To attempt to portray Anselm in all his varied activities as monk, prior, abbot, archbishop; as philosopher, theologian, writer of private prayers and meditations; in his letters of spiritual counsel and ecclesiastical policy; as man of God, friend, teacher and guide to the spiritual life; and in his relations with popes, kings, episcopal colleagues, lay men and women, monks and nuns, is one of the most challenging tasks in medieval history. The number of possible combinations in which his life and thought played a part is very large. To add to the difficulties of the subject, much of the evidence is tangential: we interpret for one purpose material that was created for quite different ends. The material is full enough to invite speculation, but rarely full enough to provide clear-cut solutions to the questions asked. To take only two examples at opposite ends of the spectrum: Anselm never wrote any account of the principles which guided his public life as archbishop, which Vaughn is particularly concerned to interpret; and, at the other end of the scale, he wrote much on friendship, but all that he wrote, as we shall see, is capable of widely different interpretations. Even his silences cry aloud for interpretation; and when we come to that, we are in very deep water indeed.

As the latest in a long line of St. Anselm's biographers, I am privileged here to address the comments of my most distinguished predecessor, Sir Richard Southern. Perhaps the greatest compliment one's work can receive is a rigorous and thorough examination of its premises, evidence, and argument; Southern has graciously rendered that favor to my Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan. I am grateful to both Sir Richard and to Albion for this opportunity to reply.

No one could dispute Southern's summation of the difficulty involved in assessing the richness and variety of Anselm's activities and achievements, nor indeed the fullness of the surviving materials and yet their tantalizing silences toward some of our most pressing questions. Indeed, fifteen years would hardly be enough time to work through them, were it not for the labors of many others, including Southern, upon which my arguments often depend. What seems remarkable to me, and apparently to Sir Richard as well, is that he and I can derive such different conclusions from virtually the same evidence. Southern views Anselm as “essentially a monastic contemplative man, with his eyes wholly directed towards God, and with his energies mainly absorbed in the task of calling others to the monastic life,” while I have argued for Anselm's political awareness, his conviction (at some point prior to his archiepiscopal consecration) that God had destined him for Canterbury, and his sense that as God's steward of the mother church of Britain, he must take effective action in the world of high politics to safeguard Canterbury's lands, privileges, and primatial rights. And I have argued that he did so skillfully and successfully. These two views seem almost mutually exclusive.

Sir Richard Cocks (c. 1659–1726) was a rare bird among the crook-taloned specimens perching on the back benches of King William III's House of Commons. He seems to have displayed every hallmark of that declining species, the Country Whig; impeccably Whiggish, indubitably rustic, learned in Greek and Roman history and versed in contemporary neo-Harringtonian literature; profoundly tolerant and resolutely erastian in his religious inclinations, even somewhat Puritan in outlook. He supported the Revolution settlement but opposed a standing army and entertained a healthy suspicion of placemen; approved of trade but distrusted the new power of finance; assisted Quakers and inveighed against priestcraft. What is more, he was never tempted to compromise his principles with the taint of office, nor to forsake his patriotism for Treasury gold. Old Whig, radical Whig, Roman Whig, Vulgar Whig, and independent country gentleman rolled into one, he stood almost alone among his fellow M.P.s, sometimes literally as well as metaphorically. Unlike the vast majority of these parliamentary colleagues, he left posterity a detailed record of his opinions, in the form of two albums or memoranda-books, now in the possession of the Bodleian Library, a handful of letters and essays scattered through various repositories, and a clutch of publications, religious tracts and charges delivered to grand juries in his native Gloucestershire. Of those contemporaries who kept diaries or preserved their personal papers the one whose social and political profile perhaps most resembles Cocks's is the Yorkshire baronet Sir Arthur Kaye, a Country Tory rather than a Country Whig, and with an archive of parliamentary diaries, letters, and speeches, mostly dating from the 1710s, that is nowhere near as extensive. Cocks's writings offer a unique opportunity to examine some of the thought processes at work in the mind of a rank-and-file Country Whig in what might be considered the golden age of Country Whiggery at the turn of the seventeenth century.

There is no uniform technique for the study of popular protest and ideology: different periods require different forms of analysis. Historians of the eighteenth-century crowd, for example, have to de-code the rituals, symbols, violence, and theatre of seemingly tumultuous collective behavior in order to infer the legitimizing aims and beliefs of the plebeians who were so rebellious in defense of custom. Students of Chartism, by contrast, have a less daunting task. They have merely to consult the movement's literature and propaganda, the very language of which, it is now argued, did not simply mediate but actually served to determine the nature and limitations of proletarian ideology in early nineteenth-century England. There is no need to de-code or decipher this public political language: it must be read as it was phrased, within the structural conventions and constraints of traditional oppositional discourse. Eschewing the orthodox social and economic interpretations of Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones has insisted that the movement's altogether political language was neither symbolic nor anachronistic. It was political monopoly, the Chartists proclaimed and believed, which led to polarization and immiseration; it was political power, therefore, secured by the venerable Six Points, which would facilitate economic and social amelioration. Phrased in the traditional radical idiom of political exclusion, the Chartist challenge acquired unprecedented conjunctural relevance and force in the 1830s as parliament and the state were reformed at the expense of the unrepresented. Regional rental variations notwithstanding, the uniform £10 franchise of the 1832 Reform Act left the working class alone as the excluded and unrepresented people, separated from the “shopocrats” who acquired the vote and joined the ranks of the politically privileged.

This article explores the connections between the seventeenth-century Leveller movement and the democratic radicalism of the period 1790 to roughly 1840. At first glance the two appear to have much in common. Both were concerned with the extension of the franchise, the idea of a written constitution, and the equality of citizens before the law. Various commentators on the subject, including some historians, have suggested that such a continuity does indeed exist. Unfortunately this conclusion has been based for the most part on vague connections indicating a lack of solid research on this topic. An exception in this regard is the 1962 essay of Olivier Lutaud which traced many of the linkages of Leveller ideas and phrases in European literature.

By contrast historians of seventeenth-century England have tended towards a too ready acceptance of a discontinuity between the Levellers and the democrats of the post-1788 era. They have been content to consign the Levellers to “relative oblivion” and “near-oblivion,” and to assert, quite erroneously, that Leveller pamphlets were not reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time we must be aware that the historian of early nineteenth-century radical movements is not confronted with a powerful body of evidence indicating strong Leveller-radical connections. The influence of Levellerism on subsequent radical-democratic movements was subtle and somewhat oblique in nature.

In 1869 William Aitken looked back over a long and distinguished career as a radical activist in the Lancashire factory town of Ashton-under-Lyne. In a letter to the Ashton Reporter, he recalled his introduction to the ranks of radicalism: “My earliest remembrances of taking a part in Radicalism are the invitations I used to receive to be at ‘Owd’ Nancy Clayton's in Charlestown, on the 16th of August to denounce the Peterloo Massacre, to drink in solemn silence ‘To the immortal memory of Henry Hunt’.…” In November 1838 the Northern Star, Chartism's great newspaper, made what would appear to be the first mention of Aitken's public role in radical politics. The twenty-four year-old Aitken, former piecer and cotton spinner turned school master, attended a dinner held in the working-class suburb of Charlestown at the home of John and Nancy Clayton to commemorate the birthday of the hero of Peterloo fields.