Peers, Equals, and Jurors
New Data and Methods on The Role of Legal
Equality in Leveller Thought *Melissa Schwartzberg†

Arthur Spirling‡

Abstract
We consider Leveller thought on equality relative to their contemporaries during the Civil
War(s) period. We compile a corpus of hundreds of seventeenth century pamphlets and combine this with novel word embedding techniques trained on millions of Early Modern English
documents to make statements about word “meanings”. We focus on understandings of thephrase “peers and equals” (and its variants). We provide quantitative and qualitative evidence,in line with extant literature, that the Levellers—John Lilburne specifically—had a prevailinginterest in equality in a way that is different to that expressed by other groups of the time.
But contrary to current scholarship, we show that the Levellers and Lilburne were animatedprimarily by notions of legal rather than social equality, and that their interest in parity or the
status of peers primarily pertained to juries, an institution that did indeed aim to level down
legal judgment.

* First draft: September 9, 2022. This draft: June 21, 2024. We are grateful to audiences at APSA (2022) and the
ERC “Minority Rule” conference (2023). Florian Hollenbach provided helpful comments on an earlier draft.
† Silver Professor of Politics, New York University (ms268@nyu.edu)‡ Professor of Politics, Princeton University (arthur.spirling@princeton.edu)

11Introduction

The historical study of political equality, both ancient and modern, is enjoying a renaissance.
Among the figures receiving renewed attention are the Levellers, a political group active during
the English Civil War(s) of the mid-seventeenth-century. The Putney Debates of 1647—for which
three days of transcripts were rediscovered in 1890—are now a staple of courses in modern political thought and democratic theory. A fragment from these meetings by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough is so familiar as to constitute a cliché of Leveller ideology: “I think that the poorest hethat is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.” Although scholars widely recognize thesignificance of the Levellers for the development of democratic thought, particularly with respect
to the franchise, they continue to debate the nature of their egalitarianism.
A currently dominant interpretation of the Leveller commitment to egalitarianism focuses on
standing in relation to others (Anderson, 2017; Waldron, 2017; Bejan, 2022). Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson devoted the first of her Tanner Lectures, in part, to a reconstruction of the Levellers
as a source for arguments against social hierarchy in support of a free society of equals (Anderson,2017). Relational equality is today a regulative ideal for many political theorists, but scholars havelong sought to marshal the Levellers for their own normative conceptions of equality. As such, it
is important to characterize the Levellers’ claims as accurately as possible. Here we test a numberof hypotheses about the character of Leveller egalitarianism to argue that the Levellers were primarily committed to a legal equality, and that their arguments for social equality were generally
downstream from their advocacy for trial by jury, in particular.
While the Levellers have been of continual interest, studying them systematically has provendifficult. A major issue is data availability and awareness: the Levellers wrote a large numberof pamphlets and other material, only some of which are widely anthologized and have received
much scholarly attention. We would expect a broader corpus of Leveller works to be more heterogeneous—and potentially representative—than a selective reading of their “major” works. Beyond
this, without reading widely from contemporaneous pamphlets and other documents, it is hard to
identify those arguments that are distinctive to the Levellers and not common in the era. Related,2

it may be difficult to identify exactly who counts as a Leveller at a given time since Levellers “didnot make up a structured and organized political movement fashioned by authors understood tobe party leaders.” (De Krey, 2017, 2) Third, within the subset of recognized Levellers, taking anyargument or figure to be representative of their ideology as a whole is perilous: the writings of
Lilburne pose particular challenges (Foxley, 2004, 2016). It is difficult to assess whether claims
advanced by one or two major actors reflected, or produced, agreement among the Levellers as awhole, or were idiosyncratic to these individuals.
These are political theory problems for which we contend quantitative text-as-data approaches
are—or can be—tailor made (see, e.g., Ballandonne and Cersosimo, 2023; Blaydes, Grimmer and
McQueen, 2018). Towards that end, we develop a new, relatively large and comprehensive corpus of pamphlets from the seventeenth century that combines “core” Leveller works with thoseof contemporaries. This data, which comprises some 260 contemporary documents of various
lengths,1 is derived from the Leveller Tracts project (Hart and Kenyon, 2018). It covers the years
1638–1666, and includes the social and political writings of over 60 different authors from that
period. In that sense, it is a broader, deeper collection than previously employed. This allows
greater purchase on the issues of comparison and purported distinctiveness we mentioned above.
Of course, such a dataset is only useful to the extent that it can be analyzed appropriately. Our
second contribution then is to provide and use new tools for this purpose. In particular we will
employ word embedding approaches. These techniques are proving popular in political science
when researchers want to capture the “meaning” of terms, across groups or over time (Rheault andCochrane, 2020; Rodman, 2020). They do this by implicitly incorporating information about thecontexts—other words—of the terms of interest. We will use a specific variant of these models
that allows for statistical inferences, even when we have relatively little data (i.e.,when the terms
are quite rare) (Rodriguez, Spirling and Stewart, 2023). This arrangement nonetheless requires abackground corpus written in a style and period approximating that of the pamphlets. Here we will
use millions of words from official reports of Parliament in the seventeenth century (courtesy of
1 Technically, there are 262 documents, but two are repeats.

3

Rodon and Paskhalis, 2021). This leads us to build up embeddings for (political) Early Modern
English, that we believe have not previously existed and that we anticipate will be per se useful toother scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
A key element of text-as-data analysis is that it enables scholars to uncover “patterns, trends,
and facts” that lie beneath the surface (Rodman, 2023, 14). Rodman argues, reasonably, that thisparadigm means that text-as-data will always be a hard sell to many theorists. Skeptical theorists
argue that there can be no substitute for close reading, and that mere quantification of terms andconcepts will add relatively little to our understanding of these works. But close reading has its
own liabilities, particularly in the context of large collections. Scholars’ heuristics or prior beliefs
may shape the search, leading them to over-emphasize certain concepts relative to their actual
significance, or to cherry-pick, yielding selection bias. A well-designed analysis can preserve thebenefits of expertise— necessary to form worthwhile questions in the first place—while enabling ascholar to determine more precisely the relative salience and usages of concepts in given historicalor geographic domains. This is our approach below, and we combine embeddings work withfocused, qualitative investigation.
In the next section we briefly situate the Levellers as an entity in history, before discussing
debates on their beliefs and doctrine. This sets up a series of research questions for which our new
data—described in Section 3—is arguably ideal. We introduce our embedding methods in Section
4, focusing on the challenges of working with Early Modern English. Our empirical results arepresented in Section 5, followed by our qualitative results in Section 6. We conclude in Section 7.

2

Peers and Equals

Although Rainsborough’s “poorest he” speech is perhaps the most-recited summary of Leveller
thought, and the Putney Debates mark the beginning of the “zenith” of Leveller power (Frank,
1955, 135), the group’s practical influence on England’s constitutional settlement after the first
Civil War—especially as regards suffrage reform—was minimal. Indeed, the Levellers were es-4

sentially an extinguished force by 1650. But they remain of both political and historical interest
for at least two reasons. First, the Levellers arguably represent a genuinely new form of radicalism(Foxley, 2004, 2016). Their central ideas—of freedom of conscience, constitutional reform andparliamentary sovereignty—broke new ground in democratic thought. Second, the Levellers communicated widely using the relatively new technology of printing. That is, we have an unusuallydense record of information about their doctrine, discussions, and how they evolved.
In recent years, the democratic character of Leveller thought has focused on its egalitarianism. Scholars such as Waldron (1999) and Anderson (2017) have emphasized its anti-hierarchicalstrains.2 Again, in her first Tanner Lecture, Elizabeth Anderson turns to the Levellers to vindicate
a conception of social or relational equality. For Anderson, egalitarianism, including the egalitarianism of the Levellers, is a means for “dismantling or taming social hierarchy.” (Anderson, 2017,8) Specifically, she argues that the Levellers challenged the authority of priests and the Churchof England through defending toleration; the domination of men over women through expanded
franchise; and the power of guild monopolies through advocacy of private property and free trade.
Anderson highlights the persuasive (and on her account, feminist) force of Leveller John Lilburne’s
characterization of Adam and Eve and their progeny as “by nature all alike and equal in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having by nature any authority, dominion, or magisterial
power one over or above another.”
In an important article published in this journal, Teresa Bejan 2022 argues for a distinctive Leveller theory of “parity,” a social concept which distinguished between those eligible to be treatedas high-status peers and those consigned to be low-status “equals”: to be a peer was to “level up”
to the status of aristocrats. Against Anderson, she holds that their concept of equality was not
merely relational, in the sense that it aimed to challenge hierarchies of standing, but that it entailed“levelling up” to the equal high standing of aristocrats. For Bejan, “the point” of Leveller parity
was “first, to erase the hierarchical distinction between Peers and Commoners that rendered the2 Waldron (1999) invoked Rainsborough’s argument from Putney in support of the claim for the “poorest he” tohold equal political power with, and contest exclusion by, an aristocratic elite. Although Waldron’s more recent useof Rainsborough tends to be in support of “basic equality,” rather than social equality as such, he nonetheless still
typically emphasizes interpersonal forms of dignity and standing (Waldron, 2012, 2017).

5

former superior and the latter inferior; and second, to claim the rights and privileges of Peeragefor themselves.” (Bejan, 2022, 612) Those rights of peerage, which she characterizes as “levellingup,” nonetheless left women, foreigners, and bondsmen as mere “equals” by nature, remaining
subordinate. Bejan argues that as natural “pares,” commoners had a claim to be treated “ ‘on apar’ ” with their aristocratic counterparts, while remaining stratified between genders; “commoner
wives would be treated like ladies, and their husbands like lords.” (Bejan, 2022, 613) Bejan writes
that although Lilburne argued that “the meanest man in England” could become a high-status peer,“as much entitled and entailed. . . as the greatest subject,” women would remain merely “low-status
equals.” ” (Bejan, 2022, 613)
We agree with Bejan that the concept of peers is crucial to understanding Leveller claims forequality. However, the analysis of “peers” in our corpus demonstrates that the Levellers typicallyused the term in legal contexts, and mostly, if unsurprisingly, in advocating for trial by jury. To
be sure, Bejan does note that the primary target of Leveller demands was the law, and highlights anumber of passages in which the ostensible point of parity was to point out that differences in social standing should not give rise to legal distinctions. Yet we believe that reading “peers” in thesepassages as advocating “levelling up” is mistaken. The legal reform program was indeed egalitarian: the Levellers aimed to make law accessible through English translations and to dismantle thenational courts at Westminster in favor of local justice. But the invocations of peers in the jury
context were not intended to level up, but radically down: to eliminate the expert judiciary and thelawyers, described as “vermin and caterpillars.” (Shapiro, 1975) Put simply, Leveller equality wasneither about satisfying the “eyeball test,” to use Philip Pettit’s evocative phrase (Pettit, 2012) , norof the democratization of aristocratic claims to standing. Rather, the Levellers sought to situatelegal judgment with the people without asserting that they thereby would acquire the dignity ofcommon lawyers, whom they reviled.
Our main arguments here—that the use of “peers” by the Levellers is primarily a legal rather
than social matter, and that the call for a jury of one’s peers levels down rather than up—are
consistent with the history of the jury, at least from Magna Carta. Consider, for example, the6

famous language from Magna Carta in chapter 39—prescribing that no “free man” is to be subject
to arrest or imprisonment except by the “lawful judgment of his peers [and/or] by the law of theland” [legale judicium parium]. It is true that this identifies a status distinction between “free”
and “unfree”—the unfree do not receive such protections. But the status being described is muchbroader than the baronial one: it did include those of knightly rank but also lesser freeholders,
who were distinct from unfree peasants and serfs. Chapter 21, by contrast, prescribes that earls
and barons are only to be fined by their peers for minor offenses. So although it is true that thelanguage of “peers” denoted a status condition—no one could deny that—it is also the case thatthe standing was not necessarily especially elevated. Freemen were equally entitled to a jury of
their peers and/or to adjudication according to the law of the land.
It is surely true that freemen might feel their standing diminished were they to be judged byunfree peasants [although there is some evidence to suggest that in fact this was not uncommon(Musson, 1997; Masschaele, 2008)]. Even when composed of freeholders alone, medieval juries
were socially integrated, bringing together peasant villagers, members of the gentry, and occasionally knights and higher lords (Masschaele, 2008). Proximity served as the key eligibility requirement: a jury of one’s peers was drawn from the “hundred,” in part because early English trial juries
were at least in part self-informing. A jury of one’s peers did not necessarily require true social
equality, but did require those empaneled to render judgment consistent with evidence and norms
drawn from the local community. Their equality as jurors—i.e. their status as peers- derived fromtheir ability to find facts and render just verdicts in a given domain, not (at least not necessarily)
their high standing.
In sum, the Leveller use of “peers” is more similar to, and in keeping with, earlier wellestablished understandings of the term than typically recognized. But in order to demonstratethat this is true, we need data and some (new) methods. We now turn to each.

7

3

Data: Leveller Pamphlets and Parliament

Our core data—for both qualitative and quantitative inspection—are the words of the Levellers andtheir contemporaries. Predominantly, these are printed pamphlets which were circulated to local
populations. Our source for these pamphlets is the Leveller Tracts project (Hart and Kenyon, 2018),
distributed on the web by the Online Library of Liberty.3 The pamphlets are all transcribed fromimages of the original printed works. As might be expected with a relatively ancient collection,
the “result has been files with thousands of illegible words and characters.” The compilers of thetexts therefore insert specific characters, notes or marginalia to alert readers to this possibility. We
simply strip out these problematic cases: for a reasonably large corpus, the occasional missing
term is unlikely to be devastating for our inference. We also generally dispense with footnotes andendnotes where we find them. Ultimately, we have 260 texts from the seven “main” volumes, plus
three addendum volumes.4 . Their average length is around 12000 words, and the median length isaround 6000 words.
Much of this skew is caused by three or four unusually long composite documents—including
the Putney Debates, the Whitehall Debates and several consecutive issues of Lilburne and Overton’s The Moderate newspaper—which we treat as single entries to the corpus here. Note thatsome composite documents, like the Putney Debates, are essentially reports of conversations or
discussions between actors. We do not consider these “Leveller” (or non-Leveller) pieces per seprecisely because they contain other voices that are not part of a recognizable single movement.
Our core corpus begins with a document from March 1638, and ends with a document from
July 1666. For orientation purposes, we think of the “main” period of Leveller activity as beingthat from August 1645 (Lilburne’s first writing from imprisonment) until November 1649 (approximately when the authors of The Moderate newspaper were jailed). Within this 1645–1649
interval, we have the Putney Debates, the publication of the Agreement of the People manifestos,and the Banbury Mutiny—which arguably marks the last time that the Levellers were a force in the
3 https://oll.libertyfund.org/
4 Plus one document that other scholars deem important, but was not in the original collection: Walwyn’s “Warning

for all the Counties of England” (1647)

8

New Model Army. Where we do not know the precise date of a document, as given by the online
library, we impute it.5
In terms of authors, specifically first authors listed, the data is also skewed. Leveller leaders,such as Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Thomas Prince, are responsible for around 40% of all
tracts. To these “main” authors—who co-wrote The Agreement of the People manifestos from
captivity—we add John Wildman and Edward Sexby, as constituting an expanded version of theterm Leveller. In Supporting Information A we report some summary statistics on our corpus,
and we also provide some evidence that Leveller and non-Leveller authored texts are somewhatbalanced (in terms of length) over time.

3.1

Working with Early Modern English

The texts we will work with are all written in Early Modern English (EME), a form of the language used between the Tudor period and the Restoration (1660). Though certainly intelligible formodern readers, EME is not always trivial to understand. Partly this is a matter of word use andchoice, and partly it is grammatical. For one thing, spellings are inconsistent. For another, certain
terms which are unused now (such as “thou” as a second-person pronoun) are very common. Consider this snippet from The Grand Concernments of England ensured, published in October 1659
(capitalisation as original):
IF thou art prejudicate, save thy purse and thy paines; ’tis the considerate man, he that
ponders his wayes, I had rather deal with: I promise thee thus much, I have no design
to seduce thee, but whatsoever I have written, is my very thought: it may be thou art
perswaded thou maist better employ thy time in Reading; I believe no lesse, however
thou shalt finde some things here, not altogether unworthy of Consideration.
We might “translate” this as something like
5 If we know the month, but not the day (about 8% of the data), we take it as the 15th of the month; if we do notknow the month (about 5% of the data), we take it as July.

9

If you are prejudiced, don’t bother reading. This is for considerate, thoughtful people.
What follows is not my attempt to bamboozle you, but just my genuine thoughts onthese issues. I for one think my words are worth reading, and hopefully you will agree
if you press on.
Obviously, some care is required in dealing with such texts. In particular, off-the-shelf methods
trained on modern documents are unlikely to perform well, especially if they mistake unusual (byour standards) spellings for (uniquely) rare words. Certain “normalization” tools can potentiallyhelp with this. In those approaches a pre-existing, perhaps user-provided, list of variants is used
to map terms of the period to the single (modern) word they represent (see, e.g., Archer et al.,2015). Of course, this comes with some danger of error aggregation (the variant rule being applied
may be incorrect in some specific instances) and by its very nature reduces the nuance of the texts.
Alternatively though, it can be very time consuming to manually suggest perfect mappings in everycase. More importantly, the techniques we will use below will automatically help with the problem
at hand. In particular, we will produce word embeddings for terms like “peer” and we will do thisin a way that takes averages of other (more common, more uniformly spelled) words around them.
In practice, this means that if two words are used in (exactly) the same context, they will get thesame representation and thus be treated the same in our analysis. In that sense, we will solve
the normalization problem within our modeling strategy and in a way that caters specifically to
our local corpus. We prefer this rather than relying on rules produced in other contexts for othercorpora. In any case though, we will we need other texts of the period to contextualize these ones.
We discuss these ideas in the next section.

4

Quantitative Methods: Embeddings

We want an automated, quantitative way to estimate what authors mean when they use terms in
the Leveller Pamphlets. This, when combined with our close-reading below, will enable us to be
more confident in our claims. To do this, we will use some theoretical insights from linguistics,
10

followed by some statistical methods that put those insights to work.
The broad linguistic idea is the “Distributional Hypothesis” perhaps best summarized as theadage that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth, 1957, 195). Suppose weobserve a sentence fragment such as “right to vote” many times in a corpus of documents. We
also observe ”the right of people to vote”, “we seek the right of citizens to vote” and such related variations. Here, the term “vote” often occurs together—physically a few words away—with“right.” The techniques we will use—called “word embeddings”—will encapsulate this idea by
telling us that “vote” and “right” are related in some (important) way. But they can do more thanthat. Suppose, in addition, that we also see “suffrage right”, “suffrage for all citizens is a right” andother such variations. Word embeddings techniques can tell us that because “suffrage” and “vote”
occur in very similar contexts—literally the other words like “citizens” that are used near thoseterms are alike—that these two words themselves (“suffrage” and “vote”) likely mean somethingsimilar, and that is itself related to a “right”. This is true even if “vote” and “suffrage” are nevercollocates—that is, even if they themselves never appear together. This is a strength of the embedding approach over simply recording which words co-occur with others. That is, the technique
can tell us about the relationships between all the words in corpus without explicit instructions tocheck, say, specific pairs or triples of terms. Thus, for instance, embedddings models can tell us
which words appear to be synonyms or antonyms, and they can implicitly incorporate that knowledge into subsequent analysis.
There are many varieties of word embeddings models (see Rodriguez and Spirling, 2022, foran overview), but the essence of them is prediction. To simplify, these models attempt to selecta word from the vocabulary of the corpus in a way that is best for the problem at hand, wherethat problem is created by pretending that a given word is missing and needs to be learned. For
example, suppose we had the sentence
we seek the [] of citizens to vote

Here, the goal is to select the best word for the blank space. Ideally, the model would suggest
terms like “right” and “liberty” with high probability, and terms like “war” and “book” with (very)11

low probability. The model estimates those probabilities from observing many millions of suchsentences in the corpus and learning which words co-occur with others. To do this, the model
represents each term—like “right” and “war”—as a numerical object. In particular, each word isrepresented as a long vector of numbers. The specific values of these vectors and the numbersin them is of interest insofar as they have the “correct” relationship to other term vectors. For
instance, the model should end up with the vector for “right” being very similar to the vector for“vote” and both of them very dissimilar to the vector for “war”. That will be a consequence anda cause of the model predicting the sentence sequences of terms correctly. We call those vectors“word embeddings”.
The key strength of these techniques relative to alternatives like topics models (e.g. Blaydes,
Grimmer and McQueen, 2018) or style detection (e.g. Ballandonne and Cersosimo, 2023), is that
if we buy the assumptions, they reveal something more directly about the meaning of terms. But
this comes with some startup costs in terms of how we go about the estimation process. First, weneed to “train” the model. That is, we need to show it millions of instances of words being usedin conjunction with others, such that it can learn the correct relationship between them in termsof the numbers in the vectors that represent them. An immediate problem in our case is that weare working with Early Modern English, so the standard big background corpora available to us—
like Wikipedia—probably will not be appropriate since meanings of terms (like “rights” or “law”)
have changed over time. To resolve this, we use text date from Rodon and Paskhalis (2021),
who provided us with written proceedings of the English Parliament for the relevant period. In
particular, we have the “journals” of the House of Commons and House of Lords, starting in 1547
and 1510 respectively. These are non-verbatim summaries of daily proceedings. And we have thestatutes passed by Parliament from 1625 onwards, including the interregnum period. All told, thisis some 19 thousand documents, and some 35 million tokens.
Our second problem is methodological. As we mentioned above, there are many alternative
ways to produce word embeddings once one has data available. We use techniques from Rodriguez,
Spirling and Stewart (2023), which are designed for situations where at least some terms occur very12

rarely. The essence of this approach is to obtain embeddings for (rare) terms by taking the averageof the embeddings of (more common) terms around them. This average is reweighted in a way thathas been found consistently to provide high quality embeddings—i.e. they make sense relative to
one another—for such situations.6 There are two other nice features of the Rodriguez, Spirlingand Stewart (2023) statistical approach helpful to us. First, we can speak of meaning differences
between groups by comparing their embedding vectors for the same word. Second, it is relatively
straightforward to get a substantive sense of how the groups differ by inspecting the other terms
closest to word of interest in each case. For instance, it might be useful to know that Levellers use
the word “law” in close proximity to “equality”, while non-Levellers do not.7
To reiterate: our approach is contingent on the notion that the way actors use language isindicative of what they mean by that language. And thus, to the extent that the former differs
across groups, so does the latter. Obviously, there are many ways in which this may not be true,
and there is a large philosophical literature demarcating more principled approaches (e.g. Schiffer,1972). For one, actors are strategic, and choose terms they believe an audience will respond to inparticular ways, or simply to differentiate their ideas from some other author. In this sense, there
may be no “sincere” belief of a difference in meaning. Second, even if all statements are sincere,the contexts in which certain words appear reflect quantities beyond meaning per se. For example,
Democrats and Republicans in Congress might discuss “immigrants” in radically different ways,
but they do not literally disagree on the meaning of the term. Nonetheless, as a first approximation
we believe our approach is reasonable and in line with other efforts in corpus linguistics (see, e.g.,
Camacho-Collados and Pilehvar, 2018, for an overview).
6 We provide validation of our Early Modern English embeddings, relative to Modern English ones, in Supporting
Information B.
7 We give more details on precisely how we produced our embeddings in Supporting Information C.

13

5

Quantitative Results

In this section, we provide some broad empirical evidence of the ways in which the Levellers,
Lilburne specifically, used the term “peers”. Our consistent claim is that their invocation of thisterm is in the context of law—juries particularly—rather than in some broad social class sense.
For what follows, note that the term “peers” is not very frequent in the corpus, occurring just 292
times in the corpus, in 62 unique documents. Furthermore, “peers and equals” is a rare construction, occurring just twice in that exact form (in two unique documents). We can nonetheless use
statistical machinery to explore the relevant distributions.

5.1

The Levellers v Their Contemporaries

Our first cut on the problem is to compare the Levellers’s use of “peers” in our corpus with those
who were contemporaries but not Levellers (as defined above).8 Here, we are asking which embedded terms in the corpus are closest—via cosine similarity, a standard measure—to each group’s
understanding of the focus term (here, “peers” in its various guises).9 The results are in Table 1.
We see that the Levellers use “peers” in a way closest in connotation to terms such as “legall”,“illegall” and “tryall” in the pamphlets, while their contemporaries use that term closest in connotation to terms like “parliament” and “king” Our point here would be that these are not (in eithercase) obviously examples of social equality—they are legal in nature.
8 Given our comments about the nature of English at the time, and simply to be as inclusive as possible, we actually

search for the following variants of “peers”—“peer”, “peere”, “peeres”, “peers”.
9 These are typically called the “nearest neighbors”, but we refer to them as the “nearest neighbor-terms” here to
avoid confusion with “neighbor” as a specific term of interest in the 17th Century.

14

Table 1: Levellers and non-Levellers have different connotations for “peers” (10 nearest neighborterms), and they are legal in nature
rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Levellers
legallillegallpeerestryallchartalawes
lawcondemnmagna
expresly

Othersparliament
peers
king
lawes
commons
kings
therefore
parliaments
peeresright

To throw the comparison into starker relief, we now report the nearest neighbor-terms that are
most distinctive to each group. The results are shown in Figure 1. To understand that figure, andsome others that follow, note first that for a given group (say, the Levellers) we can provide anembedding for any term (say, “peers”) and then calculate the cosine similarity of that term to any
other (say, “legall”). We can do that for another group too (say, the Levellers’s contemporaries),
and thus we have two cosine similarities between two terms, for each group. The ratio of those
two cosine similarities can take various values: if it is 1, then the cosine similarities are both thesame (top and bottom), and we draw the conclusion that both group use the term identically (atleast relative to the focus word). If that ratio departs from one, it means that either the group in
the numerator has a much larger cosine similarity than that in the denominator, or that the group in
the denominator has a much larger cosine similarity for the terms than the group in the numerator.
The figure shows the (top) terms that have (absolute) cosine ratios that are distinct from one. The
x-axis is simple the (raw) value of that ratio. The y-axis is the ratio’s absolute deviation from 1,
and makes comparisons of magnitude a little easier.
On the left of the figure then, we have the terms for which the ratio is lower than one: that is,
the terms for which the non-Levellers have higher similarities to “peers” than the Levellers. To theright of the plot are the terms for which the Levellers have higher similarities to “peers” than the15

non-Levellers. Terms nearer the top of the plot are words for which the cosine ratio magnitudes ismost different from one—so, terms used in ways that are most distinct to the two groups (Levellers
and non-Levellers). The plotting characters at the bottom provide information about where thewords themselves exist in terms of being nearest neighbor-terms in the sense presented in Table 1:
some of the most distinct terms are nearest neighbor-terms for the Levellers use of “peers” (e.g.
“legall”, marked with a square) , some of the most distinct terms are nearest neighbor-terms forthe non-Levellers (e.g. “commons”, marked with a circle), and some in both lists (e.g. “lawes”,
marked with a triangle). The terms with statistically significant cosine ratios (for which a ratio of
one is the null hypothesis) are marked with asterisks.
Examining Figure 1, we see that—to the far right and top—the most distinctive term that it isstatistically significant is “tryall” (trial). Equivalently, the Levellers use the term “legall” in theclose context of “peers” in a way the non-Levellers do not. This is prima facie statistical evidence
that while the Levellers have a different understanding of “peers” to their contemporaries, it isfundamentally a legal one, and refers to notions of (criminal) trials.

5.2

Lilburne’s Position

It could conceivably be the case, that while the Levellers as a whole appear to have a predominantly
legalistic understanding of “peers”, this masks Lilburne’s personal socially egalitarian stance on
the matter. To investigate, we repeat the exercise above, but splitting the corpus as documentsthat Lilburne-authored vs documents authored by the other Levellers. We begin with the nearest
neighbor-terms in Table 2.

16

king*
parliament*
parliaments*
kings*

condemn*charta*magna*
legall*expresly*

therefore*
commonsright*

0.2

0.4

tryall*Non−Levellers
sharedLevellers

illegall*peers
lawpeeres
lawes

−0.2

0.0

absolute value of cosine ratio

0.6

●

●
●
0.6

● ●

●●●

●
0.8

1.0

1.2

1.4

1.6

cosine ratio

Figure 1: Non-Leveller v Leveller most distinctive nearest neighbor-terms of “peers”: Levellers
use of “peers” is different to that of the contemporaries but is legal in nature. Asterisk indicatesp < 0.01.

Table 2: Lilburne and the other Levellers have different connotations for “peers” (10 nearest
neighbor-terms), and Lilburne’s are legal in nature
rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Lilburne
legallchartatryallmagna
peeresexpreslycondemnlaw
lawes
commoner

Other Levellers
peers
therefore
commons
parliamentneither
thus
yet
kings
must
peeresWhat we see is clear: Lilburne’s nearest neighbor-terms for “peers” are essentially identical tothose of the Levellers as a whole, above. This makes sense, insofar as he wrote the lion’s share of
their output, and he himself was repeatedly placed on trial, most famously for treason in 1649. But

17

1.0

●

tryall*charta*magna*

otherssharedLilburne

0.6
0.4

commoner*yet
must

legall*thoughlaw*parliament
0.2

therefore

thus
kings
commons

illegall
lawes
peers

peeres−0.2

0.0

absolute value of cosine ratio

0.8

expresly*

●
●

●
●

●●

● ●

0.5

●
1.0

1.5

2.0

cosine ratio

Figure 2: Lilburne v other Levellers most distinctive nearest neighbor-terms of “peers”: Lilburne’s
use of “peers” is legal in nature. Asterisk indicates p < 0.01.
the terms do not pertain to social equality in this case, either: they are legal in nature. The other
Levellers use even less socially related terms. In Figure 2 we provide similar graphical evidence as
above: this time we see that Lilburne’s use of “peers” is with respect to legal notions like “tryall”
and “magna” “charta”.

5.3

His Apologeticall Narration“His Apologeticall Narration” is the title of the only Lilburne-authored pamphlet containing theexact phrase “peers and equals”. While there are obviously related constructions like “Peers orEquals” or “Peeres or Equalls” or “Peers, that is Equalls”, this document is still potentially special.
We mean this in the sense that it contains a particularly influential use of “peers” that we should
investigate directly. There are two related ways to proceed. First, and an indirect route: we remove the document from the Leveller (only) corpus, and re-estimate our nearest neighbor-terms as
above. If the document is particularly distinct, we might expect the lists to look different when the
document is out of the data versus when it is included. They do not: the nearest neighbor-terms

18look almost identical, whether “His Apologeticall Narration” is included or not.10
Still, it could be that mere numbers are misleading: that is, perhaps the document does differ
substantially, but this is drowned out by the homogeneity of the other Leveller texts discussing“peers.” To check this, we reran our analysis above, both in terms of the nearest neighbor-terms
and their ratios on this document specifically. This provides an opportunity for the (potentially
distinct) use of “peers” in this particular text to shine through. But that is not what we find; inparticular, the use of “peers” in “His Apologeticall Narration” is, as everywhere else in the corpus,
legalistic in nature. We see this first in Table 3, where the nearest neighbor-terms are tokens
like “tryall” and “judges”. We see it also in Figure 3, where essentially all the terms have legal
connotations.11
Table 3: The use of peers in “His Apologeticall Narration” is legal in nature
rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Other Leveller Texts
legallillegallpeereslawes
chartalaw
tryallmagna
condemn
expresly“His Apologeticall Narration”
tryalljune
speciall
tryed
barre
jury
judgeslegalljohnparl

A feature of note in Figure 3, is that the differences are generally not statistically significant
because the sample size is small by construction (there is just one document—“His Apologeticall
Narration”—providing the comparison set). Nonetheless, it could conceivably be the case that theembedding of “peers” in this document differs in some overall sense to the embedding elsewhere.
To check that, we conducted an “embedding regression” in the sense of Rodriguez and Spirling(2022). This techniques uses permutation to assess whether embedding vector for a word for one
10 Specifically, the top ten nearest neighbor-terms for the Levellers v non-Levellers comparison are identical, albeit
reordered. This is also true for the Lilburne v other Levellers comparison.
11 Note that to make the table easier to read we “corrected” letter is to js where appropriate, but we left the figure
as the original spelling.

19

0.6

0.8

shareddocument dummy

illegall*condemnchartaexpresly
peeresmagna
legall

0.2

0.4

parl
iudgestryed barre
tryall

iury

iohn
iune
speciall

−0.2

0.0

absolute value of cosine ratio● otherlaw*lawes*

● ●
0.2

●●
●●
●
0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

cosine ratio

Figure 3: “His Apologeticall Narration” v other Levellers most distinctive nearest neighbor-termsof “peers”: These are primarily legal in nature.

20

1.4

group (in this case, the Levellers) differs from that of another (in this case, the specific uses in “His
Apologeticall Narration”. Table 4 provides the relevant normed estimate and standard error. We do
not see evidence of a difference (p = 0.19). Of course, this is not the same as having evidence of
no difference, and the result may simply be a product of low power (we only have a few mentions
to compare). But it is at least not inconsistent with our claim that the particular way Lilburne used
“peers” in this document is not different to other Leveller uses—and by extension, not non-legal.
peers
His Apologeticall Narration

3.034[0.606]

Table 4: The use of “peers” in “His Apologeticall Narration” is not statistically significantly different to other uses by the Levellers.
To summarize for this section, we have found very little quantitative evidence that what theLevellers meant by “peers” is related to social equality. Rather, their discussions of this term appear
to relate to legal matters, especially juries. We now turn to more in-depth qualitative commentaryon this claim.

6

Qualitative Results

As we have discussed, the Leveller obsession with law reform took particular institutional form in
the jury; as Thomas Green has written, “The ‘jury right’ was more than just another Leveller reform
item: the supposed right lay at the very heart of Leveller political and social theory. . . ” (Green,
1985, 154) It encapsulated a great number of Leveller preoccupations: the use of Latin rather thanEnglish in the law; the enactment of arbitrary and unequal punishments; the excessive power ofParliament, and in particular the House of Lords, against the people; and the value of local control,
both with respect to matters of justice and of parliamentary elections. It is no surprise, then, thatclose reading of key Leveller passages demonstrates that legal judgment was in fact the means bywhich freemen became “equal and alike” or “peers.”
21

Take, for instance, Bejan’s passage from Lilburne—i.e., that “the meanest man in England”
could become a high-status peer, “as much entitled and entailed. . . as the greatest subject.” Again,
Bejan invokes this passage to demonstrate the significance of socially “levelling up” (while leaving
women in a subordinate position). Yet in the “The Oppressed Mans Importunate and Mournfull
Cryes to be brought to the Barre of Justice,” Lilburne starts by pointing out that “the Law of theLand is equally and alike our common birthright and inheritance (for all the distinguishing, deviding names amongst us) unto which”—and here we leave off where Bejan begins—“the meanest
man in England is as much entitled and entailed. . . as the greatest Subject.” That is, the way inwhich social unequals—the meanest man and greatest subject—in fact are able to relate as equals
and peers is through their status under the law. But it is also the case that Lilburne denied that theHouse of Lords were the “Peeres of Commoners,” and that Commoners of England ought to betried by their own “Peers, that is, Equals.” (“Oppressed Mans Oppressions Declared” and “People’s Prerogatives and Priviledges”) He denied that a committee that mixed Lords and commons
was permissible, “seeing the Lords are none of their or my Peers and Equalls by Law, and so cannot, nor ought not to be there, to be my examiners, tryers and Judges. . . ” Lilburne’s argument was
not that the Commoners should have parity with respect to the high status of Peers: rather, theyshould remain socially distinct on the grounds that “their peers were in fact not his Peers” (Bejan,
2022, 611)
That “peers” here did not entail leveling up is an important point for the wider history of theLeveller movement because, far from seeking to gain access to the bench, the second Agreementof the People instead sought to “rid the Kingdom” of lawyers. In a letter to Col. Henry Marten,
Lilburne himself specifically repudiates the aim of high standing, because of his hostility to theestablished legal establishment: “I do believe you will never find one president in England before
mine, for as I was (for anything I could ever hear) the first man in England that refused the Star
Chamber’s illegal and unjust oath, so I believe I am the first man in England, that ever at theLords (to their faces) protested against their jurisdiction in criminal cases, over the Commons ofEngland; and Solemnly and formally appealed to the House of Commons, as me legal Peers and22

Equals.” Likewise, in “People’s Prerogative and Priviledges,” Lilburne refers to peers and/or equals
repeatedly in invoking the jury, denying that Parliament—which had arrogated to itself both lawfinding and fact-finding—had a right to try him. (Green, 1985, 168). Again, the argument was insupport of lay justice, rather than the pursuit of power to render elite judgment.
Of course, Bejan is right to note that, on Sir Edward Coke’s gloss of Magna Carta in theInstitutes, there is a difference between the peers of the “peerage,” and the peers of the commoners(Bejan, 2022, 208). But that does not mean that the commoners were themselves mere equals;
to adopt Bejan’s language, Coke in fact identified differential dignity within each rank. “For as
every of the Nobles is a Peer to each other, though they have severall Names of Dignity, as Dukes,
Marquisses, Earles, Viscounts, and Barons; so of the Commons of the Realme, each Commoneris a Peer or Equall to another, though they be of severall Degrees, as Knights, Esquires, Citizens,
Gentlemen, Yeomen, and Burgesses.” (19) Moreover, as Rachel Foxley has persuasively argued,
Lilburne in particular developed a new and distinctive egalitarian legal language drawing on Cokeand Magna Carta: as she notes, Coke’s discussion of the freemen of Magna Carta chapter 29
was inclusive in terms of status, extending to villeins (Foxley, 2016, 94) Lilburne’s use of theterminology of “peers” for the aim of lay justice by fellow Commoners is thus consistent.12
The use of “peers and equals” in “Apologetical Narrative” clarifies the point. Lilburne complained that he had been judged by the “Lords barr,” and protested that they had asserted jurisdiction over commoners, which he maintained was against the 29th chapter of Magna Carta and thePetition of Right, which “positively and expressly declare, that the Commons of England, shall be
tried by nonewhatsoever, but their equals.” (emphasis added) He lamented further that Cromwell
and the Earl of Manchester had brokered a deal in which they would release him if he acknowledged the “Lords jurisdiction over me,” but he refused and—true to form—“printed several highdiscourses” against Cromwell. Yet eventually a petition to Parliament succeeded in freeing him.
At a later point, Lilburne recounted, he, Walwyn, Prince, and Overton had been locked in the
12 We would also note that these arguments further bolster R.B. Seaberg’s view—against Hill (1958) and Pocock(1957)—that the Levellers were not mere critics of the common law as the “Norman Yoke.” Rather, the Levellers
believed the jury trial (among what Lilburne termed the “kalendar of Englishmens fundamental liberties”) had persisted
through the “Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, or Normans.” (Seaberg, 1981)23

Tower and subject to “barbarous crueltie” by his adversaries in Parliament; after having been denied “all these legal liberties and privileges, that by the declared Law and England were and are
my undoubted Birth-right,” eventually he was “most gloriously delivered by the clear and entire
verdict of a jury of twelve Londoners, being my Peers and equals (the Law requiring me to betried only by such a number of legal and good men of my neighborhood) of their own choosing,”
and which was met—on his account—by great celebrations on the part of the people of London.
The reference to “Peers and equals” at once cites the freedoms of Magna Carta, resists trial by
Parliament, and celebrates the value of lay judgment by neighbors. Lilburne evinces no ambition
either to eliminate the hierarchical distinction or to claim the rights of peerage: rather, his sought
just to be judged by those of his own status and proximity, rather than those above him. There isneither explicit nor implicit distinction between those who are high-status peers or mere low-status
equals: Lilburne uses both terms to characterize similarity of social standing qua geographicallyproximate freemen, as opposed to Lords.
It was not only Lilburne who invoked peers and equals in this way. For instance, the anonymous“Vox Plebis” again characterizes peers as those who share in judgment from the proper standpoint,
and—further—indicates that the invocation of “equals” does not only pertain to those of lower
status:A Nobleman hath this privilege of trial as well per legem terra, as by this Charter:and that anciently, legale judicium parium, or lawful trial of Peers, for all manner of
persons, as well Noble-men as Commons: was, veredictum duodecim proborum &legalium hominum de vicineto, a verdict of 12. good and lawful men of the neighborhood. Now to prove that legale judicium parium, or lawful judgment of a man’s Peers
or Equals, is by verdict of 12. men, and not otherwise: for the word Peers [universally]signifies both.
Bejan takes this argument to demonstrate that the Levellers here “deliberately and systematically conflated any distinction between high-status ‘Peers’ and low-status ‘Equals.’” But read in thecontext of the common law arguments of “Vox Plebis,” drawing on the medieval work of Glanvill
24

(likely via Coke), Magna Carta, and Coke’s Institutes (“Amercements [fines] ought to be assessedby the equals of him that is amerced”) it seems clear that “peers” pertained not to Peerage but tothe “good and lawful men of the neighborhood” capable of rendering judgment. Both noblemen
and commoners were entitled to the judgment of twelve of their peers or equals, drawn—in either
case—from the good and lawful men of the community.
The main point is this: if “peers” is a significant concept during this period—and we concurwith Bejan that it was—it is because it is so closely associated with the legal reform agenda of
the Levellers, and the value of judgment by those similarly situated, both with respect to locality
and to standing. The Levellers were surely, in key respects, socially and politically egalitarian;but insofar as they used the language of parity to characterize their commitment to the jury, it was
invoking the freemen of Magna Charta rather than the earls and barons of the realm. To achieve
justice according to a jury of their peers and equals, they did not need to level up, but down.
It might seem that the distinction between levelling up and levelling down is an insignificant
one: why should we care, so long as rights are allocated on equal terms? But it has acquired
outsized significance in discussions of equality within political philosophy. In “Justice and Equality,” Gregory Vlastos argued that the wide distribution of citizen rights does not “trivialize” theseprivileges, but conferred a “ ‘rank of dignity’ in some ways comparable to that enjoyed by hereditary nobilities of the past” (Vlastos, 1962, 47). Waldron drew on these arguments in his Tanner
Lectures to argue that human dignity now accords to every human being “the dignity, rank, andexpectation of respect that was formerly accorded to nobility.” (Waldron, 2012, 33-34). Invoking
this concept of equal high standing in support of a distinctly democratic conception of dignity,
Josiah Ober suggests that civic dignity may be understood as “elite peerage regrounded in explicitly political relations and extended to a broad and diverse set of persons,” and that this concept
was central to Athenian democratic institutions and political culture (Ober, 2012, 829). It is important for the history of democratic thought, then, to see if this mechanism—the democratizationof “peerage”—travels. It may indeed, but we do not believe it extends to the Levellers.
It is also true that the Levellers may not have consistently distinguished between legal and25social (or, for that matter, political) equality. Yet what our analysis has demonstrated is that,quite often, these latter arguments derived from appeals to legal equality. There are, of course,
good historical reasons for this, including Lilburne’s own endless trials, as well as wider Leveller
concerns about legal persecution for assertions of religious freedoms.13 Legal equality was not thesole commitment of the Levellers, but the extent they invoked the concept of parity, it was in the
pursuit of equal legal standing, rather than a more expansive demand for equal high standing.

7

Discussion

Commentators have often noted that the Levellers evade easy characterization, variously construed
as proto-democrats (e.g. Frank, 1955); as religious sectarians (Robertson, 1951); as bourgeois
individualists (Macpherson, 1962) or classical liberals (Otteson, 2020) or socialists (Brockway,1980) avant la lettre; or as radicals manqué (Foxley, 2016). In the modern UK, partisan forcesfrom both the communitarian left (Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn) and the libertarian right (Daniel
Hannan, Douglas Carswell) cite them as inspirations. Recent efforts to marshal the Levellers inthe service of egalitarian political philosophy are no different: all sensible readers agree that theLevellers were invested in equality of some form, but they disagree about its scope and character.
In response to recent work situating the Levellers with respect to relational egalitarianism, we haveargued that the Levellers were preoccupied by legal judgment, and that their defenses of social
equality tended to be downstream from their institutional arguments. While we agree that it isimportant to understand what the Levellers meant by their repeated invocations of “peers” and“equals,” we have contended that it clarifies the outsized importance of lay legal judgment to theLevellers, and to levelling down, rather than up.
We combined new data and methods to make these points. We built word embeddings for our
corpus—a fairly comprehensive set of period pamphlets—and used those to assess the “meaning”
of terms like “peers” in terms of “nearby” words. Our overwhelming impression from the quan13 We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this point.

26

titative work was that, to the extent “peers” are mentioned by the Levellers, it occurs in the legal
context. We demonstrated this by comparing Levellers to their non-Leveller contemporaries, andthen with a specific focus on Lilburne. Our qualitative examination—where we looked at the term
usages in a more holistic way—confirmed these “thinner” statistical claims. Future work might
examine other questions about the Levellers or this period, including Leveller differences with respect to the Diggers, their potentially changing views over time, or their commitment (or not) torepresentative democracy and its institutions.
Whatever the substantive matter at stake, we note three broader issues that other historical workof this nature must grapple with. First, the techniques are only as good as their data. Embeddings
require non-trivial amounts of data to be of high quality—that is, to make sense for the domain towhich they are being applied. Here, we studied early modern English, and were fortunate to havea large background parliamentary corpus to “train” our model. This is likely to be a bottleneckfor earlier periods, where the available corpora are smaller or non-existent. Perhaps for later periods, training on contemporary English sources would be reasonable, but we would advocate basic
qualitative diagnostics when doing so. In our case, the nearest neighbor-terms of Supporting Information B told us that our local corpus seemed sufficient (and indeed that embeddings fit to modern
texts would not suffice). Second is the importance of guided inference—that is, that qualitative
experts direct quantitative queries. The statistical techniques we used above can reveal the “meaning” of terms but only in a shallow sense. They can tell us about tokens and their distances to otherwords, but that is not a substitute for a deep understanding of the term within its historical milieu.
By extension, the methods cannot tell us what to test; their utility comes in determining how to
test. Our point here is that future work in this vein—whether for this period or others—should startwith substantive questions that could plausibly have statistical answers, rather than with statisticalanswers that could plausibly have substantive questions. Our third broader point flows from thisobservation: mixing quantitative and qualitative approaches is non-trivial and that clarity is neededin terms of the workflow of a study. For example, it can be hard to specify hypotheses in the case ofpolitical theory, and even harder to pre-register them. Specifically, scholars of thought often work27

through a given set of texts—such as Lilburne’s writings—in an inductive fashion, updating theirviews about the author as they go. This implies an “unsupervised learning” world view, where
the task of the analyst is to uncover latent structure in the documents. Translating that process totestable “theories” about the data is difficult in any discipline, including political science. Moreconcrete guidelines for these concerns would clearly be helpful, and we leave that for future work.

28

References
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (and why we
don’t talk about it). Princeton University Press.
Archer, Dawn, Merja Kytö, Alistair Baron and Paul Rayson. 2015. “Guidelines for normalising
Early Modern English corpora: Decisions and justifications.” icame Journal 39(1):5–24.
Ballandonne, Matthieu and Igor Cersosimo. 2023. “Towards a “Text as Data” Approach in the
History of Economics: An Application to Adam Smith’s Classics.” Journal of the History of
Economic Thought 45(1):27–49.
Bejan, Teresa M. 2022. “What Was the Point of Equality?” American Journal of Political Science
66(3):604–616.
Blaydes, Lisa, Justin Grimmer and Alison McQueen. 2018. “Mirrors for Princes and Sultans:
Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds.” The Journal of
Politics 80(4):1150–1167.
Brockway, F. 1980. Britain’s First Socialists: The Levellers, Agitators, and Diggers of the English
Revolution. Quartet Books.
Camacho-Collados, Jose and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar. 2018. “From word to sense embeddings: A survey on vector representations of meaning.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 63:743–788.
De Krey, Gary Stuart. 2017. Following the Levellers. Volume One, Political and Religious Radicals
in the English Civil War and Revolution, 1645-1649. London : Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Firth, John R. 1957. “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory, 1930-1955.” Studies in linguistic analysis .
Foxley, Rachel. 2004. “John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ’Free-Born Englishmen’.” The Historical Journal 47(4):849–874. Publisher: Cambridge University Press.
Foxley, Rachel. 2016. The Levellers : Radical political thought in the English Revolution. Oxford:
Manchester University Press.
Frank, Joseph. 1955. The Levellers. In The Levellers:a history of the writings of three seventeenthcentury social democrats. Harvard University Press.
Green, Thomas A. 1985. Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English criminal
trial jury 1200-1800. University of Chicago Press.
Hart, DM and R. Kenyon. 2018. “Tracts on Liberty by the Levellers and their Critics (1638-1660),
Cilt: 5,(Ed: DM Hart & R. Kenyon), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.”.
URL: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hart-tracts-on-liberty-by-the-levellers-and-their-critics1638-1660-7-vols
Hill, Christopher. 1958. The Norman Yoke. Palgrave Macmillan US chapter 3, pp. 46–111.
29

Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Masschaele, James. 2008. Jury, State, and Society in Medieval England. Springer.
Musson, Anthony. 1997. “Twelve Good Men and True? The Character of early Fourteenth-Century
Juries.” Law and History Review 15(1):115–144.
Ober, Josiah. 2012. “Democracy’s Dignity.” American Political Science Review 106(4):827–846.
Otteson, James R. 2020. “The Levellers and the Birth of Liberal Political Economy.” Social Philosophy and Policy 37(1):170–189.
Pennington, Jeffrey, Richard Socher and Christopher D Manning. 2014. Glove: Global vectors
for word representation. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on empirical methods in natural
language processing (EMNLP). pp. 1532–1543.
Pettit, Philip. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy.
Cambridge University Press.
Pocock, John. 1957. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge University Press.
Rheault, Ludovic and Christopher Cochrane. 2020. “Word embeddings for the analysis of ideological placement in parliamentary corpora.” Political Analysis 28(1):112–133.
Robertson, David Bruce. 1951. The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy. Columbia
University Press.
Rodman, Emma. 2020. “A Timely Intervention: Tracking the changing meanings of politicalconcepts with word vectors.” Political Analysis 28(1):87–111.
Rodman, Emma. 2023. “On Political Theory and Large Language Models.” Political Theory .
Rodon, Toni and Tom Paskhalis. 2021. “Parliament Strikes Back: Agenda-setting and Power Voids
in Early Representative Assemblies.” Working Paper .
URL: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/qgu9c
Rodriguez, Pedro L and Arthur Spirling. 2022. “Word embeddings: What works, what doesn’t,
and how to tell the difference for applied research.” The Journal of Politics 84(1):101–115.
Rodriguez, Pedro L, Arthur Spirling and Brandon M Stewart. 2023. “Embedding regression:
Models for context-specific description and inference.” American Political Science Review
117(4):1255–1274.
Schiffer, Stephen. 1972. Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seaberg, Robert B. 1981. “The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: the Levellers and theargument from continuity.” The Historical Journal 24(4):791–806.
Shapiro, Barbara. 1975. “Law reform in Seventeenth Century England.” Am. J. Legal Hist. 19:280.
30

Vlastos, Gregory. 1962. Justice and Equality. In Social Justice, ed. R.B. Brandt. Prentice-Hall
pp. 31–72.
Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. Law and Disagreement. OUP Oxford.
Waldron, Jeremy. 2012. Dignity, Rank, and Rights. Oxford University Press, USA.
Waldron, Jeremy. 2017. One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality. Harvard University
Press.

31

Online Supporting Information for Peers,
Equals, and Jurors: New Data and Methods on
The Role of Legal Equality in Leveller Thought

1

Contents (Appendix)
A Data Details

2

B Validating the Embeddings

3

C Specification Details on Quantitative Analysis
C.1 Making the Corpora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C.2 Making the Embeddings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C.3 Modeling etc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4
4
5
5

A

Data Details

Table 5 provides an overview of the (260) pamphlet (and associated document) lengths: the meanis around 13000 words, but the median is around 7500 words.
Min
196

25th percentile
3030

Median Mean
6272
12041

75th percentile
Max
13487
111280

Table 5: Lengths of texts (numbers of tokens) in our “core” Leveller corpus.
To get a sense of the balance between these groups and others overtime, consider Figure 4.
There, the [red] circles and [pink] squares mark Leveller texts (“main” or from “other” authors),
while the [blue] triangles are non-Leveller texts (by our definition). Notice that the y-axis is thelog (base 10) length of text, and thus the Leveller and non-Leveller texts are somewhat balancedon this dimension over time. Our “main” period—where most of the data appears—is demarcatedby broken bold lines at the center of the plot.

2

5.0
3.5
2.5

3.0

log(length)

4.0

4.5

Leveller (main)
Leveller (other)non−Leveller

1640

1650

1660
year

Figure 4: Authorship of core corpus, overtime and by (log) length. The two vertical dashed lines
signify our “main” period of study

B

Validating the Embeddings

We can gain some immediate insight into the merits of our localized embedding strategy by exploring how it represents key words from the period. We can do this both in an absolute way(“does this meaning make sense?”) and in a relative way (“does this meaning improve on othertechniques?”). Table 6 displays some results for six words of specific importance in our period.
In the “Standard GloVe” column, we report the (nine) nearest neighbor-terms in embedding space
for a pretrained standard GloVe model fit to modern English sources such as Wikipedia (available
from Pennington, Socher and Manning, 2014). In the final column is our model, fit to the parliamentary data and the various Leveller texts noted above. In all cases we remove the search word
itself from the results (because e.g. the closest neighbor to “sovereign” is “sovereign” and thus notvery informative).
We will not belabor this point, but from inspection it is obvious that our model returns terms
that are more meaningful—and thus accurate—for our corpus of study. For example, the termsovereign is associated with being “gracious” and “dutiful” . For the standard model, it is associated in part with “debt” and a potential “downgrade”. Similarly, rights in our case returns
associated terms of the age like “ancient” “priviledges”. For the standard model, we see modern
terms such as “advocacy” and “human [rights]”. The word alms may seem obscure, but provides
final evidence of the quality of our local model. In particular, “alms” or rather, the receiving ofalms, were a potential disqualifier for Leveller notions of suffrage. Our model correctly locatesthis terms near “freemen” and “housekeepers” who generally were thought worthy of the vote.
The standard model meanwhile returns “zakat”, an Islamic term for almsgiving, and “gt2”, a type3

tokensovereignparliament

cromwellrightsalms

godStandard GloVe
sovereignty, entity, debt, status, downgrade, creditworthiness, entities, affirmed, monarch
parliamentary, mps, assembly, legislature, duma, lawmakers, deputies,
elected, speaker
1649, 1653, oliver, 1658, 1651, 1654,
1652, 1655, 1657
human, freedom, freedoms, liberties,
abuses, advocacy, advocates, activist,
legalzakat, begging, gt2, lmp2, gt1, prayers,mans, scavenging, blessingsallah, gods, divine, heaven, christ,
bless, jesus, faith, worship

Our Model
reign, gracious, dutiful, memory,
majesty’s, subjects, loyal, queen,followeth
assembled, lords, present, commons,
now, whereas, hath, may, houseoliver, ireton, gen, wentworth, maynard, north, lieutenant-general, lieutenant, morleyliberties, priviledges, just, subject,privileges, enjoy, ancient, freedoms,
preserve
lot, housekeepers, freemen, voted, receiving, householders, elected, poor,
scotworld, people, even, heart, almighty,
spirit, yet, christ, glory

Table 6: Nearest Neighbor-terms (9), Standard GloVe v our locally trained model.
of BMW car.

C

Specification Details on Quantitative Analysis

As always with text analysis problems, specification matters. Here we lay out how we set up ourembeddings and other important objects.

C.1

Making the Corpora

The training corpora involves several parliamentary text data sets courtesy of Rodon and Paskhalis(2021). These are:
• Acts of the Interregnum period• Parliamentary journals of the House of Commons• Parliamentary journals of the House of Lords• Statutes of the period under consideration
These are then combined with the 260 documents in the Leveller Pamphlet collection. We preprocessed our corpora as follows using quanteda:
1. lower-cased, removed punctuation, removed symbols, removed numbers, removed separators4

2. removed English stopwords, and forced a floor on token length of 3
3. dropped all features not appearing at least five times in the whole corpus

C.2

Making the Embeddings

We first constructed a feature co-occurrence matrix with a 12-word window. We set our embedding
vector length to 300. We fit the Glove-based embedding model using text2vec. We set ourconvergence tolerance for the optimization to 0.001 or 200 iterations, which ever occurred first. In
practice, the model converged at 185 iterations (this took around 15 minutes on a modern desktop
PC).
For the local transform matrix (the A matrix in the original Rodriguez, Spirling and Stewart(2023) presentation), we used log weighting.

C.3

Modeling etc

When using the various conText functions, we used the local transform matrix formed as describedabove. We used the bootstrap and/or permutation functions when appropriate, with 1000 of eachin every case.

5