On St George’s Hill
On April Fool’s day in 1649 half a dozen men began to dig common land at St George’s Hill, Weybridge, in Surrey. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, was a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman, who claimed he had received a divine injunction that people should ‘work together; eat bread together’.
The numbers tripled within a week. They called themselves True Levellers and soon became known simply as the Diggers. They were arrested and locked up in a church, released and locked up again. An angry neighbour said, ‘They invite all to come and help them, and promise them meat, drink and clothes. They do threaten to pull down and level all park pales, and lay open, and intend to plant there very shortly…. It is feared they have some design in hand.’ They certainly did.
A common store house for all
Within weeks Winstanley explained his ‘design’:
The earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.From the beginning it was not so. [1]
Their plan at St George’s Hill was to ‘lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor … Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation.’
St George’s Hill was to be only the beginning: Winstanley envisaged a vast series of collective communities: ‘not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in and Manured by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England and in the whole World, shall be taken in by the People.’
Once in possession of their birthright, the people will never let it go: ‘wheresoever there is a People, thus united by Common Community of livelihood into Oneness, it will become the strongest Land in the World, for then they will be as one man to defend their Inheritance.’ War and division would cease: ‘Propriety [property] and single Interest, divides the People of a land, and the whole world into Parties, and is the cause of all Wars and Bloud-shed, and Contention every where.’
Before Lord Fairfax
Winstanley and his follower William Everard were summoned to Whitehall to be questioned by Lord Fairfax, the army chief. They proclaimed, ‘what they did was to restore the ancient community of enjoying the fruits of the earth, and to distribute the benefits thereof to the poor and needy, and to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked.’
They stood before Fairfax with their hats on, and when asked why they did this, they replied, ‘Because he was but their fellow creature.’
Relocation to Cobham Manor
Back on St George’s Hill, when the Diggers tried to cut and sell wood on the common land, their horses were attacked by local landowners. Then ‘divers men in women’s apparele on foot, with every one a staffe or club’ attacked the Diggers. When this failed to dislodge them, the landlords took to the courts.Bailiffs confiscated the cows, but wellwishers recovered them.
Winstanley then moved the community to Cobham Manor, built four houses and prepared the land for a crop of winter grain. But troops were sent in October and November and on the second occasion they pulled down the houses. The Diggers built themselves ‘some few little hutches like calf-cribs’, and slept there at night, continuing to plant wheat and rye, ‘counting it a great happiness to be persecuted for righteousnesse sake, by the Priests and Professors.’
They denied slanders that they were thieves or that they held women in common: ‘I own this to be a truth, That the earth ought to be a common Treasury to all; but as for women, Let every man have his own wife, and every woman her own husband,’ said Winstanley.
They survived the winter and by April 1650 had sown eleven acres of corn and had built seven houses. The vicar of Horsley sent a group of men to demolish one of the houses, so maltreating the occupant’s pregnant wife that she suffered a miscarriage.
Destruction of the settlement
Winstanley tried to negotiate a settlement, promising that the Diggers would not cut wood on the common if the neighbours would not pull down their houses. But on Easter Friday they were attacked by fifty men, who burnt down the houses and scattered their belongings across the common.
In frustration Winstanley wrote that if the Diggers beg ‘they whip them by their Law for vagrants, if they steal they hang them; and if they set themselves to plant the Common for a livelihood, that they may neither beg nor steale, and whereby England is inriched, yet they will not suffer them to do this neither.’
The settlement was destroyed but Winstanley remained defiant.‘And now they cry out the Diggers are routed, and they rang bells for joy; but stay Gentlemen, your selves are routed, and you have lost your Crown, and the poor Diggers have won the Crown of glory.’
Other diggers
Meantime at Wellingborough in Northampton, where over a thousand inhabitants were receiving alms and public relief, nine men led by Richard Smith began ‘to bestow their righteous labour upon the common land at Bareshanke.’ They resolved not to dig up any man’s property ‘until they freely give it us.’ And they were pleased to discover that ‘there were not wanting those that did.’
Other Digger colonies were established at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, Cox Hall in Kent, Iver in Buckinghamshire, Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in Middlesex, Dunstable in Bedfordshire, Bosworth in Leicestershire, and at other sites in Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire.
The great searching of heart
In 1649 Winstanley set out his case with precision: ‘Reason requires that every man should live upon the increase of the earth comfortably.’ He believed that half or two thirds of the land of England was not properly cultivated: ‘If the waste land of England were manured by her children, it would become in a few years the richest, the strongest and [most] flourishing land in the world.’ [2]
This went beyond an attempt to defend traditional commoner rights against those who argued, perhaps correctly, that more intensive farming methods were needed to supply the needs of the growing population. Winstanley argued that collective cultivation of the land by the poor (as an alternative to expropriation by the rich) could generate both prosperity and social justice.
His plan for social reformation was set out in 1652 in his greatest work: The Law of Freedom in a Platform. [3] Here he states his quest: ‘The great searching of heart in these days is to find out where true freedom lies, that the commonwealth of England might be established in peace.’ The solution lies in the restoration of common land to the community as a whole: ‘True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth.’
Enriching of the commonwealth
Winstanley proposed that all land confiscated from royalists and from the dissolution of the monasteries a century earlier should be added to a commonwealth land fund. Private ownership of land or the produce of the land would be abolished (although families would retain ownership of their houses and property within it), money would disappear, and communal storehouses would be set up:
Every tradesman shall fetch materials, as leather, wool, flax, corn and the like, from the public store-houses, to work upon without buying and selling; and when particular works are made, as cloth, shoes, hats and the like, the tradesmen shall bring these particular works to particular shops, as it is now in practice, without buying and selling. And every family as they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops and fetch without money.
Commerce, he believed, would thrive under such arrangements:
Every man shall be brought up in trades and labours, and all trades shall be maintained with more improvement, to the enriching of the commonwealth.
Community peacemakers
Elected councils would govern at local levels, and these would send elected representatives to national government. As in Thomas More’s Utopia, there would be no lawyers. Education would be universal and enable men and women to discover the ‘secrets of Nature and Creation within which all true knowledge is wrapped up.’ No one would work beyond the age of forty.
Winstanley recognized that it was no easy thing for people to live together harmoniously in a community. He accepted that in any parish ‘the body of the people are confused and disordered, because some are wise, some foolish, some subtle and cunning to deceive, others plain-hearted, some strong, some weak, some rash, angry, some mild and quiet-spirited. ’Therefore ‘peacemakers’ would be annually elected in every parish ‘to prevent troubles and to preserve common peace.’
Similarly, elected ‘overseers’ would maintain order and ensure effective production and exchange: ‘they are to see that particular tradesmen, as weavers of linen and woollen cloth, spinners, smiths, hatters, glovers and such like, do bring in their works into the shops appointed; and they are to see that the shops and storehouses within their several circuits be kept still furnished: [and] that when families of other trades want such commodities as they cannot make, they may go to the shops and storehouses where such commodities are, and receive them for their use without buying or selling.’
An innovation exchange
The third type of elected officer in every parish would be the ‘postmasters’. These would keep monthly records of events and transactions within the parish, and share these records with other parishes and with the nation as a whole. This would allow all communities to assist each other in the case of disaster, avoid mistakes that others had made, and share discoveries and innovations:
The benefit lies here, that if any part of the land be visited with plague, famine, invasion or insurrection, or any casualties, the other parts of the land may have speedy knowledge, and send relief.
And if any accident fall out through unreasonable action or careless neglect, other parts of the land may thereby be made watchful to prevent like danger.
Or if any through industry or ripeness of understanding have found out any secret in nature, or new invention in any art or trade or in the tillage of the earth, or such like, whereby the commonwealth may more flourish in peace and plenty, for which virtues those persons received honour in the places where they dwelt:
When other parts of the land hear of it, many thereby will be encouraged to employ their reason and industry to do the like, that so in time there will not be any secret in nature which now lies hid (by reason of the iron age of kingly oppressing government) but by some or other will be brought to light, to the beauty of our commonwealth.
Afterwards
The Diggers were rapidly and ruthlessly suppressed by the aspiring landowners within Cromwell’s Protectorate. The restoration of Charles II was followed by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 in which, though the monarchy’s powers were limited, the landowning classes took political and economic control.Exactly what the Levellers and Diggers had most feared had come to pass, and the ‘common treasury’ was once again denied to the people.
The tragic consequences became most evident a century later when the early industrial revolution produced not wealth but rather poverty for the masses. That this was a consequence of theft by landowners and capitalists of common assets was understood by Thomas Spence, whose work suggests an intellectual inheritance from the Diggers, though it is not known whether Spence had direct access to any of Winstanley’s writings.
As for Winstanley himself, after the suppression of the Diggers, he joined a group of Quakers which included George Fox. It is possible that Winstanley’s ideas found renewed life among the early Quaker co-operators such as John Bellers, who in turn inspired Robert Owen and so led to the great nineteenth century ventures in community co-operation.
Sources
Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England,1979.
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1972.
Peter Marshall, ‘Digging for Freedom’, in Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica, 2001.
[1] Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, or The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men, April 201649.
[2] Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness, 1649.
[3] Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, 1652.
