The period from 1647 to 1649 is a time of huge turmoil in England. In 1647, the King is captured and imprisoned, the tyranny of the old monarchy at last brought to an end. An intense debate develops between the Army, the Parliament and elsewhere as to what form of government should thenceforth apply. What Oliver Cromwell and the Grandees want is, in essence, a continuation of the old system, though now in the form of an oligarchy – ‘rule of the people, by the rich, for the private wealth of the rich’. But the ordinary soldiers and ordinary citizens want something much more radical – ‘An Agreement of the People‘, a new constitution that would give a genuine democracy, ‘rule of the people, by the people, for the people’, a true Commonwealth. It’s clear that those two models for the future cannot co-exist…

All of this comes to a head at two events – the Putney Debates of 1647, and the Whitehall Debates of 1649. At both places, both times, Cromwell and the Grandees are on the point of losing the debate – but somehow, both times, an outside event causes a distraction, and the momentum is lost. In the end, Cromwell ‘wins’ by executing any who disagree with him – and sets himself up as the new tyrant, dominating the country and beyond for another drear, dread-filled decade. The so-called Restoration that followed, in 1660, restored everything that was not worth keeping, and threw away just about everything that was worth saving: Not A Good Idea… Such is, all too literally, the basis for modern Britain. All too literally, the Agreement was lost – and with it, perhaps our only real chance, for centuries, to make a better life for everyone.

A few fragments of the Agreement did remain: they surface again in much-diluted form in the English ‘Bill of Rights’ of 1689, and again in part in the formal Constitution of the fledgling United States of America. Yet even now, after almost 400 years of supposed ‘reform’, we still have not caught up with all of what was on offer in the Agreement. It’s sometimes hard to comprehend just how huge that loss has been – not just in England, but worldwide.

Yet imagine – just imagine – that Cromwell somehow failed; that some of his stratagems backfired, and that he or his party ended in disgrace. Imagine that the Agreement did indeed become the constitution for the land, creating a literal Commonwealth. It would have opened the way to greater influence by egalitarians such as the Levellers, communards such as the Diggers, and pacifists and free-thinkers such as the Quakers and Ranters. Weird politics indeed, to our eyes now – though maybe it’s our politics that’s weird…

And parts of the Agreement would have broken the dominance of the Church and its endemic silencing of women’s voice – hence, for example, likely to double the technical and scientific workforce from then onward, with women joining in on research and technology on equal footing with men. So imagine – just imagine – another kind of technology that develops out of that difference: a technology that’s centred not on ‘control’ of nature – as in so much of our present-day technologies – but on working with nature, to grow what we need. Give it a name: call it vinery. A technology, literally rooted in plants, that can grow almost anything – pumps, bridges, cranes, lamps, ploughs, even vehicles and more – via something that’s somewhat akin to present-day gene-splicing and the like, but using only the techniques and understandings available at that time. What would that give us? Weird plant-things. Definitely weird.

Then put those two themes together, in relating with the rest of the world – which, unlike this Commonwealth, is continuing on in the same path as we know in the histories that lead to our present day. There’d be clashes – lots of them. But with a pacifist politics underpinning the Commonwealth, and a strange technology that no-one else knows how to use and that would work well for defence, we can imagine the likely outcome. Weird battles in which the aim – on one side, at least – is that nobody dies.

That’s the world of the Viner Codex.

What’s interesting, perhaps, is to explore how it could be our world too…