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.

→ Play 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: 320.01 (Political science and political ideologies)