Allison
De Weese
Milton and the English Revolution
3/20/03
The Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley
The decades leading up to and during
the reign of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell were rife with new freedoms,
such as the freedom of the press, and spawned several religious and political
sects that were intent on developing a better governmental system for England. This time
was punctuated by an increasing outcry against the clergy, universities that
produced an idle gentry and courts that favored the whim of judges and lawyers
rather than the written laws. The
merchant class mobilized educational reformation, establishing
Gresham College to instruct men who had the ambition, but not the money, to
learn. Books on mathematics, astronomy,
navigation, physiology were being cheaply produced and sold among the
London populous, and petitions against parish priests were
flowing in from the South and East of England
outlining the common people’s allegations of priests’ adultery and
thievery. Amidst this background rose
the True Levellers, or
Diggers,
proposing to dig up the wastes and fens of England, proclaiming them as a common land to be shared by
all people.
The
Diggers were associated with the
Levellers,
a group that desired constitutional equality and had its prominence in the Army. The Diggers were more concerned with economic
equality than political power and invited all men to join. The Levellers attempted to take control of the
New
Model Army during the reign of
Charles
I in an attempt to restore the government to the people.
“The Levellers thought that the state had broken down
in the course of the civil war; until it was legitimately refounded a state of
nature existed in which the sword was the only remaining authority. But military force could justly be used only
to hand power back to the people. This
was the purpose of the Agreement
of the People, the Levellers’ new social contract refounding the
state.”
The aim of the Diggers was to create a commune on the
wastes where all could be fed, housed and clothed with all members working
together to support each other. John
Lilburne, a vociferous member of the Levellers, spoke out against the Diggers
saying “[we] never had it in our thoughts to level men’s estates, it being the
utmost of our aim that …every man with as much security as may be enjoy his
property.”
April 1, 1649, a few men gathered on St. George’s Hill north of
London and began to dig up the ground in preparation for
the commune they intended to establish.
This reclaiming came as a result of a vision from William Everard,
founder of the St. George’s Hill commune.
The vision told him to “plough the earth as an attempt to restore the
Creation to its former condition." As the communes began populating the land,
tracts and pamphlets were appearing appealing to the state to sanction the
utopian communes. After Everard left,
Winstanley became the spokesman for the Diggers. He wrote several pamphlets and letters
concerning the establishment of the communes, describing the possession of
property as a fall from innocence. He published the first Digger manifesto,
The True Levellers Standard Advance: Or, The
State of Community Opened and Presented to the Sons of Men soon
after joining the men of St. George’s Hill.
This declaration outlined the reasons for the commune, the faults of men
and the government in aiding some men to rule, unnaturally, over others and the
location and pursuits of the St. George’s Hill collective.
Gerrard Winstanley argued that God had created men as
equals and it was only in sin that a man enslaved his brother, buying and
selling land that belonged to all men and women. “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 […] from the beginning it was not so.” From the beginning of the commune, the
Diggers were persecuted and attacked by the local clergy and landowners and
were harried by the local government to remove themselves. They did not leave and a second Digger
Manifesto appeared in June of 1649:
A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People
of England. This tract was
more succinct but still did not improve the Diggers’ situation. Winstanley and his people endured the ongoing
persecution but were eventually driven off the hill to settle on nearby Cobham
Heath. This commune was also attacked and lacking
financial support, Winstanley and the others disbanded in 1650. Other communes rose and fell in Kent,
Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire
during this time. The idea of communism
was not entirely new, nor was it practiced strictly by the Diggers of St.
George’s Hill. The “agrarian communist
ideas […] had long circulated in England, reinforced by Anabaptist theories which the
Thirty-Nine
Articles of the Church of England fiercely denounced.
The
Family of Love and the Family of the Mount had kept such ideas alive
in the Elizabethan underworld: both Spenser and Shakespeare had clearly heard
communist propaganda.”
Despite failure, Winstanley continued
to write for the cause, penning
The Law of Freedom in a Platform
in 1652. A letter to Oliver Cromwell
opened the platform, calling for Cromwell to create a new government rather
changing it in name only. “That which is
wanting on your part to be done is this, to see the oppressor’s power to be
cast out with his person; and to see that the free possession o f the land and
liberties by put into the hands of the oppressed commoners of England.” Winstanley’s argument was built on the
contributions of the common people to the overthrow of the king and Cromwell’s
debt to their support. “Set the land
free to the oppressed commoners who assisted you and paid the Army their
wages.”
The text goes on to outline that
though Cromwell had been in power for three years, little had changed. By releasing the land, Winstanley maintained
that the land would be at peace, everyone working for the interest of all rather
than the interest of a few. The result
would be no need for war. With buying
and selling abolished, lawyers would have been obsolete. All goods would come from a common store
house as “riches make men vain-glorious, proud and to oppress their brethren.”
Winstanley concluded his letter by summarizing
his political statements regarding the return of the lands and the freedom of
the people, both poor and landholding, to choose their economic lifestyle:
“I
desire that the commonwealth’s land, which is the ancient commons and waste
land […] may be set free to all that have lent assistance, either of person or
purse to obtain it; and to all that are willing to come in to the practice of
this government and be obedient to the laws thereof. And for others who are not willing, let them
stay in the way of buying and selling, which is the law of the conqueror, till
they be willing.”
Though
ultimately concerned with the release of propertied land, Winstanley also
promoted in this tract and in others education for males and females as well as
apprenticeships to avoid being trained as scholars who “through idleness and
exercised wit therein they spend their time to find out policies to advance
themselves to be lords and masters above their laboring brethren.” He believed that men and women should be free
to “marry whom they love, if they can obtain the love and liking of that party
whom they would marry. And neither birth
nor portion shall hinder the match, for we are all of one family, mankind.” A
majority of the marriages were made for financial gain rather than for love, a
notion that several of the breakaway sects held.
In addition to his radical ideas about property and
love, Winstanley took a different view of the resurrection of Christ. He believed that there would not be a second
coming but that “it was a continual experience in the hearts of men.”
Winstanley was a prominent spokesperson for the
Diggers, taking up where Everard quickly left off. It was, after all, Everard’s vision that led
to the establishment of the commune and there is little information surrounding
the other communes other than a few published pamphlets. Winstanley not only published several
documents but also visited with Lord Fairfax and engaged him with conversations
and letters
concerning the state of the commune.
These are the texts that hold the most information. At the time he joined the Diggers, Winstanley
was also engaged in writing religious and social pamphlets and the opportunity
presented itself at St. George’s Hill to put his ideas into practice. Given that Winstanley became the sole
speaker for a community where he could put his own ideas into action, it is
difficult to determine if all the revisions and changes he cited in his
documents were his personal feelings or those of the movement he
represented. Though the Digger movement
focused primarily on the confiscation of ‘ancient lands’ and the poor who
remained unaided by the governments of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, it was to
provide an historical precursor of what was to come in the early twentieth
century.
The mid 1600’s offered a unique time where the people
had the freedom to print what they wished, inventions and discoveries were
occurring steadily, governmental power was changing hands and there existed the
possibility for social as well as governmental change. The Levellers and the Diggers sought to take
advantage of these opportunities and though they did not succeed, the documents
they left behind illustrated that the people desired equality, not necessarily
for all, but for the majority of the population. The Agreement of the People proposed
elected bodies of representatives, the right not to testify against oneself in
court, freedom of religion, and that everyone is subject to the same laws
regardless of class, birth or wealth.
Winstanley’s pamphlets illustrate that communism did not begin with
Marx, but rather the hope for a utopian society had existed for hundreds of
years beforehand. At the very least, the
acts of the Levellers and Diggers suggest that political and social change were
possible for a brief time of governmental instability. When the government reestablished itself with
different figureheads, the chance had passed and all that could be accomplished
had been. It would be just over 200
years later that the Digger’s efforts would be better understood and radically
widespread.
