A search for the roots of the dissenting tradition in England, rediscovering secret sects, extraordinary individuals and their eccentric, influential legacies.

Heretics burning at the stake in medieval Norwich. The Mayflower on a voyage to settle – and deeply unsettle – America. Naked Quakers protesting on the streets of Restoration London. These men and women refused to conform to the church and the law; Dissenters tells their stories.

Britain’s religious radicals were persecuted indiscriminately. Some, like the Baptists and Methodists, survived. Most, including the Lollards, Ranters, Muggletonians, Diggers, Levellers and Shakers have been forgotten, but their legacies have not. The freedoms we take for granted today – the abolition of slavery, trial by jury, mental health care and women’s and workers’ rights – were driven not by the establishment, but by its most stubborn, visionary and often maddening opponents.

Taking the reader from fourteenth-century Coventry to the civil war years, through the industrial revolution and into the twentieth century, Dissenters revivifies the history of dissent. Rigorous, warm and frequently astonishing, it restores these angelic troublemakers to their rightful place in Britain’s national story and asks what their courage means for the world we are still trying to build.