So although my flair relates to Medieval and Early Modern Ireland, another fascination of mine during my studies was the history of Puritanism, and the variety of radical groups - like the Diggers - which popped up during this period.

The term Puritan (which has remained in the English lexicon as a term of abuse) conjures up a vivid stereotype of the dour, hat-wearing zealot. When thinking of religion in this period, that is likely the image that comes to mind for most. However, it’s certainly not the full picture. The period from about 1640 to 1660 was one of dramatic social and religious upheaval, perhaps the most turbulent in English history; a period which saw the emergence of numerous sects, movements and individuals who held extremely heterodox beliefs and who hoped to completely transform the society in which they lived.

This was a strange world of Baptists, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, and more. It was time which saw “the world turned upside down”, to quote from a contemporary ballad (and the title of an extremely influential work by Christopher Hill). The Diggers were one of a number of these small, radical groups. One of the most radical in fact. As their most well-known leader Gerrard Winstanley put it:

“the present state of the old world is running up like parchment in the fire”.

This was a time when anything seemed possible and although their revolutionary aims were not fulfilled, it is nevertheless fascinating to look at groups like the Diggers from the perspective of their own time.

Winstanley and the Diggers

In April 1649 a small group of individuals gathered on St. Georges Hill, a plot of waste ground in Surrey, and ‘sowed the ground with parsnips, and carrots, and beans’. A few days later, they were reported to have burned 40 rood (about 10 acres) of heath, ‘which is a very great prejudice to the town’. Despite fears from one local yeoman that ‘four or five thousand’ would join them ‘within ten days’, their numbers were in fact very small. The Council of State investigated this disturbance, but it was concluded that it was a local affair scarcely worth bothering with. William Everard, leader of the group alongside Gerrard Winstanley and who styled himself as a prophet, was described as ‘no other than a mad man’.

So who were these people? What did they want?

In a tract entitled The New Law of Righteousnes, published a few months before their “digging” began, Winstanley expounded his view that poverty is rooted in the practice of ‘buying and selling the earth from one particular hand to another’. He thought that because some people have the right to say of the land, ‘this is mine’, others are prevented from seeking nourishment from it and just about able to survive by labouring ‘for small wages’. It is ‘as if the earth were made for a few, not all men’, Winstanley wrote. However, he also believed that the days of such practice are numbered, and would end very soon when Christ begins to rise in his people and lead them once more to act righteously toward one another.

Their occupation of St Georges Hill was an attempt to turn this theory into practice. They advocated for radical social change which would see a fundamental restructuring of the pattern of land-ownership throughout England. The abolition of the monarchy that had taken place in January of 1649 should, in their view, be consolidated in the establishment of a truly communitarian order. They believed that the earth should be restored to communal ownership as it had been in the beginning.

The Diggers (or the “True Levellers” as they called themselves) have therefore been identified as a kind of Utopian proto-Communist movement. In their own day they were a very minor group, one among several fringe ideologies. Unlike the Levellers (who were politically radical, but did not advocate for an economic overhaul like the diggers) their ideas did not gain any particularly widespread influence. In fact they were much more likely to be ridiculed in the popular press. One newspaper dismissed them as:

‘a company of crack-brains, which are digging out their own ruins’.

Another, Mercurius Pragmaticus, ridiculed:

‘Prophet Everard’s’ intention to turn ‘Oatlands Park into a wilderness and preach liberty to the oppressed deer’.

This radical experiment of theirs met with a significant degree of hostility from locals. In Surrey they were attacked both legally and physically until they were forced to move. In October 1649 they relocated a short distance to Cobham Heath. But there they met with equally little success and the commune was once again violently crushed by 1650. It seems that following the failure of the movement, after about 1652 Winstanley reintegrated himself into regular Cobham society and he is known to have died as a Quaker in 1676. What happened to William Everard and other members is unclear.

The Importance of Religion

While the Diggers and their leader Gerrard Winstanley have often been treated as significant by later generations due to their proto-Communist views on land ownership, they were a deeply religious movement. There was a profound theological component to their ideology. One key reason they continued with their ‘digging’ was, as Andrew Bradstock puts it:

‘because it had a theological and mystical dimension which identified the communization of the land with the lifting-up of the creation from bondage and restoration of all things from the curse’.

The Diggers understood their actions, at least in part, as an activity which would presage the Second Coming of Christ. This was not conceived of as the literal appearance of an individual but, rather, the mystical resurgence of Christ in the hearts of men and women. Winstanley was opposed to the established church because it held Christ and God ‘at-a-distance’, whereas he wished to stress the immanence of God (who he refers to as Reason) in all people, writing that ‘every single man, male and female, is a perfect creature of himself’ and has the creator dwelling in him ‘to be his teacher and ruler within himself’. In turn, this rendered personal experience much more important than the established church, as well as ‘book-learning’. For Winstanley, there was no difficulty between God’s immanence and transcendence: ‘the same spirit that made the globe’ is, for him, ‘the indweller in the five senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and feeling’.

Clearly then, although the economic and political elements of the Diggers ideas were also of critical importance, this was fundamentally based on Winstanley’s theological interpretation of Christ’s Second Coming. It was a Millenarian movement as much as a Communist one. Their actions were frequently justified in biblical terms, with allusion to scripture. Everard justified their communal experiment on St George’s Hill with a vision he had received, bidding him:

'Arise and dig, and plow the earth and receive the fruits thereof' (see Matthew 21:34)

Winstanley likewise claimed that he had received a revelation whilst in a trance, during which he heard the words “Worke Together, Eat bread together” (see Jeremiah 41:1). St Georges Hill was revealed to him as the place where by “righteous labour, and sweat of our browe” (see Proverbs 10:16, Genesis 3:19) they could begin to transform the Earth into “a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons” (see Mark 12:43, Acts 2:44). There was a pronounced mystical component to their thought.

Although leftist/socialist movements in later centuries would try to co-opt the legacy of the Diggers, they really cannot be understood apart from the mental world of the seventeenth century. As Ariel Hessayon has noted:

“Communal ownership of property and belongings had been a characteristic feature not only of several ancient christian heresies but also of certain Protestanst sects, all of whom envisaged themselves as communities imitating apostolic practice”

Although some would try to identify them as an example of an early stirring of Socialist thought, or the beginning of a chain of Communist ideas leading up to the present, in fact their ideas formed part of a longer spiritual tradition. This isn’t to downplay their radicalism, but you can’t simply detach the political views of the Diggers from their religious ones, to do so would be anachronistic.

It is still worth recognising their radical ideas - however fringe they were - and some of the ways in which they prefigured many of the rights and freedoms that we now take for granted. But they were a very far cry indeed from any modern socialist, anarchist, communist movement we would find today.