An Arrow Against All Tyrants

In 1646 in Newgate Gaol in London, a political activist, Richard Overton, penned a pamphlet that contained dangerous ideas. An Arrow Against All Tyrants asserted the inalienable rights of the individual.

‘No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s… For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom.’

The thoughts contained within were radical at a time of historic upheaval in England.

This book reprints Overton’s bold, declamatory pamphlet, carefully typeset from the original at the British Library.

It is introduced by Ian Gadd, Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University, who sets Overton’s work into its literary and historical context.

An Arrow Against All Tyrants is deal for anyone interested in the tumult of radical ideas during the English civil wars and the both of human rights.

Introduction by Ian Gadd (excerpt)

In October 1646, somewhere on the streets of London, the bookseller George Thomason picked up a scruffily printed work entitled An Arrow Against all Tyrants and Tyranny by Richard Overton (fl. 1640-63) and, as was his habit, noted the date of his latest acquisition on its title-page. Thomason had been systematically collecting all sorts of printed items since 1640 and An Arrow was just the latest example of what he and his contemporaries would have called a pamphlet – a word that, of course, still has currency today but that lacks much of the potency and meaning that it had for Overton’s first readers.

First of all, a pamphlet was not a book. This may seem a curious thing to say, especially as you’re currently holding this book in your hands, but a 17th Century reader would have understood the distinction. For a start, a pamphlet was not bound. Many printed works in England in this period were sold unbound – as folded, printed sheets ó in the expectation that a purchaser would get them bound, but some kinds of printed items, including pamphlets, were never intended for binding. Instead, a pamphlet like An Arrowwould have been ‘stab stitched’: simply held together by coarse thread that had been stabbed through the left-hand margin when the pamphlet was closed. In contrast to the careful, precise, and hidden sewing of a book binding, stab-stitching signalled a pamphlet’s sense of urgency and directness – and also its likely ephemerality.

More in book

Author Biography

Richard Overton (fl. 1640–1664) was an English pamphleteer and Leveller during the Civil War and Interregnum (England). He wrote An Arrow Against All Tyrants while incarcerated in Newgate Gaol. 

Ian Gadd is Professor in English Literature at Bath Spa University, where he is academic director of the Global Academy of Liberal Arts. He is a member of the board of directors of the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution and an external member of the curators of the University Libraries at the Bodeleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. He specialises in the literature and history of the 16th, 17th and early 18th Centuries.