Gerrard Winstanley: The Diggers’ Prophet of Common Land
Gerrard Winstanley (19 October 1609 – 10 September 1676) was an English Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher, and activist during the Commonwealth period. He led the True Levellers, known as the Diggers, a movement that occupied and cultivated enclosed lands to challenge private property and advocate for communal living.
Early Life and Education
Winstanley was baptised on 19 October 1609 in Wigan, Lancashire, the son of Edward Winstanley, a mercer. In 1630, he migrated to London and became an apprentice to a Merchant Tailor. He was admitted as a freeman of the Merchant Tailors’ Company in 1638 and married Susan King, daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639.
The First English Civil War disrupted his business, and he was made bankrupt in 1643. With help from his father-in-law, he moved to Cobham, Surrey, where he worked initially as a cowherd.
Career and Achievements
Winstanley emerged as a radical thinker during the Commonwealth. In 1648, he published The New Law of Righteousness, a pamphlet grounded in the hardship of England’s labouring poor under enclosure of common lands. He argued from biblical sources—particularly Acts 2:44–45 on communal property—that the Earth was created as a common treasury for all mankind, and that private property and hierarchical rule violated Christian teaching and natural law.
On 1 April 1649, Winstanley and his followers occupied St George’s Hill in Surrey, beginning the Digger movement. They cultivated vacant or common land and distributed food without charge to those who joined their labour. Similar colonies spread to Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Northamptonshire. Local landowners responded with violence; in 1650, hired armed men attacked and destroyed the Surrey colony. Despite Winstanley’s protests to the government, the experiment failed.
After the colony’s collapse, Winstanley briefly worked as an estate steward for Lady Eleanor Davies, an aristocratic mystic, but left after less than a year when Davies accused him of mismanaging her property. He returned to Cobham and continued advocating land redistribution. In 1652, he published The Law of Freedom in a Platform, outlining a communistic society without property or wages, structured on non-hierarchical lines yet with voluntary patriarchs, all grounded in biblical models.
Notable Events and Milestones
The occupation of St George’s Hill on 1 April 1649 marked the beginning of organized Digger action. This event challenged the enclosure movement and the privatization of common land that had impoverished rural and urban workers. The subsequent spread of Digger colonies to other counties demonstrated the appeal of Winstanley’s vision, even as local resistance mounted.
Winstanley’s two major publications—The New Law of Righteousness (1648) and The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652)—articulated a systematic critique of private property rooted in both biblical interpretation and observations of contemporary social hardship. By 1654, Winstanley was possibly assisting Edward Burrough, an early Quaker leader, suggesting his later alignment with the Society of Friends.
Additional Resources
Winstanley’s life and writings remain central to studies of English Civil War radicalism and early modern communism. Readers seeking fuller biographical and intellectual detail can consult Wikipedia’s extended entry on Winstanley, as well as scholarly editions of his pamphlets and secondary works on the Diggers and the Commonwealth period.
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