Officers and elected soldier representatives debated England's political future at St Mary's Church in Putney from 28 October 1647. They disputed voting rights, property, religious freedom and the authority of Parliament. The surviving record preserves an exceptional exchange between social ranks within a seventeenth-century army.

The debates contain some of the era's most powerful spoken arguments about natural rights and political equality. Their vivid language has made figures such as Thomas Rainsborough central to later literary representations of the English Revolution.