ABSTRACT
The Civil War and its aftermath released radical demands that were far removed from the moderate, constitutional aims of many parliamentarians of 1640-2. In the beginning, conservatives and ‘middle-group’ politicians had been willing to use popular radicalism for their own immediate political purposes. But soon most of the parliamentary leaders of Westminster, and the gentry rulers in the localities, shied away in horror from the extreme ideas which had been allowed to fl ourish by their initial tolerance and by the collapse of the old political order. From 1640 until the early 1650s, parliamentary ordinances attempting to suppress pamphlets and books were largely ineffective; the State as well as the Church was in no position to clamp down on the free expression of opinion as it had done before 1640 and as Cromwell was to do after 1655. The collection of pamphlets made in the 1640s and 1650s by a London bookseller, George Thomason, is a good indicator of the quantity of material printed in those two decades. Although he did not get his hands on everything published, Thomason, a fanatically keen bibliophile, collected over 18,000 items between 1640 and 1655, after which the fl ow diminished; between 1655 and 1660 he collected over 3,000 printed works.1 The Thomason Collection, which is still intact in the British Library, is a monument to the intellectual activity released by the English Revolution, from the lively, scurrilous and libellous, to the serious, high-minded and academic. It also gives a unique insight into the normally unrecorded beliefs and aspirations of ordinary men and women.
