John Kenyon’s judge­ment on The World Turned Upside Down: “I think we are entitled to ask where all this discussion of obscure left-wing fanatics is getting us. That some of them were mad we have always impatiently known, but Dr Hill positively glories in it … This was not really a proletarian movement at all. It was an unexpected opportunity for failed shopkeepers, lazy artisans and eccentric academics to find their voice.”

Andrew Bradstock’s Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England is very much Hill redivivus. There is the same sentimental cele­b­ration of liberty descending into licence, the same insouciant acceptance of his radicals’ accounts of their experience of persecution as they challenged what was left of hierarchy and authority, the same wistful plea for the evergreen integrity of their ideas. Ironically, Bradstock is so successful in locating his radicals in their own times that his claims for their enduring value seem less plausible at the end than at the beginning. That said, he does indeed offer a wonderfully clear summary of his three movements and four moments, and the bigger and more enduring the better he is.

This is certainly now the best short introduction to the truculence of the early Quakers – militant passive resisters, organ-isers of tithe strikes and disrupters of services in steeple houses – and of the determined separatism of the Baptists; and it offers a measured account of the Fifth Monarchists, constantly disappointed in their conviction that the 1,000-Year Rule of the Saints was tomorrow night. It is less surefooted with the Ranters, brushing aside the compelling evidence of J.C. Davis that whatever the antinomianism of a congeries of violent anti-Calvinists, the “movement” was in the minds of establishment puritans more than in the gatherings of men and women determined to demonstrate that they were free from sin by practising all the sins which are most fun. Davis’ work is dismissed in a sentence in which he is “anonymised”.

It is good to see the profound if idiosyncratic biblicism of the Levellers and Diggers (the one radical libertarians, the other radical egalitarians) taken seriously, and entertaining to find anti-clericalism taken to such extremes. Most readers of this book will find its presentation entertaining and enlightening, but most will also find its wider claims unconvincing. The bibliography is tendentiously selective and no references are provided for the host of lively, vivid, startling quotations from original sources, which is a real pity. Bradstock has written passionately in the past about Gerrard Winstanley, most passionate of the Diggers, and it is with them that his sympathies most obviously lie. This book will make few converts among readers of The Tablet, but it will do them no harm to see just how thinkable some thoughts are when there are no bishops around to keep the faithful in line.