The Levellers were a political movement active during the English Civil War who were committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance.

The hallmark of Leveller thought was its populism, as shown by its emphasis on equal natural rights, and their practice of reaching the public through pamphlets, petitions and vocal appeals to the crowd.

[5] After Pride's Purge and the execution of Charles I, power lay in the hands of the Grandees in the Army (and to a lesser extent with the Rump Parliament).

[6][7] As a political movement, the term first referred to a faction of New Model Army Agitators and their London supporters who were allegedly plotting to assassinate Charles I of England.

The first ideological identification was due to Thomas Edwards, who, in his work Gangraena (1646), summed up Levellers' views and attacked their radical political egalitarianism that showed no respect for the constitution.

It called for an extension of suffrage to include almost all the adult male population (but excluding wage-earners, for reasons mentioned below), electoral reform, biennial elections, religious freedom, and an end to imprisonment for debt.

At the Putney Debates in 1647, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough defended natural rights as coming from the law of God expressed in the Bible.

Michael Mendle has demonstrated the development of Leveller ideas from elements of early parliamentarian thought as expressed by men such as Henry Parker.

[17][18] In July 1645, John Lilburne was imprisoned for denouncing Members of Parliament who lived in comfort while the common soldiers fought and died for the Parliamentary cause.

In July 1646, Lilburne was imprisoned again, this time in the Tower of London, for denouncing his former army commander, the Earl of Manchester, as a Royalist sympathiser because he had protected an officer who had been charged with treason.

For example, Ireton asked whether the phrase in the Agreement "according to the number of the inhabitants" gave a foreigner just arrived in England and resident in a property the right to vote.

It is notable that John Wildman resisted religious language, arguing that the Bible produced no model for civil government and that reason should be the basis of any future settlement.

When some refused to accept this (because they wanted the army to adopt the Levellers' document), they were arrested and one of the ringleaders, Private Richard Arnold, was executed.

The Levellers' largest petition, titled "To The Right Honourable The Commons Of England", was presented to Parliament on 11 September 1648 after amassing signatories including about a third of all Londoners.

[22] On 30 October 1648, Thomas Rainsborough, a Member of Parliament and Leveller leader who had spoken at the Putney Debates, was killed during an attempt to abduct him.

His funeral was the occasion for a large Leveller-led demonstration in London, with thousands of mourners wearing the Levellers' ribbons of sea-green and bunches of rosemary for remembrance in their hats.

On 20 January 1649, a version of the "Agreement of the People" that had been drawn up in October 1647 for the Army Council and subsequently modified was presented to the House of Commons.

In April, 300 infantrymen of Colonel John Hewson's regiment, who declared that they would not serve in Ireland until the Levellers' programme had been realised, were cashiered without arrears of pay.

"At his burial a thousand men, in files, preceded the corpse, which was adorned with bunches of rosemary dipped in blood; on each side rode three trumpeters, and behind was led the trooper’s horse, covered with mourning; some thousands of men and women followed with black and green ribbons on their heads and breasts, and were received at the grave by a numerous crowd of the inhabitants of London and Westminster.

"[24] In 1649, Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton were imprisoned in the Tower of London by the Council of State (see above).

[2] In the 1724 Levellers Rising in Dumfries and Galloway, a number of men who took part in it were called "Dykebreakers" (a dyke being a Scottish term for a stone wall without cement).