The Ranters

Preaching afforded many Ranters the opportunity to forego the drudgery of everyday work and concentrate on more pressing matters to their souls. Charity or theft provided them with the means to pursue the doctrine of the Free Spirit, allowing them to celebrate the Divine in any place or time. For, in a period of social upheaval, when many believed in the second coming of Christ, the Ranters rejected orthodox Christianity in favour of a more practical understanding of God’s word. Personal spirituality was tailored to their everyday needs, with guilt being superseded by sin, a recipe for salvation that led man to pursue a life stripped of all social restraint. Indeed, Ranters believed that they were as pure as the driven snow, the chosen ones who had come to understand that all things were pure unto them: adultery, fornication, blasphemy; all were sanctioned because sin didn’t exist except in the imagination of man. Just as the Old Man of the Mountains, Hassan I Sabbah, stated in the Middle Ages, “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.”

In a cunning take on the Bible, Ranters proclaimed God to be in all things, even in their tobacco pipes! One truth propels another, for if God was in all things, then God dwelt in them, too. In fact, Ranter philosophy decreed that each man or woman was a part of the Supreme Being, and as all Good Christians know, God cannot sin. In one fell swoop, immorality was made to disappear, and all opposites became one. To quote Laurence Clarkson, a self-confessed “Captain of the Rant”: “The Devil is God, Hell is Heaven, Sin Holiness, Damnation Salvation, this and only this is the first Resurrection.”

In the Ranter code, Heaven was therefore to be found here on Earth, as much in the tavern as in the Church, as easily in sex as in the dregs of a beer! For, as Abiezer Coppe states in his tract, “The Fiery Flying Roll”, “Not by Sword; we holily scorn to fight for anything; we has as lief be dead drunk every day of the week and lye with whores in the market place, and account these as good actions...” His comrade in drinking, Joseph Salmon, agreed: “Well, drink I must but mark the riddle. ‘Twas given me that I might drink, I drank that I might stumble, I stumbled that I might fall; I fell and through my fall was made happy.’”

All forms of intoxication, whoring and swearing were permitted for spiritual reasons (a line of thought that should ring a bell with anyone who has found themselves “enlightened” on a Saturday night). Ranters, such as Coppe, equated these with prayer. “Well! To the pure all things are pure. God hath so cleared cursing, swearing, in some  that which goes for swearing and cursing in them, is more glorious than praying and preaching in others.” Too fucking right!

As you might have guessed by now, the favourite haunt of these high priests of debauchery was none other than the pub. According to one manuscript written by a hostile critic of the times, eight Ranters were apprehended in a tavern called the David and Harp in Moor Lane. The landlord was a man named Middleton, and it was his testimony, along with a spy who had infiltrated the group, that gives us a first-hand account of what actually happened in the Ranter feasts of yore.

Apart from the general swearing by both men and women present, there was the occasional act of exposing the genitals for all to see. Cries of “fellow creature” and “all is ours” echoed through the room, interspersed by outrageous singing which took the form of blasphemous lyrics exchanged for the words of the psalms. All this was hard enough for a stout Puritan to stomach, but it wasn’t until they sat down to eat that the true significance of the Ranter creed began to take shape. The transcript reads: “One of them took [a piece of beef] in his hand, tearing it asunder, said to the other, ‘This is the flesh of Christ, take and eat.’”

To our modern minds, such acts may seem tame enough; I’ve seen worse in a pedestrian high street in Worcester. Oliver Reed is certainly a modern-day equivalent. Yet the Ranters represent a rare moment of anarchic freedom in English history, a freedom that is separated from the restrains of guilt. Their collective unity, which preached a communistic approach to all property, wasn’t afraid to renounce the shackles of work in favour of a more sublime existence of sex and alcohol. Spirit reigned supreme, attitude spoke volumes.

In conclusion, it seems quite appropriate to quote a verse from S. S. Gent’s satirical comedy of the period entitled, The Joviall Crew, or, The Devil turn’d Ranter. A worthy epitaph ever there was one!

“Come away, make no delay, of mirth we are no scanters. Dance and sing all in a Ring, for we are the Jovial Ranters. No hell we dread when we are dead, No Gorgon nor no Fury; And while we live, We’ll drink and fuck, In spite of judge and jury.”

For more about the Ranters, see Norman Cohn’s The pursuit of the Millennium, printed by Pimlico. It’s the key text!