A Historical Snippet Pertinent to #OWS, Arrests, and Nonconformism

This is what happened in July 1670, when Roger L’Estrange, inveterate royalist and Licenser of the Press, was implementing his “crack-down against nonconformists,” trying to stop people from printing unlicensed work. (This was just after Puritan efforts at republicanism had failed, and Charles II had been restored to the monarchy.) The relevant portion is from the Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1670. As related in John Spurr’s England in the 1670s: “This Masquerading Age“:

“L’Estrange’s men raided John Streater’s printing-house with warrants to search and arrest suspects, but twenty people ‘fell into an uproar, and begin [sic] crying out that they were freeborn subjects, and not to be meddled with by such a warrant’ …. Intimidations and insinuations … were part and parcel of the political process.”