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.
I have been interested in the Digger movement since I joined a group of self-described diggers in Hollywood in the summer of 1967, following my freshman year at Hollywood High. I became especially interested in "my digger connection," several decades later due to the influence of historian Jaques Barzun and the chapter entitled "Puritans as Democrats" in his magnum opus "From Dawn to Decadence, in which he linked the diggers to the "Flower People of 1968."
This article presents the most coherent and concise history of the diggers I have yet seen. There are small but significant details about the lives of Winstanley and Everard in it of which I was previously unaware. Thank you, Dr Hessayon, for continuing to research this important period in history that in so many ways foreshadowed the political and social crises of the present era.
An excellent piece that vividly shows the sufferings of the English peasantry during times of crisis
I have been interested in the Digger movement since I joined a group of self-described diggers in Hollywood in the summer of 1967, following my freshman year at Hollywood High. I became especially interested in "my digger connection," several decades later due to the influence of historian Jaques Barzun and the chapter entitled "Puritans as Democrats" in his magnum opus "From Dawn to Decadence, in which he linked the diggers to the "Flower People of 1968."
This article presents the most coherent and concise history of the diggers I have yet seen. There are small but significant details about the lives of Winstanley and Everard in it of which I was previously unaware. Thank you, Dr Hessayon, for continuing to research this important period in history that in so many ways foreshadowed the political and social crises of the present era.
What with things as they are at the moment, the Diggers may have to make a comeback?!