The Putney Debates

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Putney Debates. For several weeks in late 1647, after the defeat of King Charles I in the first hostilities of the Civil War, representatives of the New Model Army and the radical Levellers met in a church in Putney to debate the future of England. There was much to discuss: who should be allowed to vote, civil liberties and religious freedom. The debates were inconclusive, but the ideas aired in Putney had a considerable influence on centuries of political thought.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Justin Champion 11 episodes
  Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Ann Hughes 2 episodes
  Professor of Early Modern History at Keele University
• Kate Peters 2 episodes
  Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

Reading list

• The Levellers: The Putney Debates
  Philip Baker (ed.) (Verso, 2007)
• The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution
  Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (eds.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
• The Clarke Papers
  Charles Firth (ed.) (Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1992) Google Books →
• The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State
  Michael Mendle (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Google Books →
• The English Levellers
  Andrew Sharp (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Google Books →
• Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates 1647-9
  A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.) (Everyman Ltd, 1986) Google Books →
• Soldiers and Statesmen: the General Council of the Army and its Debates 1647-8
  Austin Woolrych (Clarendon Press, 1987) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b01rw1k7

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rw1k7

Auto-category: 942.062 (History of England and Wales—Civil War and Commonwealth, 1642–1660)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The Church of St Mary's, Putney, stands on the south bank of the Thames, about six miles upriver from central London.