ABSTRACT
Oliver Cromwell defended the ancient social structure, summarizing it as "the orders of men and the ranks of men" and he proudly took credit for having suppressed the "levelling principle" that had threatened social harmony just after the Civil War. Seventeenth century revolutionaries who mythologized the history of the Anglo-Saxon period, as they did Magna Carta, and professed to see in pre-Norman England a golden age of peasant democracy did not express the substance of English social philosophy. The Leveller party abhorred by Cromwell and Harrington was a radical element in London and in the army which emerged from the ferment of ideas and debate after the defeat of Charles I. Although the Quakers might be considered Dissenters in so far as the Act of Uniformity was in effect a definition of Dissent, contemporaries called the Quakers by that name and reserved the word Dissenters for members of the Three Denominations, Baptists, Independents or Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.
