Teresa Bejan

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

Teresa Bejan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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In Our Time · The Levellers · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

So it would be wrong to say that Lilburn was the leader of the leveller movement in any kind of exclusive way.

But I do think it's right to say that without Lilburn and without specifically his pre-existing celebrity as a Puritan martyr, nothing like the leveller movement as we know it would have emerged today.

So basically, Lilburn is the second son of a downwardly mobile gentry family in the North.

And he makes his way to London in the 1630s to take up an apprenticeship in the cloth trade.

But while he's there, he sort of falls pretty quickly into this radical sectarian subculture.

And he gets involved with clandestine printing and particularly this kind of Puritan critique of the Episcopal Church of England, so the rule of bishops.

And in that capacity, Lilburn finds himself put on trial in 1638 before the prerogative court of Star Chamber.

In his trial, he refuses to acknowledge the authority of the court.

He refuses to swear the oath.

that they put to him.

And for this and for printing, he is then sentenced to be whipped from Fleet Prison to Newcastle Yard, so about a distance of two miles.

So he's whipped publicly, pilloried and put in prison.

And it's Lilburn's bravery and kind of meeting this punishment that turns him into just an absolute phenomenon.

So he becomes known as Freeborn John.

He really becomes the poster boy, if you will, for the cruelty of Star Chamber and the kind of excesses of Charles I's personal rule.

And so what ends up happening in 1641 is that the long parliament orders Lilburn's release from prison as one of its very first acts.

And so this really sets him on a kind of trajectory that will become important for us, I think.

Well, I think that the idea of equality that becomes essential in leveler arguments and leveler practices is one that Lilburn really comes up with on the fly in the summer of 1646 in the midst of one of his many legal battles.

But basically, Lilburn invokes the natural and universal equality of human beings in the context of this court battle as having basically social and political implications.

So in Lilburn's hands, we see the equality of human beings really for the first time being cited as a kind of basis on which ordinary men and women can make political demands and specifically can demand to stand as equals with the privileged in the way that that quote you read for us at the beginning shows.

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