1647 Remembered 

Re-enactment on 25 October 2025 in St Mary's Church

In Saffron Walden during the Spring of 1647, elected 'agitators' were raised from the ranks of the Parliamentary Army that had defeated the King during the English Civil War. They joined 'Debates held in Saffron Walden Church on 15 and 16 May 1647'. 

Click here to see a video and photos taken by the Sealed Knot photographer John Beardsworth.

Historian, Author and Prof John Morrill a Patron of Saffron Walden 1647, goes on to say, 'These mark the first stage of the debates on democracy, the nature and limits of religious freedom and on the right of the whole army – common soldiers as well officers – to speak out about the way the cause they had all put their lives on the line for was being betrayed by politicians in Parliament. These debates were to culminate in the autumn of 1647 in the much more famous debates at Putney, but the process of radicalisation and democratisation began back in May in Saffron Walden and these debates and events around them need to be better commemorated and understood as a neglected but really significant moment in the development of the precocious English concept of liberty.'