Ted Vallance

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144 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Ted Vallance’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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In Our Time · The Levellers · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

It's a lot higher risk, particularly the types of petitions that the levellers are producing.

So if you're producing a petition...

you're supposed to be in a kind of supplicatory, humble position to the figures in authority that you're asking to resolve the matter of the petition to.

Yes.

So that kind of symbolism, also just the language of it.

So the petitions that they're producing are very assertive.

And in fact, they are clearly...

saying to Parliament, we are in fact the people who should be able to command you to do what we're telling you to do in this petition.

A remonstrance of many thousand citizens says, we are the principals, you are our agents, so you should be doing what we tell you to.

So it's reflecting the Leveller's political philosophy and that belief in popular sovereignty.

But petitioning activity is also really important kind of organisationally as well.

So you have to think about these as exercises in mobilising large numbers of people.

These Leveller petitions are reputed to have tens of thousands of people signing them.

The large petition of September 1648...

40,000 people were reported to have signed it, which would have been about 10% of the population of London at the time.

Now, whether that's accurate or not, the levellers are using these kinds of figures, again, to show that they have public opinion behind them.

The other thing that you see the levellers doing within these petitions is they're also broadening their appeal.

They're not, if you like, just trying to speak to the converted.

They're trying to reach out to other sorts of constituencies.

So they're trying to appeal to more moderate parliamentarians some of the times in these petitions.

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