Baptised 1609, died 1676

Almost three hundred years ago, the lives of people in Britain were disrupted by political unrest. Two opposing factions fought to gain supremacy, and as both sides were made up of men born or living in Britain, the conflict was known as a Civil War.
On one side was the King, and the established order, on the other was a new class who wished to establish a system of their own. Eventually, this new group, known variously as Parliamentarians, or Roundheads, was successful. They had a supremely well-organised fighting force (known as the New Model Army), and were filled with religous zeal. The King was beheaded and the Roundheads’ leader – Oliver Cromwell – became the effective ruler of Britain.

In the midst of these political changes, some people began to wonder if the time had come for an improvement in the lives of the poor and oppressed.
Gerrard Winstanley was one of the most radical of these thinkers. He was born close to the town of Wigan, in the north of England, and his father was a wool trader. Gerrard followed his father’s profession, and when he was twenty years old, he migrated to London, and became apprenticed to a Merchant Tailor. After a few years, he established his own business, buying and selling cloth, and married a young woman called Susan King.

It was at this time that war broke out. The King fled London, and the Parliamentarians took control of the capital. Although Gerrard Winstanley was a businessman, and supportive of the new order, the conflict was bad for trade, and he was obliged to give up his house and business, and move to the country. Later, he wrote that he was “beaten out of both estate and trade, and forced to live…a country life”.
However, it seems that he had also been reflecting on the nature of trade, and had decided that it was intrinsically dishonest.
“For matter of buying and selling, the earth stinks with such unrighteousness,” he wrote.
Gerrard Winstanley’s father-in-law was an influential man called William King. When Gerrard’s business failed, it seems that William King allowed Gerrard to farm some land of his own, near the village of Cobham, in Surrey.
This meant that Gerrard Winstanley was, materially speaking, quite comfortably off. However, most of the people living round about him were less fortunate. Almost all the land was owned by a few yeoman farmers and the gentry, and the majority of Gerrard’s new neighbours were landless labourers. Gerrard Winstanley began to muse upon the injustice of such a system, and he started to write, and publish pamphlets, setting forth his new ideas.
Take note,” he wrote, “That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as comfortably as the Landlords that live in the Inclosures.”
He also believed that the people of England had been living in a state of oppression since the arrival of William the Conqueror in Britain in 1066; at that time, the land became the possession of the Norman aristocracy, and had been passed down through generations of their descendants ever since.
Gerrard wrote that:
“Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have cast out Charles (that is to say, King Charles), our Norman oppresser, we have by the victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoke”.
Like many of the new class of merchants and revolutionaries, Gerrard Winstanley read, and reread, the Bible for inspiration.
“In the beginning of time,” he wrote, “God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another.”
However, he did not lay all the blame upon the rich. He wrote that those who worked for the rich were also responsible for upholding an unjust system.
If you labour the earth, and work for others that live at ease…eating the bread which you get by the sweat of your brow, not their own, know this, that you shall perish with the covetus rich man.”
Gerrard became more and more convinced that the time was ripe for the founding of a new society, run along completely different lines, where all were equal, and the earth was once again “a common treasury for all”.

The founders of this new society would be called the True Levellers (later on, other people gave them the name of Diggers).
 They would abstain from violence, neither would they dispossess anyone of their property. If the rich wished to keep their estates, they could do so, but no labouring people would work the ground for them.
“If the rich hold fast to this property of mine and thine,” Gerrard wrote, “let them labour their own lands. And let the common people who say the earth is ours, not mine, let them labour together and eat bread together up on the commons, mountains, and hills.”
Gerrard Winstanley had a friend called William Everard, who shared his radical ideas. On the 1st of April, 1649, these two men were joined by a handful of fellow idealists, and began to cultivate a patch of land on a hill outside Cobham, called St George’s Hill.
Henceforward, Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard, and this little group of men and women, would work together, eat bread together, and have no private property.
In a pamphlet called “The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced”, Gerrard Winstanley wrote that:
“The Work we are going about is this. To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows”.

He also wrote: “That which does incourage us to go on in this work, is this; we find the streaming out of Love in our hearts towards all; to enemies as well as friends; we would have none live in Beggery, Poverty, or Sorrow, but that everyone might enjoy the benefit of his creation; we have peace in our hearts, and quiet rejoycing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.“
Opinions vary as to the nature of the land which the True Levellers began to farm. Some people describe it as crown property, which with the execution of the King, had become of uncertain ownership. Other sources describe it as common land, but it may also have been former common land, which had become private property, and the Diggers set about pulling down the new hedges, and filling in the  newly-made ditches.
Whatever the case, the activities of this little group of men and women caused widespread dismay amongst the local population. As the community of Diggers on the Hill grew bigger, the authorities, and also many of the surrounding country people, grew alarmed.
A report of their activities was sent to General Thomas Fairfax, the commander of the army, suggesting that he send troops to disperse the Diggers.
Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard were summoned up to London, to appear before General Fairfax. The conversation seems to have been fairly amicable, although neither man would consent to remove his hat – in those days, a common courtesy when in the presence of a social superior.

They stated that they considered General Fairfax to be their equal, and later Gerrard sent him a letter declaring that:
”While we keep within the bounds of our Commons, and none of us shall be found guilty of medling with your goods or inclosed properties…your laws then shall not reach to us, unless you will oppresse or shed the blood of the innocent.”
For a few months it looked as if the peaceful revolution had started to spread. Groups calling themselves True Levellers, or Diggers, occupied land in several surrounding counties, and the Diggers on St Georges’s Hill planted parsnips, carrots and beans, and started ploughing and sowing cereals.
In June, Winstanley published a pamphlet called a Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England. It stated that while the Diggers on St Georges’s Hill were waiting for their first harvests, they intended to sell wood from the commons to raise money to buy “food, ploughs, carts and corn”.
The declaration seems to have given Gerrard’s opponants the justification they were looking for. The little settlement was broken up, and the Diggers beaten and dispersed. Others fledgling Digger communities were also destroyed.

Gerrard Winstanley refused to be discouraged, and the settlement was rebuilt, but it seems that life on the hill became more and more difficult, and on the 19th of April 1650 – just over a year after the settlement was founded – a mob led by the local parson set fire to the Diggers’ makeshift houses, and burned or broke their tools and household belongings.

Records show that following the disastrous end to the Diggers’ Revolution Gerrard returned to farming his own land. After a lapse of almost two years, he wrote his last work – a pamphlet called The Law of Freedom. It was addressed to the country’s new leader, Oliver Cromwell, and outlined Gerrard’s ideas for a model society.
“That which is waiting on your part to be done is this,” he wrote, “to see the oppressor’s power to be cast out with his person; and to see that the free possession of the land and liberties be put into the hands of the oppressed commons of England.”
The pamphlet was ignored, and as Gerrard Winstanley had forseen, the Civil War merely resulted in a transfer of power from one group to another.
In 1657 Gerrard’s father-in-law gave him some extra land, and when Gerrard’s first wife passed away a few years later, he remarried, and he and his new wife had three children together.
For many years Gerrard Winstanley’s writings, and his efforts to establish a fairer society, were almost forgotten. St Georges’s Hill was enclosed alongside ajoining common land in 1804, and in 1911 it was bought by a property developer. He developed it into a “hillside studded with mansions”, ideally suited to the Edwardian professional man, and in 1928,  the area became restricted to the general public.
At the same time, appreciation of Winstanley’s work and efforts is on the increase. It is interesting, with the benefit of hindsight, to try to work out if he could had done anything differently, or if his experiment was doomed to fail.
In 1650, when it became fairly obvious that the Digger’s Movement was almost universally unpopular, he wrote,
“having put my arm as far as my strength will go to advance 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 other, wherin truth shall sit down in triumph”.

Words and pictures by Bethan Lewis

Read Gerrard’s original writings at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/index.htm