The Diggers

Digger (noun): one who excavates or turns up the earth with a mattock, spade, or other tool [Oxford English Dictionary]

England was a ravaged land in 1649. The harvests of the two preceding years had been poor. The early winter months, always difficult, had been particularly severe. And murrain (a virulent infectious disease of livestock) had taken sheep and cattle in many areas. From the provinces came news of widespread famine, with stories of families ‘ready to starve for want of bread to put in their mouths’. In Westmorland it was said that 16,000 families could not afford to buy bread. From Ambleside, Kendal and the adjoining region came a petition outlining how the poor were starved, the rich reduced to extreme measures and that both poor and rich must be immediately supplied with food or else they would perish. Similar tales of distress emanated from Lancashire, which was reportedly afflicted with a ‘three-corded scourge of sword, pestilence and famine’. Trade was ‘utterly decayed’, the inhabitants of Wigan and Ashton apparently reduced to eating rotting flesh and other ‘unwholesome food’ that would surely kill them. In Somerset commodities were scarce and prices high, while dearth in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire had reduced wives and children to ‘go a begging from door to door’. An Essex minister remarked upon the ‘great scarcity of all things’ and that people looked emaciated.

Nor did London fare better. Indeed, it was observed that since the outbreak of Civil War in 1642 there were many more poor and miserable people than before. Some women from the City and its suburbs petitioned the House of Commons, bemoaning their ‘poverty, misery and famine’, unable to see their children ‘cry for bread’. Creditable reports spoke of families that ‘in the extremity of hunger’ had been reduced to feeding upon animal blood boiled together with brewers’ grains. A newsbook even related that in Westminster an unfortunate family had been reducing to eating cats and dogs. The plight of these destitute masses had moved a pamphleteer to cry:

Oh that the cravings of our stomachs could be heard by the Parliament and City! Oh that the tears of our poor famishing babes were bottled! Oh that their tender mothers cries for bread to feed them were engraven in brass! Oh that our pined carcasses were open to every pitiful eye! Oh that it were known that we sell our beds and clothes for bread! Oh our hearts faint, and we are ready to swoon in the top of every street!

Yet there were no grain riots in London, Kent or Essex. Though it was maintained that never in England had there been ‘so many in want of relief as now’, food riots seem to have been confined to the clothing districts of the West Country. Some of the poor survived by stealing food and fuel, others benefited from organised collections, abated rents, charitable bequests and relief provided by their parish. Several schemes were also advanced for putting them to work, while the Mayor of London passed a declaration empowering constables to whip idle beggars. In addition, measures were taken to alleviate distress. Even so, as a timely reprint of three sermons on the curse befalling corn hoarders reminded, the ‘public punishments’ of ‘sword, pestilence and famine’ were among the ‘most grievous judgements’ inflicted by God upon a ‘sinful nation’.

Reporting a plague of vermin blighting crops and cattle in Essex, a Royalist newsbook editor issued a similar warning:

truly it is a wonder that the blood-surfeited earth produce not greater plagues then these, when it hath been made drunk with the blood of God’s Saints; yea, the sacred blood of the Lord’s Anointed that crieth louder than that of Abel’s, and will never leave roaring in the Earth, till it bring down heavier plagues upon this mournful Isle, then ever those less vengeance threatening sins brought down on Sodom and Gomorrah.

Against this backdrop, on Sunday 1 or Sunday 8 April 1649 – it is difficult to establish the date with certainty – five people went to St. George’s Hill in the parish of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey and began digging the earth. George’s Hill was common ground, that is a piece of open land available to all Walton’s tenants and on which they enjoyed traditional rights – such as the freedom to graze their animals and collect wood or turf for fuel. The diggers sowed this unfertile ground with parsnips, carrots and beans, returning the next day in increased numbers. The following day they prepared more land for cultivation by burning at least ten acres of heath, much to the displeasure of several locals. By the end of the week between twenty and thirty people were reportedly labouring the entire day at digging. It was said that they intended to plough up the soil and sow it with seed corn. Yet they also apparently threatened to pull down and level all park pales, thereby evoking fears of an anti-enclosure riot (a familiar form of agrarian protest).

John Speed, Map of Surrey (1610)

Speed’s map of Surrey [detail]

The acknowledged leaders of these ‘new Levellers’ or ‘diggers’ were two former apprentices of the Merchant Taylors’ Company: William Everard (1602?–fl.1651) and Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676). Everard seems to have been a Parliamentarian spy during the English Civil War. He had also been implicated in a plot to kill King Charles I, gaoled and subsequently cashiered from the army. Thereafter he was imprisoned by the bailiffs of Kingston in Surrey, accused of blasphemously denying God, Christ, the authenticity of the scriptures and the efficacy of prayer, and then charged with interrupting a church service in a threatening manner. Everard also called himself a prophet and was portrayed as a mad man. His companion Winstanley came from Wigan and had learned his trade in London, where he can be connected with Presbyterian networks during the early 1640s. Winstanley’s business, however, had been severely disrupted by wartime, reducing him to bankruptcy. Afterwards with his wife Susan he relocated to Cobham in Surrey, supporting himself as a grazier by pasturing cattle, harvesting winter fodder and digging peat on waste land – for which he and several others were fined by the local manorial court (as inhabitants they lacked the customary rights of tenants to take fuel from the commons).

Everard justified the Diggers’ new communal experiment with a vision bidding him ‘Arise and dig, and plough the Earth and receive the fruits thereof’. Similarly, Winstanley declared that during a trance he had heard the words ‘Work together. Eat bread together’. Moreover, George’s Hill was revealed as the place where by their righteous labour and the sweat of their brows work should begin in making the Earth ‘a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons’. Nonetheless, complaints were soon made to the authorities against these supposedly distracted, crack brained, ‘disorderly & tumultuous sort of people’. Fearing a Royalist rendezvous gathered under cover of the commotion caused by such ‘ridiculous’ activities, the Council of State dispatched two cavalry troops commanded by Captain John Gladman to investigate. But there was little to see. The Diggers were merely ‘feeble souls’ with ‘empty bellies’.

Then on Friday, 20 April 1649 Everard and Winstanley were brought to Whitehall before Lord General Thomas Fairfax. According to one account, reprinted in several newsbooks, they refused to remove their hats in deference. Furthermore, Everard allegedly asserted during questioning that he was of the ‘race of the Jews’; that the people’s liberties had been lost since the Norman Conquest; and that ever since ‘the people of God’ had lived under ‘tyranny and oppression’. But now the ‘time of deliverance was at hand’. Indeed, just as God had rescued the Israelites from the bondage of Egyptian slavery, so now God would ‘bring his people’ out of their ‘slavery’ and restore their freedoms to them. Only then would they be able to enjoy the ‘fruits and benefits of the Earth’.

Intending to ‘restore the Creation to its former condition’ the Diggers justified their actions as a fulfilment of the prophecy, ‘This land which was barren and waste is now become fruitful and pleasant like the Garden of Eden’. In addition, by renewing the ‘ancient community’ and distributing the earth’s produce to the poor and needy they performed gospel injunctions to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The Diggers thus welcomed those that would willingly submit to their communal precepts – especially the Golden rule, ‘to do to others as we would be done unto’. They also promised to provide newcomers with food, drink, clothing and other necessities. Interestingly, like some Anabaptists (a post-Reformation religious movement opposed to infant baptism), the Diggers were opposed to using weapons in self-defence and when one was violently struck he turned the other cheek.

Nonetheless, Walton’s inhabitants were mainly hostile to the ‘new plantation’ on George’s Hill. Winstanley claimed that several Diggers were imprisoned in Walton church and beaten by the ‘rude multitude’. Moreover, the acre of ground the Diggers had laboured upon was ‘trampled down’ and releveled, their ‘new creation utterly destroyed’ by the ‘country people’ thereabouts. Undeterred, a ‘considerable party’ of Diggers returned intending to sow hempseed. Within days they had issued their first manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced.

Everard and Winstanley headed the list of fifteen subscribers, contending that so long as a system of landlords and their rent paying tenants persisted, the ‘Great Creator Reason’ remained ‘mightily dishonoured’. Buying, selling and enclosing land, which had been gotten through oppression, murder or theft, kept it ‘in the hands of a few’, placing the ‘Creation under bondage’. Nor would the English be a ‘Free People’ until the landless poor were permitted ‘to dig and labour the Commons’ and ‘waste land’, averting starvation through their ‘righteous labours’. About a month later, while fetching wood to build a house, the Diggers were ambushed, their cart sabotaged and a draught horse maimed. At the end of May when Fairfax visited George’s Hill with his entourage, he found nine ‘sober honest’ men and three women ‘hard at work’ among some sprouting barley.

By 1 June 1649 the Diggers had issued their second manifesto, A Declaration from the Poor oppressed People of England. It was signed by forty-five men. Renouncing their subordinate position – ‘slaves, servants, and beggars’ subject to the ‘Lords of the Land’ – these poor, hungry signatories condemned hoarding the earth’s treasures in ‘bags, chests, and barns’. Instead the Diggers proclaimed ‘the Earth, with all her fruits of corn, cattle, and such like’ to have been made a ‘common storehouse of livelihood’ for all humanity, friend or foe, without exception. In addition, they claimed an ‘equal right’ to the land by the ‘righteous law of Creation’, denouncing the ‘subtle art of buying and selling the Earth’ together with her bountiful fruits. They also condemned the ‘great god’, money.

This declaration was followed by A Letter to the Lord Fairfax (delivered 9 June), in which Winstanley accused some infantry quartered at Walton of assaulting a man and beating a boy, as well as stealing clothing, linen and food – not to mention setting fire to the Diggers’ house. On 11 June four Diggers were brutally attacked by a group of local men wielding staves and clubs, ritually dressed in women’s apparel.

Yet physical violence was not the only threat Diggers faced since their enemies also filed suits for trespass against them in Kingston’s court. Winstanley and several others were arrested and though they demanded to plead their own case rather than paying an attorney, the jury required them to pay damages. One Digger was briefly gaoled while some of Winstanley’s cows were distrained, driven away to feed the ‘snapsack’ boys and ‘ammunition drabs’ until ‘strangers’ rescued them out of the bailiffs’ hands. At an unknown date the Diggers abandoned their colony on George’s Hill.

By late August 1649 they had relocated to the Little Heath in neighbouring Cobham, a parish where a number of Diggers originated. It has been suggested that among those of middling social and economic status there was a mixed response, which may be contrasted with determined opposition from local gentry, rich landowners and their tenants. At the beginning of October the Council of State instructed Fairfax to send cavalry to assist the Justices of the Peace for Surrey in dispersing an estimated fifty Diggers. Reportedly aspiring to ‘a Community in all things’ where ‘they should share with the rest of the sons of Adam the wealth and riches of the nation’, several of these planters of parsnips and carrots were arrested. They were, however, subsequently bailed on a legal technicality.

Then on consecutive days in late November with gentry in attendance, labourers and soldiers pulled down the Diggers’ two wooden houses, forcing an elderly couple to sleep out in the cold, open field. In April 1650 a poor man’s house was pulled down and his pregnant wife savagely kicked, so that she miscarried. The week after Easter John Platt, rector of nearby West Horsley, came with about fifty men and had these hirelings burn down six houses. At night some returned to threaten the Diggers with murder unless they departed, making their point by hacking salvaged furniture to pieces. Afterwards news spread that the Diggers had been ‘routed’ and church bells were rung in celebration. The colony at Cobham had endured for approximately thirty-four weeks, the original plantation at George’s Hill less than twenty-one.

Although other Digger communities were established at Iver (Buckinghamshire) and Wellingborough (Northamptonshire), these too were short-lived. Moreover, little is known of alleged Digger activity at Barnet (maybe Friern Barnet, Middlesex), Dunstable (Bedfordshire) and Enfield (Middlesex), or at unidentified locations in Gloucestershire (possibly Slimbridge and Frampton), Kent (plausibly Cox Heath, Cox Hall or Cock Hill), Leicestershire (perhaps Husbands Bosworth) and Nottinghamshire.

Unlike the Levellers, whose memory was invoked and appropriated by radicals in the late 18th century as part of their republican heritage, traces of the Diggers almost vanished. Yet they were noticed by, among others, the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711–1776); the philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756–1836); the French politician and historian François Guizot (1787–1874); and the biographer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who pitied them as a ‘poor Brotherhood’. Indeed, not until the growth of bourgeois, liberal, socialist and Marxist-inspired historical studies did they begin to merit attention. Since then the Diggers have been successively appropriated, firstly by campaigners for public ownership of land and Protestant Nonconformist believers in peaceful co-existence; secondly by Socialists and Marxists in the service of political doctrines that sought legitimacy partly through emphasising supposedly shared ideological antecedents. Recently they have even been incorporated within a constructed Green heritage. All of which is a remarkable legacy for a short-lived and defeated movement, not to mention Winstanley himself.

The Alexander Garden Obelisk in Moscow, commemorating nineteen ‘outstanding thinkers and personalities of the struggle for the liberation of workers’. Gerrard Winstanley appears eighth on the list, after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.