History like an argument: The Norman conquest in Levellers’ and Diggers’ texts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to arise some objections to Quentin Skinners three part thesis that for the Levellers and his allies (i) history and, in particular, the Norman conquest, is used only as a means of illustrating a number of arguments also capable of being more abstractly stated, (ii) that they treat the historical evidence as carrying no prescriptive force and (iii) that they recognise instead that, as Hobbes was to put it, history can offer only examples of fact, never argument of Right. It appears, however, that on the basis of the evidence furnished by the study of the political vocabulary of some Levellers and Winstanleys tracts that propositions (i)-(iii) can no longer be maintened as a correct historical explanation of the main political claims those tracts are meant to support.