Teresa Bejan
speaker
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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Again, he's something of a jailhouse lawyer.
He had a grammar school education, but he never went to university.
And so he's really teaching himself about the common law in Magna Carta during his various stints in prison and coming up with really inventive arguments about Magna Carta.
And everything on that basis.
And so William Prynne, one of his former friends and also fellow Puritan martyrs, ends up becoming incredibly critical of Loburn and saying that he is an upstart monstrous lawyer called to the bar at Newgate Prison, where he now practises.
And they're constantly pointing out that he knows nothing about the common law, that the fact that his Latin isn't very good means that he's making inferences that a person better educated never would have.
But what I like about the Levellers, and I think that they're political theorists in a sense that we need to maybe take more seriously, is that they are discovering arguments
that allow them to do things politically.
And the arguments end up being persuasive insofar as the doing of things looks good to others.
And so that's, I think, the key when we see these leveler arguments proliferate.
It's not because they're great philosophers, but they are excellent political activists and political theorists.
you do see these echoes at the end of the 18th century in the American Revolution and then the French Revolution.
So it's just the strangest coincidence.
It turns out that Thomas Jefferson is actually related to John Lilburn on his mother's side.
So that kind of echo of Lilburn's postscript that we get in the Declaration of Independence.
I mean, whether or not Jefferson is self-consciously channeling leveler ideals then, certainly 50 years later when he's reflecting on the Declaration, he describes the palpable truth
of equality in the Declaration in language borrowed from another leveller, so Richard Rumbold on the scaffold in 1685, who said that the mass of mankind had not been born with saddles on their backs nor a favoured few booted and spurred ready to ride them.
I think they're hugely important and something really does change in the 1640s when leveler arguments and activism effectively make the idea of equality effectual in a way that it hadn't been before.
It begins to be used to do things politically.
And so, I mean, we've been talking about the kind of the sort of
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