The Seeker Culture of the Thames Valley

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to give a more focussed account of the doctrines and ideologies of his Bradfield group, to attempt to situate them in their intellectual context, and make suggestions as to their provenance.  I will argue that these doctrines were basically concerned with private religious strivings, and their emergence in the 1640s and early 50s into the world of social theory and public politics was a temporary aberration due to the disturbed conditions of the time. For the present purpose, and as in my previous paper on this subject, I will use the term radical to describe attempts to bring about fundamental changes in public religion or in social institutions or both, and the term conservative for resistance to radical activities. Thus, the period during which the Bradfield group may be described as radical had come to an end well before the Restoration.