Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/103

 revolutions generally swayed by factional or personal considerations. To establish the proper weight to be assigned to each of these three views, a knowledge of his career before 1645 is necessary.

John Lilburne was the younger son of a Durham family whose lineage traced to the fifteenth, perhaps even to the fourteenth century. Lilburne, though he might forget his gentle birth in his ordinary intercourse with men, had it ever ready for use as a weapon. Thus, when he was on trial in 1653, he told Barkstead that it was fitter for him to sell thimbles and bodkins than to sit in judgment on a person so much his superior. Like many other younger sons, Lilburne was apprenticed in London sometime between his thirteenth and fifteenth year, about 1630. His schooling had previously progressed far enough to give him a little Latin and Greek, and this education he supplemented in London by reading Fox’s Martyrs and the Puritan divines. Almost to the end of his career his information was confined to a few narrow fields. But the quickness with which he assimilated such learning as he needed from time to time, and the critical judgment he brought to bear on it should have put to shame many of his contemporaries whose reputation for wisdom depended on the amount of their information rather than on the originality of their thinking.