In the plays and popular folklore of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are many expressions of liberty against the law. Taking this literary theme as his starting point, Christopher Hill examines how seventeenth-century society and its laws looked to the mass of the landless and lawless classes.
The colourful beggars and highwaymen of The Jovial Crew and The Beggar's Opera voice the paradoxical claim that beggars are more free than people of property. These fiercely satirical plays show the crafty beggar as no worse than the eminent politician or courtier. The ballads of Robin Hood, at their height of popularity, personify the opposition between liberty and property, the freedom of the outlaw in the greenwood versus the constraints of power, money and society.
Other groups opted out too: there are stories of ladies eschewing material comforts to go with the gypsies; colonists in North America 'went native'; and the idea of the 'noble savage' dates from this period. With their rejection of the state church, religious dissenters also challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, and so the law of the state.
This hero-worship of the 'outlaw' reflects vast social and economic changes. The lives of the peasantry were irrevocably altered, and Christopher Hill considers how they were affected by enclosures, the loss of many traditional rights and draconian punishments for minor transgressions.
However, the time when discontent would be expressed in political action was still far in the future. These expressions of contempt for the law challenge the equation of law with property that came about in the Glorious Revolution. They begin to pose the question, 'Freedom for whom?'