Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, rejected a “God without” in favour of “God within”, which he also called “Reason”. Like the Leveller leader John Lilburne, Winstanley took up with the early republican Quakers, and this article by TONY GOSLING and JIM PATON is reproduced from the The Friend (October 16, 1998) with their permission and that of the editor.
Digging for the Republic of Heaven he English Civil War was a piv- | otal point in world history.
Political power was seized by the burgeoning English merchant class which went on to create the industrial revolution, one of the biggest exploitative empires the world has ever seen. In the late 1640s, Cromwell was constructing the police state on which his middle-class revolution would be based.
The parliament of the day was anything but representative. Elections had been suspended and soldiers, on several occasions, were in the houses of parliament arresting MPs who would not toe the line. The Levellers formed a vast popular movement which took its name from the anti-enclosure activists earlier in the century. The Levellers are only now being acknowledged as the first political faction on either side of the Atlantic to organise themselves on a pattern of democratic self-government. When Leveller pamphleteer John Lilburne was arrested and tried for treason, events in the courtroom “Declaring the earth a ‘common treasury for all’, Gerrard Winstanley went further than the Levellers had dared. With his forty or so supporters, he issued a peaceful challenge to all the nation to come and join him to cast off the ‘Norman yoke’ and liberate the land of England forever”. were relayed out to thousands jamming the streets around Guildhall.
When he died, tens of thousands of ordinary Londoners turned out to pay their respects at what is now thought to have been the largest funeral of the century, eclipsing even that of Charles I.
Elizabeth Lilburne and Katherine Chidley, two. Leveller women, were centuries ahead of their time. Tens of thousands of women signed their equal rights petitions, but when thousands of women delivered one of them to par- liament, they received short shrift.
They were told by Cromwell’s Parliamentarians to “go home and wash the dishes”.
The war was a time of great popular ferment. It was by no means clear what form of government would replace the monarchy and the Levellers pulled together many visions of a better country, a better world.
Printing had been strictly controlled by the Stationers’ Guild before the war.
But sympathetic Leveller soldiers liberated presses and publisher Giles Calvert (Calvert Press today) helped ensure that Leveller ideas were available to counter Royalist and Parliamentarian propaganda.
Lilburne’s Agreement of the People captured the ordinary people’s vision of a more representative, fairer government.
So worried were the Parliamentarians by Leveller literature that they had the pamphleteers imprisoned and lying propaganda was issued to discredit them. As a final body-blow, GERARD WIDSTANLEY THE DIGGER th Wi eS ITAA = Cromwell’s “mercenary dammne crew” treacherously decimated the final regiments of faithful Leveller soldiers. The Diggers appeared in a nation wracked by the fallout of war just as this endgame was being played out. On 1 April 1649, calling themselves the “True Levellers”, they occupied a small area of common land at St. George’s_ Hill near Weybridge in Surrey.
Declaring the earth a “common treasury for all”, Gerrard Winstanley went further than the Levellers had dared.
With his forty or so supporters, he issued a peaceful challenge to all the nation to come and join him to cast off the “Norman yoke” and liberate the land of England forever. Winstanley believed in a radical form of Christianity spelt out in confessional pamphlets like The Saint's Paradice: ‘To my beloved friends, whose souls hunger after sincere milk. Dear friends, It hath been the universall condition of the earth (mankind) to be over-spread Etching by Maxwell Armfield, which first appeared in The Ploughshare. From Friends House Library. with a black cloud of darkness; and the knowledge of the King of righteousness hath been manifested but in some few scattered ones... I spoke the name of God, and Lord, and Christ, but I knew not this Lord, God and Christ: I prayed to a God but I knew not where he was, nor what he was, and so walking by imagination, I worshipped that devill, and called him God: by reason wherof my comforts were often shaken to pieces, and at last it was shewed to me, That while I builded upon any words or writings of other men, or while I looked after a God without me, I did but build upon the sand, and as yet I knew not the rock.’ To Winstanley, mankind is the Lord of the Creation, but he was always careful to explain that using the term ‘mankind’ included women as fully as men. Sovereignty is given to each soul to use for good or ill as it chooses. The thought of some sovereign force outside the sphere of the individual he saw as an insult to ‘the great creator, Reason’.
To set an example the world could follow, Winstanley called this practical manifesto The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. He was - expanding on Leveller ideas to tackle issues even more fundamental to the plight of common people. For all their popular support, most Levellers believed it would only be necessary to revise the parliament. The Diggers went further, tackling social questions that Levellers had only touched on, like whether the state has any jurisdiction over those not willingly consenting to it. In Winstanley’s vision there was no place for the familiar institutions. Central in his analysis was addressing the hard fact of landpoverty and dispossession, leaving those who had been masters of their own destiny in the clutches of “Lords of Manors and Lords of the Land”. When Winstanley addressed England’s landowners in “a declaration of the poor oppressed people of England”, he struck at the very root of class divisions: ‘the earth was not made purposely for you, to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants and Beggars; but it was made to be a common Livelihood to all, without respect of persons: And that your buying and selling of Land, and the Fruits of it, one to another, is The Cursed thing, and was brought in by War which hath, and still does establish murder and theft, in the branches of some parts of Mankinde over others...’ Winstanley straightforwardly exposed what he saw as the fraud of the civil war as Lilburne had done before him. That it was a popular point of view in 1649 is only now being acknowledged: ‘0 thou powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter through thy self-seeking humour That thou hast wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us: not only bringing thy fellow creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government...’ He was determined to strike at the root causes of social conflict. In spirited prose, he explained why the Diggers had chosen to act, and spelt out his vision for an equitable future. ‘And the First Reason is this, That/we may work in righteousness, and lay/ the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the Land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation. 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.’ As the Diggers built their makeshift settlement their pamphlets and their ideas were spreading. The common at St. George’s Hill was planted with parsnips, carrots and beans. Several more Digger colonies sprang up around the country, especially in Buckinghamshire and Kent, with a major settlement at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. The local clergyman-landowner, Parson Platt, dis- “The Digger philosophy has stuck, and the vision refused to go away. It can be traced in the Monmouth Rebellion, in the French Revolution and amongst its supporters in other countries, in the Paris Commune and in British land struggles throughout the last two centuries.
In the tradition of social equity there are few who have stripped social assumptions back so far as Winstanley”. — ———, missed Winstanley’s Christian creed and that of his squatters. Means legal and illegal were used to confiscate livestock and destroy the encampment and crops, leaving the Digger community without food.
The Diggers didn’t give up. The colony at St. George’s Hill lasted only a few months, but they moved to another site near Cobham, where they were able to stay longer and raise crops. As the year wore on and winter came, conditions were increasingly cold and grim. After a year, they were defeated by constant attacks and oppression, as malnutrition and general ill-health took their toll. Other Digger settlements lasted longer and, as their venture came to an end, the colony at Wellingborough gave money to support the Surrey Diggers.
But the Digger philosophy has stuck, and the vision refused to go away. It can be traced in the Monmouth Rebellion, in the French Revolution and amongst its supporters in other countries, in the Paris Commune and in British land struggles throughout the last two centuries. In the tradition of social equity there are few who have stripped social assumptions back so far as Winstanley.
His critiques transcend concepts of left or right. Winstanley demanded no less than direct personal access to natural resources. His convictions on common ownership reflected those of the Christian apostles: “Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common.” (Acts 4.32).
Winstanley equated the extension of private property rights with evil and the concept of participatory common rights with good. He particularly highlighted land as the key resource being privatised, or “inclosed” in his day, directly against the interests and wishes of dispossessed commoners.
By the early 1900s, almost all land in Britain had been enclosed, leaving the vast majority of the population landless, taking their livelihood through others.
Now, the remaining commons such as the seas and the air have been deregu- “lated_and defiled and even the natural monopoliés.such as public utilities are in private ownership.
Rights once thought inalienable have been recently stripped away in legislation such as the Criminal Justice Act (1995) and the Police Act (1997).
Meanwhile private property rights are being extended, even into the building blocks of life itself. The extension of private property rights is now reaching insane proportions.
When Winstanley’s colonists were finally hounded off the land, he wrote, “And here I end, having put my Arm as far as my strength! will go to the advancement of Righteousness: I have Writ, I have Acted, I have peace: and now I must wait to see the Spirit do his own work in the hearts of others, and whether England shall be the first Land, or some others, wherein Truth shall sit down in triumph.” Next year, The Land Is Ours will be reviving the Digger spirit with anniversary celebrations and is planning Digger colonies on unclaimed land across the south of England.
Preparations will begin with a meeting at London’s Conway Hall on Sunday 17 January 1999.
What unnerving foresight Winstanley showed in his warnings, and how can we not take up his challenge to those who followed him to continue his work?
Tony Gosling is a researcher for The Land is Ours, Box E, 111 Magdalen Road, Oxford OX4 1RQ. Jim Paton works at the Advisory Service for Squatters.
Reproduced from The Friend (16 October 1998) by permission of the authors and the editor.