63H
is name has been
inscribed on a column
commemorating
revolutionary heroes
in Alexander Garden,
Moscow; his life has
been celebrated in
historical fiction, on film and stage, and in
song; and his writings inspired 21st century
political and ecological activists, from
Tony Benn to George Monbiot. Yet this
celebrated revolutionary is not Karl Marx
or even Friedrich Engels, but a
17th-century Englishman, the ‘Digger’
Gerrard Winstanley.
Winstanley is best known for the two
communes that he and his ‘Digger’ followers
established in Surrey in 1649, settlements
that reflected his core political belief that the
land, a “common treasury”, belonged to all.
The 400th anniversary of Winstanley’s birth
in 2009 was accompanied by celebratory
festivals in Cobham, Surrey where he lived
during the critical years of the Civil Wars,
commemorative lectures and the
publication of a full, edited edition of his
works by Oxford University Press.
But, until recently, much of Winstanley’s
biography was shrouded
in mystery and it was
often assumed, wrongly
as it turns out, that the
Digger communes began
as a response to personal
impoverishment.
Thanks to the research
of the historians JD
Alsop and John Gurney,however, we now know a great deal more
about Winstanley’s early life.
While it is true that Winstanley, then a
London textile merchant, was forced to
declare for bankruptcy in 1643, this
relatively well-connected Londoner was
never truly impoverished. By the mid-
1640s, he had moved to Cobham, Surrey,
perhaps because his father-in-law, the
leading London surgeon William King,
owned property there. Here Winstanley
worked as a grazier and though he was not
one of the wealthiest inhabitants of the
town, he was still listed as a ‘gentleman’ on
manorial records.
The communal settlements he founded
in April 1649 were not, then, purely
prompted by material considerations.
Indeed, Winstanley continued to retain his
home in Cobham at the same time as he
was farming the common land and
erecting temporary dwellings upon it.
More to the point, by this stage he was
well-known as a mystical writer, penning
four works on religious themes in 1648.
These pamphlets revealed an individual
whose spiritual views were deeply
heterodox, even in the context of the CivilCommunity spirit: Our modern
illustration shows Gerrard
Winstanley’s radical group,
the Diggers, cultivating crops
on common land in Surrey
Edward Vallance reviews the career of
the man who led the ‘Digger’ movement in
the 17 th century, Gerrard Winstanley, and
considers how historians today are finding
a new way to look at this celebrated radical
BECCA THORNE“Winstanley was forced
to declare bankruptcy
in 1643 , but was never
truly impoverished”