Local landowners, alarmed by the actions of this group, and their assurance that their numbers were soon to grow, as they were offering to feed folk who came to work on the land, “to ten thousand in five days”, called on the New Model Army to help oust the radicals, but after interviewing Winstanley and a few others, the commander of the force sent in response decided it was a civil matter, and that the landowners should deal with it through the courts. However, the ability of the landowners to call on the military for assistance spooked some of the initial founders, and the occupation of St George’s Hill did not last.
It is an understanding of Western culture that land can be owned, and a great deal of the hereditary structures built into our culture were based on this concept. Throughout the Middle Ages, a mostly agrarian society, villages had lands held “in common” where poorer folk could graze their animals, but from an early time, this land was not farmable, as in, crops could not be grown there. In later centuries, through the process of “enclosures”, the commons became part of the local feudal responsibility, and the land became controlled and no longer part of the common weal.
In 1649, at a time of tremendous civil unrest in England, with war combining with several bad harvest years, starvation loomed. A group of religious radicals, who had named themselves the True Levellers, took possession of St George’s Hill, part of the commons of Weybridge, in Surrey, and began to plant crops in order to offer succor to the starving smallfolk. Their activities on the Hill led to them being nicknamed the Diggers, and this is the name they have worn down through history.
Led by radical writer Gerrard Winstanley, the core group of fifteen men tried to create a grass-roots movement toward the abolition of property, and the creation of a utopian society more closely interrelating man and his environment. Some of their tenets, published in Winstanley’s manifesto1, included public health insurance and early socialist priorities, such as communal ownership of property. Aspects of their philosophy and reasoning could be traced back as far as the Peasant’s Revolt of the 1300’s.
The Diggers were not permitted to defend themselves at the trial, and lost. The work at St George’s Hill was abandoned, but several other satellite farms were started over the next year, and the movement gained some traction with the initial assistance of a local landowner at one of the new locations. He quickly turned against them however, and became the leading edge of property owner resistance. In the end, the movement petered out in the face of continuing legal challenges to their position.
The Diggers absolutely inspired a faction within the first hippie communes in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Park, as well as numerous other expressions of similar sentiments in the next several decades. The establishment of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020 may be seen as a distaff descendant of the Digger’s ideas, although missing some of the nuanced thought and religious focus of Winstanley’s writing.
Citations:
1. The text of of the Digger’s various manifestos can be found at Project Gutenberg. The reading can be heavy, but it is informative. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17480/17480-h/17480-h.htm
A Declaration by the Diggers of Wellingborough: http://www.rogerlovejoy.co.uk/philosophy/diggers/diggers3.htm
Website of the 1960’s Digger movement, with a great multimedia index of the original English Diggers: https://www.diggers.org/overview.htm
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