Muggletonian songs

The origins of the Muggletonians are to be found in the ferment of religious and political ideas that followed the breakdown of established authority at the start of the English Civil War. The two London tailors who founded the sect, John Reeve (1608-1658) and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton (1609-1698), were both from a Puritan background and were for a time attracted to the Ranters, whom they subsequently denounced. It was Reeve who, on 3, 4 and 5 February 1651 received a series of visions, which he described in A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise (1652), known to Muggletonians as the ‘Commission Book’. Reeve believed that by the visions he and Muggleton had been appointed God’s ‘two last...