instrument. Many of their best pamphlets are cast in the form of petitions. These petitions would be essentially very complex arguments lending up with a list of proposals, practical concrete proposals. And these petitions would be taken round and people would be asked to read them and if they agreed with them to sign them. Now that did two things. One, it spread the ideas and two, it created an organization because you needed an organization to actually do the business of producing the petition and taking it round. And the laugh of it is that under British law Parliament had to accept these petitions. It just had to. They're all written for parliamentary record. They also worked through the new model army. Now this was the army which Parliament had set up in 1645, a professional standing army. And they hoped that the army would be the means whereby they could gain get their agreement with people accepted. In retrospect this may have been their critical mistake. Certainly they were outmaneuvered by the general deputy commander of the army, a certain gentleman called Oliver Cromwell one of the most devious two-faced men in English history. A classical politician in fact, somebody once said of him that Oliver Cromwell, wherever he was faced with the difficulty would pray and sigh and beat upon his breast and go through agonies of conscience and then do what he'd always intended to do in the first place. He's a bit like many people we can name I'm sure. So what you have is a decentralized libertarian organization. It's not as rigidly structured as a party but on the other hand it's not a mere amorphous movement. There is some sort of organization, the discussion groups. They have their own badge, which was the Sea Green Ribbon, which was still a sign of radicalism a hundred years later I may say. Their main activity apart from lobbying was the two-fold. Firstly, publishing, as Brian Meckleford said the other day, with organizations like this it's publish or perish and they certainly publish they turned up pamphlets at a phenomenal rate. The other thing they did was to actually do practical things for the people, particularly in London. The leveler party if you want to use that word for it became effectively a sort of self-help organization in large parts of London which undoubtedly wanted a lot of support. Obviously, because these guys who were not only had great ideas they also actually got things done and helped people. Now I'm sure you'll agree that what I just described is a libertarian program put forward and advocated by a libertarian movement. Well, then how come that people like Nora Cancelin can make this claim that they are somehow the ancestors of modern socialists? Well, as I say, this is a piece of bare-faced cheek. It's sheer expropriation of the past by the present. Now, I know perhaps I'm doing what Walter Block the other day said we shouldn't do. I'm being possessive about libertarian ideas and saying, oh, how can these nasty socialists have the gall to look at these people? The thing is, if the socialists who are writing about them now actually read about the ideas and discussed them, I'd be delighted because there would be the chance that these ideas would have an effect, but they don't. If you read the orthodox left-wing or liberal histories of the English Civil War which describe the levelers, you would have no idea that they are in fact a radical libertarian movement. They are described as being left-wing, populist perhaps, radical, but nothing more than that. And the actual details of the programmer never spelt out. Instead, there's a great concentration upon one part of it which is democracy because democracy, you see, is a good thing which everybody believes in and you don't want to raise the idea that they actually had really radical ideas such as the ones I've listed. This leads me on to the point about general observations about libertarian history. You may think that here I'm advocating my own interest to go back to what we were saying this morning but certainly one of the great pressing needs of our time and certainly of our movement is to have more libertarian investigation of the past. Time and time again we think that we've invented something new and we discover that in fact it's all been done before. Private courts, the example we may think that when we advocate private jurisdictions and competing courts and private police forces that we are advocating something which is very radical, which it is in the contemporary context. But in fact these things all existed in the past. They had private police forces in the 19th century England. In theory they still survive more or two of them but then our businessmen's drinking clubs. They're called associations for the prosecution of felons in case you're interested. This one actually exists near me in a place called Staley Bridge and the whole way in which the past is written about by historians is terribly slanted and biased by the statist bias of the historians who are writing it so that the basic premise which underlies most writing about European history certainly in the 17th century is that the emergence of strong centralized nation states is A. natural and inevitable and B. a thoroughly good thing. And therefore anyone who opposes this is a dimwit, a reactionary and you don't write about them and you get the kind of phenomenon that Chris Tame mentioned where whole intellectual movements are just wiped out as a kind of black hole in history which eats up all these people and which distorts the whole writing of history very often at extreme length the classic case which I would describe here is medieval Germany which is a politely badly written English history it's all about who was to blame for there not being a united German state before Bismarck and that's all they seem to write about in English and they just blame different people some folks say it's the Pope, some folks say it's the princes some folks say it's the emperor they never think that the Germans perhaps didn't want a central state and if they had any gum to sing what's happened to them since they got one that's what they would have thought Finally what can we learn from these levelers are they relevant in any way at all to us today? Well firstly tactics I think we do have a lot to learn from the way they actually went about organising themselves and spreading their ideas it seems to me they've got a fairly decent middle way between the organised structured political party with the one hand and the kind of amorphous movement on the other secondly many of the ideas are still relevant I'm sure that if a party stood today with the platform like the one I went through earlier on everyone would say what extremist and they'd be horrified but it would be a libertarian programme these are ideas which are still very much opposite into the point today one minor point is we could learn about the way they write English one way in which I am a conservative and the English language in the 20th century is terrible compared to the past but the most important things jokes like that apart are these two points really firstly that we as libertarians have a great heritage we are not if you like a new growth we are the heirs to hundreds of thousands of brave men and women in the past not just in the 19th century not just even the 17th century but even before then who have fought and struggled for liberty as people are doing today it's very meaningful to our ancestors if you like to continue that fight and that secondly that the quest and desire for liberty burns in the hearts of men everywhere it's something that cannot be suppressed where it's suppressed in one place it will spring up in another in 1652 the Levellers were finally crushed by Oliver Cromwell at Berford and their ideas went underground but they had a tremendous influence on the American Revolution where Thomas Jefferson actually says in the letter to John Adams that he had some of his ideas independent from quote the writings of those men called Levellers they had a great influence on people like Gordon and Trenchard who wrote Kato's letters which in turn influence the Americans they are now being rediscovered today so that the desire for liberty is something which can never be suppressed it's like one of these weeds that I have in my garden you think you've got rid of it and then it springs up again and finally I'll leave you with a thought which comes from one for say of life in the best of all the Levellers William Warwin he was once asked what his idea of the perfect society was and he did roughly what I've done he described this and the person talking to him said but shall these things ever be and he said that who can tell but yet we must attempt it thank you very much Thank you very much Dr. Davies for that very interesting stimulating discussion paper we still have a little bit of time so if you have any questions I think you'll be Linda would you Oh alright Brian this is not a question to Dr. Davies but I'd like to mention another case of historical rewriting that's going on in this country the history of the National Health Service has been written in such a way that the role of the friendly societies before the development of the National Health Service has been almost completely written out of history unfortunately somebody called Dr. David Green in Newcastle is I think writing a book on this subject and it's going to present considerable intellectual material for the discussion of the way in which the National Health Service can be privatised and a better system developed I wonder if you could answer a question about the modern levelers the people that operate in magazine which went out of business recently and they seem to resurfacing do you know much about these people I've seen their publications typically socialist what can one sort of do to perhaps yes I don't know much about these people myself they're actually what you might call anti-state socialist is what they are basically they're into cooperatives and green lentils and what you might call voluntary socialism that sort of thing as you say the magazine went out of business recently but I know much more about them than that in fact it's another case of people using a name in order to try and get respectability were women included in the suffrage now that is an interesting question the answer would appear to be no because they never mention it it doesn't seem to cross their minds that is one of the sad things however I should mention that women were very active in the level of movement particularly the wife of John Lilburn who did actually present what was known as the women's petition to parliament which is printed in this book here Leveler Manifestos by Jean Wolfe and that actually did claim that women had equal rights with men if they were consistent they probably may have thought that but one thing is they may have just not dared to mention it because if they had they would definitely have been thought to be absolutely raving not cases one of the ways in which the 20th century levelers who run the alternative bookshop annoy people or even amaze them is by insisting on the great virtue of property especially and we use that word for people who have none of it or very little you mentioned a great deal about self ownership and natural rights and of course the relationship between the self and the state and the roots of authority in the rights of individuals rather than the rights of people but were they as insistent as modern libertarians like to be about the usefulness and indeed the necessity for good property rights yes they were and it's very interesting on which the grounds were on which they defended it property was something rather like Locke's idea or the homesteading idea was something which you earned by changing the world by applying reason to alter the world you acquired a right of property over it what they were against was the kind of fraudulent property right enjoyed by monopoly holders thank you do they mention anything about tribunals for settling difficulties such as trial by jury yes oh that's right one of the one of the principles which they had was that trial by jury should be the normal form of trial for everything and in fact they didn't want to judge except in the most minimal sense as the chairman of a court they did not want professional lawyers in fact you know there are several that's one of their planks which I didn't go into because of time which is bashed the lawyer kind of plank they wanted tribunals in the locality in the hundreds in the parishes which would settle disputes between people which would consist essentially of a jury which would have the job of finding out what the particular case was and awarding damages to the injured party or settling amicably disputes between people I hope that's all right you mentioned the common law I did a lot of reading in what was called or seemed to be called the history of the English common law particularly in connection with Henry II and that period much earlier period which would be what 1112 and this was quite plainly state activity there was no mixing of anything else this was Henry II's imperial empire run incidentally from France and the only reason it was law rather than just sheer Stalinism was that well frankly law worked better he had a big problem keeping control of his own people because he couldn't sort of ring them up and bully them on by the telephone he had to have rules for them and that was really the origin of the common law but it was absolutely statist I mean there was no suggestion that it was some kind of natural growth or if it was a sort of negotiation between the state and nature as it were it certainly wasn't natural can you comment on the meaning of the word that is true as you say Henry II created this law and he had great trouble controlling his sons who kept rebelling against him but then what happened was that gradually the state system of courts he'd set up created this body of case law which is what we usually mean by common law so that an essentially status institution began to develop and change in a libertarian direction also the point about common law in the 17th century context is that in the early part of the century a man called Sredwood Cook who was the Chief Justice wrote this big book on the English common law and it was lousy history he completely misinterpreted the history of the English common law by saying that it was a purely libertarian thing but this point was this idea was accepted and that's what the levelers meant by common law they meant in fact common law which reflected the decisions and practices of courts yes the interesting if I can comment on it the interesting thing about Henry II system is a very remarkable piece of state manipulation because the one thing he didn't decide was the verdicts he decided everything else his main rule was you must settle your quarrels you mustn't spend money fighting each other you must give your money to me that was the principle you had mentioned that was non-aggression can you explain what their strategy was there well what I'm what I meant by that was that they defined wrong as being aggression upon somebody else's rights that is to say act which in some sense physically or in some other way violated people's self-propriety to use the term that they used this meant that they were not quite pacifist but strongly vehemently opposed to any attempt to impose the good society by force because that would be imposing it by aggression which would be a contradictory you know an absurdity there is a pamphlet called the bloody project which deals with that at quite great length which is one of warwind's pamphlets again that is actually in print I may say by the way if you're interested in these people they are actually in print in quite considerable amount and although I say only 10% of their pamphlets are in print that's still enough to fill several fair sized books which are quite easily available I don't see any more questions so thank you again talk to David