Ranters were an English
radical group of religious
libertines c. 1649-54 who engaged in a wide written campaign of spirited religious and political
pamphleteering (though their spelling and grammar were apparently, for want of editors, horrid) while also carrying on, at the street level (allegedly),
with frenzied drunken
orgies and
immoral wantoness. One of the best works on the subject is the amazing overview,
The pursuit of the millennium :
revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern totalitarian movements by Norman Cohn (NY : Harper, 1961)
The most infamous Ranter was Laurence Claxton, a tailor by trade, who flirted with numerous Protestant denominations before joining the
Baptists in 1644. His
first tracts,
The Pilgrimage of Saints and
Truth Released, appeared in 1646 and by 1649 he'd attracted a following of Ranter spiritualists in
London. His most notorious Ranter prinicple was that a 'true believer is free from all
traditional restraints, that
sin is a product only of the imagination, and that
private ownership of property is wrong,' all of which appeared in his classical Ranter tract,
A Single Eye (1650).
Ranterism had its beginnings with the medieval
Brethren of the Free Spirit or the
Beghards, a 14th century
heretical group who started the so-called
Heresy of
the
Free Spirit. "Ranting principles" according to Gerrard Winstanley (1609?-60?), one of the groups most fervent political enemies, included a 'general lack of
moral
values or restraint in
worldly pleasures'. Excess, excess, excess in other words; and Alehouses, brothels and pubs were apparently hotbeds of Ranter
insurrection, centered primarily around
London. Some were also social reformers, affiliated also with
agrarian communists known as the Diggers who actually
had the gall to demand of the government of
England that the
common lands should be returned to the
common people. Their most theologically dangerous
belief was that the
Holy Spirit, by its nature, removed
sin from even their most reprehensible acts.
Ranters and some
Quakers of the period were known to cavort in the all together. They were also
millenniarianists, who expected and prepared for the
imminent
Second Coming of Christ at any time. And yes, there was talk of orgies and streaking and all other manner of lewdness. (After all, getting naked has
been big with the saints, holy men, and prophets since pre-Biblical times).
"Shock value, the rejection of worldly goods, and all men being equal in the sight of
God were common motivations to undress"; so indeed the Ranters (and some Quakers even, if you can imagine such a thing) paraded nude in public. Ranters were
accused (usually by their opponents) of wife swapping, sodomy, child-lust and other wanton activities which ran contrary to the societal morals of the day.
Between 1650-51, the London newspapers picked up on the Ranter movement and in January of 1651, in the City of London at Moor Lane, there was reported
some 'wanton behavior at a local alehouse' and the subsequent arrests, interogations and trials were publicized outrageously (in the manner of the '
yellow
journalism' of the time) but by 1652, they had exhausted
media interest as a
protest movement. Some scholars speculate that the pamphlets and printed
sermons of the Ranters may have been the work of other
sectarian and
secret societies of the period.
Sources :
1. The pursuit of the millennium : revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern totalitarian movements by
Norman Cohn (NY : Harper, 1961)
2. The Ranters. from Exlibris. http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/ranters.html. Accessed 17 August 2000.
3. "Claxton, Laurence" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. {http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=24648&sctn=1} (Accessed 16 August 2000).
4. "United Kingdom, history of" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. {http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=120045&sctn=12} (Accessed 16 August 2000).