In The True Levellers Standard
Advanced, Winstanley defended this
action as authorised by parliament’s war
to defend English liberty. There could be
no freedom until “the poor that have no
land have a free allowance to dig and
labour the commons”.
The poor themselves now clearly had a
significant role to play in achieving their
liberation from their landlords.
Winstanley effectively urged a strike of all
agricultural labourers to bring an end to
private ownership of the land. “The old
world” was, he declared, “running up like
parchment in the fire and wearing away.”
Though The True Levellers Standard
Advanced disavowed the use of violence
- “we shall not do this by force of arms, we
abhor it” – anger at the landowning classes
was much more evident here than it had
been in earlier works.
This hostility was a reflection of the
fierce opposition that the Diggers faced
in Walton, but it was also something of a
rhetorical ploy on Winstanley’s part. In
fact, many of their opponents came from
the same social background as the Diggers
themselves. The Diggers’ settlement, after
all, infringed upon the rights of other
inhabitants to make full use of the
commons. Disputes within the community
had got so bad that on 16 April some
residents made a formal complaint to the
executive body of the English republic,
the Council of State. Four days later,
Winstanley and Everard were summoned
to Whitehall to be interviewed by Lord
General Fairfax.
Fairfax treated them with leniency, even
permitting them to keep their hats on in
his presence. But despite Fairfax then
making a personal visit to the commune,
at which Winstanley repeated assurances
that the Diggers were non-violent, the
attacks upon the settlement at St George’s
Hill continued. By July, the Diggers had
been forced to move to new land at Little
Heath, Cobham.
Initially, they met with a warmer
reception here than at Walton. This was
partly because many of the Diggers
themselves originated from Cobham, and
partly because the parish was more socially
divided between the local gentry and
yeomanry. By the end of November,
however, local gentlemen, including
Parson John Platt, were pressing the
Council of State once again to deal with the
Diggers. On the 28th of that month, local
soldiers tore down some of the Diggers’
dwellings, took away firewood and cast
three or four elderly squatters out into the
open. By the spring of 1650, the
Edward Vallance is reader in early modern
history at Roehampton University. He is the
author of The Glorious Revolution: 1688 –
Britain’s Fight for Liberty (Abacus, 2007“The Diggers’ cultivation of land
was seen as a legitimate
defence of English liberty”
community at Cobham had been destroyed
as Platt and 50 other men set fire to
Diggers’ shelters on the common and set
watch – both day and night – to ensure
they did not return.
The communal experiment was over and
Winstanley now returned to writing,
publishing his last and best-known work,
The Law of Freedom in a Platform, in 1652.
In it, Winstanley laid out a vision of his
ideal society. The land would be held in
common and the goods produced kept in
storehouses that families could draw from
according to need – though individual
families would continue to live apart rather
than in communal dwellings.
For some historians, The Law of Freedom
represents the darkening of Winstanley’s
utopian dreams. Instead of placing faith in
the spirit of Christ rising in all to create a
free society, the Digger leader now seemed
to believe that only a strong coercive
system would ensure that all worked the
land for the common good. Overseers
were given the power to enslave those who
refused to help farm the land. The death
sentence was assigned for lawyers,
merchants and clergy who sought profit
for their activities.A democratic future
However, before we turn Winstanley into
a sort of 17th-century Pol Pot, the system
of justice in The Law of Freedom needs to
be placed in the context of the generally
brutal punishments meted out by the
contemporary legal system. Winstanley’s
penal code significantly reduced the
number of crimes that were deemed capital
offences. More importantly, whatever its
repressive aspects, The Law of Freedom
continued to map out a broadly democratic
future for the nation. Under Winstanley’s
constitution, there were to be regular
elections and office-holding was limited to
specific terms to check corruption.
Crucially, membership of Winstanley’s
utopia was voluntary. Those who wished to
cling on to the ‘Old World’ of buying and
selling could do so.
Winstanley’s book generated a limited
response and he now retired from writing,
but not, strikingly, from public life. By the
late 1650s, Winstanley, once a pariah, had
become a respectable figure in the parish ofCobham, serving as a church warden and
then later as one of the high constables for
Elmbridge. Towards the end of his life,
Winstanley was living in some comfort
in a large house in Bloomsbury.
This apparent about face, from
republican radical to pillar of the
community, was less dramatic than it
may at first seem. Throughout his works,
Winstanley had shown considerable
deference to authority – The Law of
Freedom was dedicated to Cromwell – so
his readiness to work with government,
both local and national, was no betrayal of
his earlier ideals.
And though in later years Winstanley
had sunk into comfortable obscurity,
through his writings his message lived on.
There were resonances with Winstanley’s
ideals in the 18th-century radical Thomas
Spence’s arguments, in the Chartists’ ‘Land
Plan’ and, in an American context, in the
work of Henry George.
By the late 19th century, the radical
Scottish journalist Morrison Davidson
was enthusiastically telling anarchists,
syndicalists and communists about
“our 17th-century Tolstoy”, Gerrard
Winstanley. That literary allusion remains
a powerful one.
Though descriptions of Winstanley as a
proto-communist may have fallen out of
fashion, as has the Marxist and socialist
historiography which revived interest in
him, attention to Winstanley the writer has
never been greater. It is no coincidence that
two of the three editors of the 2009
scholarly edition of Winstanley’s works,
Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, are
experts in the field of English literature
rather than history. With the exception of
Winstanley’s contemporary, the poet
Andrew Marvell, there has perhaps been
no finer writer in the English language for
fusing the pastoral with the political. The
forthcoming publication of a new
paperback edition of The Law of Freedom
will allow even more people to appreciate
the beauty of his prose, even if they might
not share his radical politics.^