Ranters, Sects, and Utopians: Local and Beyond

This chapter looks at an underappreciated area of Morton’s life and work: local history. The Mortons were enthusiastically involved in local history, local archaeology, local WEA, local societies, etc. Morton published several articles in the 1950s and early 1960s on local historical figures (particularly from the seventeenth century) for local history journals. While the Marxist language was toned down (or perhaps visible to those with eyes to see), his underlying agenda remained and, tellingly, the figures themselves were antinomian radicals of their time. While his book on the English RevolutionEnglish Revolution, The World of the Ranters, was not published until 1970, some of the chapters were already published in local history venues. Furthermore, in conventional Communist venues, Morton was also publishing on the interaction of religious motivations and class interests in the seventeenth century which provided the theoretical and wider historical underpinnings for his local historical work. While it is commonplace (and not wrong) to suggest that the spate of work by historians on the radical Revolution in the early 1970s was a reaction to 1968, Morton’s publications show that this explanation is not straightforward, a point to which this book returns in later chapters.