A fresh look at what “peers and equals” meant during the English Civil Wars shows the Levellers focused on legal institutions, not only abstract principles.
🔎 How the evidence was assembled
- Built a corpus of hundreds of seventeenth-century pamphlets from the Civil War(s) period.
- Trained novel word embedding models on millions of Early Modern English documents to analyze word meanings and usage patterns.
- Focused the analysis on occurrences and variants of the phrase “peers and equals.”
🔍 Key findings from combined quantitative and close reading
- Quantitative word-embedding results and qualitative readings both align with existing literature that the Levellers—John Lilburne in particular—expressed a distinct, sustained interest in equality compared with other contemporary groups.
- Contrary to some current scholarship, the Levellers’ concern with parity or the status of “peers” was primarily institutional: the contested meaning of equality was most often tied to the jury as an office of peers rather than to a broad, abstract conception of equal rights.
⚖️ Why this matters
- Reorients interpretation of Leveller thought away from solely ideological or abstract accounts of equality toward a focus on legal form and institutions—especially the jury.
- Demonstrates the value of combining large-scale Early Modern text embeddings with traditional qualitative methods to recover historically specific meanings of key political phrases.
🧠Takeaway
- The phrase “peers and equals” in Leveller discourse signals an institutional struggle over who could judge as a peer (the jury), not merely a generalized claim for equal status in society.
