Since the publication of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down in 1972, the radical groups of the English Revolution have continued to attract attention. Some of that attention has reinforced Hill's account, but much of it challenges the terms with which Hill approached the subject. The present chapter attempts to take stock of the results, and to provide the broad outlines of an account that takes seriously the criticisms of the Hill paradigm that have been advanced.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE ENGLISH NEO-REFORMATION

It is often said that historians are much more concerned with origins and causes than they are with consequences, effects or ‘aftermath’. It may therefore be worthy of note that we probably have a clearer understanding of the afterlife than of the origins of mid-seventeenth-century English radicalism. Although the full legacy of the English Revolution still awaits its historian, it is possible to piece together a reasonably clear idea about the ways in which subsequent generations remembered (or forgot) Levellers and radicals, and an even fuller knowledge of the subsequent fortune of commonwealth and republican ideas. But historians have never developed even the agreed outlines of an account of the origins of Civil War radicalism, or an agreed way of placing its occurrence in an early modern historical context. Indeed, they have generally avoided asking too many questions about its origins.