Levellers into republicans?

The Rhetoric of Self-Ownership

“…This use of common law was controversial at times, as some Leveller writers identified it with the Norman Yoke as an imposition to be rectified. 50 He urges "the regaining of your Liberties, and recovery of your Birth-right (the Law)." 51 Lilburne saw this legal birthright as a possession of a novel figure, the "free-born Englishman."…”

“…Indeed, it was important for Lilburne's rhetorical situation of his audience and himself, serving as the object of his address and-known as "free-born John"-his self-presentation. 52 The language inventively borrowed from and combined two conventional ways of speaking: the "free-born subject" with patriotic appeals to Englishness. In this way, Rachel Foxley writes, "'Subjects became Englishmen," understood as the possessors of an ancient birthright from the common law.…”

“…I have as true a wright to all the priveledges that do belong to a free man as the greatest man in England whatsoever he be, whether Lord or Commoner." 59 As Foxley explains, the "granting of denizen status was in a way a legal acknowledgment that there was a set of rights which accrued to native Englishmen precisely because of that status" where no such comprehensive record was codified. As both inhabitants and those to whom liberties and privileges had been granted, "denizen" linked the people, expansively construed, with a specified, or specifiable, conception of their liberties and privileges.…”

“…66 The metaphor of legal appeal to a higher court announces an active popular sovereignty, in contrast to a parliamentary sovereignty where the people's voice is not manifest. 67 The Putney Debates, unfolding around the Agreement and The Case of the Army Truly Stated (1647), give particular focus to the plural and contentious use of property talk to define, unsettle, and transform the terms of popular sovereignty. 68 We can see key sections of this debate as staging a confrontation between competing versions of self-propriety, neither side ceding property talk but rather exploiting and adapting it to their advantage.…”

“…This notion of representation is challenged not just in concept but rhetorically enacted through direct appeals to the people as in the Agreement. 74 Natural law secures nothing more, Ireton argues, than a very limited notion of property in the self, because civil law "is the foundation of all the right any man has to anything but to his own person." 75 He presents a weak notion of self-ownership against an expanded franchise: a natural law of selfpreservation that extends no further than property in the person, without tie to land, possession, or civil liberty.…”