Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians triumphed in the Civil War against the Royalist forces of Charles I

The 17th century was England's most revolutionary century. In a way that carries many echoes of what has been happening in the Arab world in the last two years, this was a 'Twitter moment' of fundamental change.

As one Cairo activist tweeted: "We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world."

But social networks don't have to be digital. Quill, ink, paper and the printing press played that role in 17th Century England.

England's first communication revolution was more a literacy revolution than a technological one. It was largely driven by a puritan insistence on literacy as the essential ingredient of a religious life: how could one know the word of God without reading it?

The transformation was, in some professions, almost total. Half of all tradesmen and craftsmen were literate in 1600, but nearly all of them could read and write a century later.

You could read for yourself and not have to accept the word of the priest. You could write for yourself and not have to rely on the village scribe. You could describe yourself, in private, in a notebook which no one else would read but contained your innermost doubts. Every dimension of your relationship to God, to authority, to other people, to the rest of the world and to your own idea of yourself would change.

The spread of the written word soon had an impact on English politics.

At the end of the 1630s, the quarrel between Charles I and those who wanted to limit his kingly authority was intensifying. Civil war was on the horizon.

News travelled the country in pamphlets spewing out of the printing presses on both sides.

These pamphlets show how ordinary people viewed the conflict and took up arms in a country that was deeply divided: on one side, fears of a royalist plot to bring back Roman Catholicism and, on the other, of anarchy and destruction.

Just as happened in the Arab Spring, the ruling classes found power slipping from their grasp.

The gentry squire Sir John Oglander lived on the Isle of Wight, which sided with Parliament against the King. Almost alone, Oglander remained loyal to Charles I. He complained in his diary, "We have here a thing called a Parliamentary committee."

"Ringwood the pedlar, Maynard the apothecary, Matthews the baker, Wavell and Legge, farmers… These men ruled the whole island and did whatsoever they thought good in their own eyes."

By 1649, Cromwell's Parliamentarians had triumphed in the Civil War, imprisoning and then executing Charles I, and establishing the only republican government England has ever known.

It lasted little more than a decade. But when the monarchy was restored, the power dynamic between king and people had changed forever.

Again, there are parallels with the modern Arab world. The internet, email, twitter and social websites all played critical roles in the Arab revolutions - not only in the mundane sense of allowing people to organize beyond government control, but in establishing an atmosphere and an expectation that government is not necessarily in control.

Back in England, the king on the throne when the 17th Century ended was William III. He was a Dutchman, invited in by a group of politicos who then told him exactly what he could and couldn't do. He could scarcely breathe without parliamentary consent.

Revolution is never straightforward. The road to liberty is not some tarmac-smooth highway of happiness. Freedom is born in agony and competition, whether now or four centuries ago.

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