In a minorly curious coincidence, this week’s Radio Four’s In Our Time was on the Putney debates, just as I finished reading The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution, by Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon eds.
It’s a highly academic collection of essays, but some of them I found fascinating even as a lay reader…
In D. Alan Orr’s chapter
p. 76 “the tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland during the 17th century saw the first significant attempts to produce a written constitution in the English- speaking world. Unsurprisingly, the position of the Agreements of the People in the development of modern constitutionalism is problematic. Their very written-ness has suggested them as important precursors to the US constitution and the emergence of modern constitutionalism, a development that historians of political thought have traditionally situated at the close of the 18th century; however, these curious documents were the product of a different culture in which memory, custom and the spoken word were as important to the process as the printed and written word.”
There were a number of versions of the Agreements … Says “the key to the success of the Levellers’ Agreements was political accountability, and they had a much more developed sense than most of their fellow radicals that this required not merely elections and the rotation of officers, both at a national level and a local level, nor even merely political and financial accountability. It also required active popular participation.” (p61, Jason Peacey’s chapter)
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