ABSTRACT
Raymond Williams begins Keywords with an account of the commiserations between himself and another young man who had similarly undergone the upheavals of the Second World War. Newly ensconced at Cambridge, they had difficulty relating to those who had not undergone these upheavals. “They just don’t speak the same language,” they agreed. 1 What kind of impact on a word and set of ideas does a historical upheaval have? Did people after 1660 speak the same language as people had earlier in the seventeenth century? Specifically, did they use the word equity in the same ways?
