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In article <d75qv1tpmmhjhhhehv4sq6sh1s7i388n33@xxxxxxx>, Bob Officer
wrote:
> I guess it was the swing back from the book burning
> anti-education stance of the round-heads.
>
"Puritans", not "roundheads".
Most (but not all) of the non-Conformist, puritanical groups in
Britain at the time sided with Parliament, whose forces overall are
colloquially known as "roundheads", but there were plenty of
(volunteer) regiments of roundheads from other origins.
Just to muddy the waters further, you're aware of an
organisation called the Diggers (or Levellers) that emerged from the
roundhead forces who were stood down when Cromwell relied more and more
on his New Model Army? They did heretical things like ploughing up
enclosed land to plant crops on the Manor's ground, organising
themselves into communes with neither lord nor sheriff nor [shock,
horror!] church, enjoying "free love" (that may well have been
government propaganda from the Commonwealth) and generally doing all
sorts of things that stereotypes associate with Marxism. As an agrarian
movement they didn't really have much time nor interest in education,
but they weren't anti-education as such.
It was a tiny, irrelevant movement - which took Cromwell
(Puritan dictator of the Commonwealth) about 6 years to exterminate the
movement, in a country where he was the legal authority, with a
professional, trained standing army ("New Model", as above) and all the
trappings of power. The Digger's commune in my home town was one of the
last to be exterminated.
--
Aidan Karley FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: 57°10'11" N, 02°08'43" W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
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