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Oxford Inscriptions: The Levellers

This inscription was set up in the 1980s at the newly redeveloped Gloucester Green near where two Levellers were executed as mutineers on 18 September 1649 following the Oxford Mutiny. Their burial (place unknown) on the next day is recorded in the St Mary Magdalen parish register, where Stephen Biggs is described there as a soldier “in the Corronals Company” and Roger Piggen (recorded as Biggins according to the Oxfordshire Family History Society transcription) as a soldier “in the Maiors company”. (Four months earlier on 17 May 1649 three Levellers had been shot in Burford, Oxfordshire).

Anthony Wood mentions the Levellers' Rising in Oxford, writing in September 1649 of an order (to be approved in Convocation on 30 October) stating that the Proctor, the Warden of Wadham College, and a Canon of Christ Church should be appointed

to confer with the mayor and citizens about the better being and security of this place [Oxford], whether they think fit is should be dismantled or retained a garrison still or what other course might be taken for the security of the University and city. — This consultation was upon the levellers rising in Oxford. The officers that quell'd them had presents given to them by the University.

(King Charles I had been executed on 30 January 1649 and the University of Oxford, which had been extremely Royalist, was now supporting the new administration: they conferred an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree on Oliver Cromwell on 19 May 1649, and he served as Chancellor of the University in 1650/1.)

See also:

• The Oxford Sausage (25 January 2025): “The Levellers' Last Stand”
• Wikipedia: The Levellers
• John Rees: “Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English Revolution” (doctoral thesis, 2014)