Gerrard Winstanley

English political activist

• Born: October 10, 1609 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Wigan, Lancashire, England
• Died: September 10, 1676
• Place of death: London, England

An English radical and one of the first modern theorists of communism, Winstanley published pamphlets during the English Civil Wars advocating communal ownership of property; he and a group of followers who called themselves Diggers or True Levellers established several agricultural communes in 1649-1650.

Early Life

The details of Gerrard Winstanley’s (JUHR-ahrd WIN-stuhn-lee) life outside the years 1648-1652 are scant, and some are in dispute among scholars attempting to identify the origins of his extremely radical ideas. Born at Wigan, Lancashire, in northern England, to Edward Winstanley, a mercer, and his wife, Gerrard Winstanley was raised in a Protestant religious environment, and it has been speculated by scholars that he received some formal education because of his use of Latin in his writings, although he may also have learned Latin during his term as an apprentice. Nothing more is known of his life until March 25, 1630, when he became an apprentice to Sarah Gater of the Merchant Taylor’s Company. Sarah, a young widow, ran a small retail business at St. Michael, Cornhill, in London, and Winstanley remained an apprentice there until February 20, 1638.

After finishing his apprenticeship, Winstanley became a shopkeeper in London, and in September, 1640, he married Susan King. Several actions he took in London in the early 1640’s indicate that he was a supporter of Parliament during the First Civil War (1642-1646). On January 4, 1642, Winstanley and two other men lodged a dissenting opinion against the traditional method of selecting London Common Councilmen, and on October 8, 1643, he joined in the Solemn League and Covenant .

Because the radical changes brought on by the rebellions and wars within the British Isles disrupted commerce, Winstanley experienced severe financial problems and was forced to liquidate his business by making partial payment to creditors. He left London and moved to Cobham, Surrey, close to his wife’s family in December, 1643. In his later pamphlets, he condemned commerce and trade; obviously this was a bitter experience for him. In Cobham, he became a cattle grazier—one who purchased, raised, and sold cattle. Records indicate that by April, 1646, he had a residence in the village of Street Cobham, and by 1648, he had become a Baptist, having undergone baptism by immersion.

Life’s Work

Climatic problems and disruption caused by the First Civil War and Second Civil War (1647-1649) created extreme hardship in England’s rural areas. Drought had created poor harvests and shortages of hay and grain, which became extremely expensive, causing a subsequent shortage of livestock. Taxes to support Parliament’s army were heavy. Such was the background against which Winstanley began to write pamphlets and attempted to put his radical ideas into practice. Winstanley had come into contact with radicals such as William Everard, a former member of Parliament’s army who would collaborate with him in the Digger movement. Historians have raised questions about the influence of these contacts upon Winstanley’s ideas, since he claimed that the ideas expressed in his pamphlets came to him during a mystic trance in late 1648. Highly significant political and military events had occurred in late 1648 and early 1649, culminating in the execution of King Charles I and the abolition of monarchy.

Winstanley’s first major pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness (1649), appeared on January 26, 1649, and presented the views that the concept of private property was evil and that God’s will was that the poor would set things right through communal property ownership. Winstanley was very vague as to how the advent of communal property was to come about, although he believed it would occur soon and peacefully spread throughout England. On April 1, 1649, Winstanley, Everard, and perhaps a dozen others began “digging” and planting crops on the common or waste lands on Saint George’s Hill in Surrey. Eventually, more than ten of these so-called Digger communes were attempted in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and Kent. At first the Diggers were regarded as harmless, but local opposition developed, and the Diggers were harassed, physically assaulted, and charged with trespass. Their crops and animals were damaged.

These events were chronicled by Winstanley in a series of pamphlets written throughout 1649 and 1650, especially in A New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie (1650), published January 1, 1650. The Saint George’s Hill Commune, which peaked at about fifty participants, was abandoned in July or August, 1649, as Winstanley and his followers moved to nearby Cobham Heath, where they maintained their settlement until abandoning it altogether in April, 1650, because of legal charges against them, unrelenting opposition, and financial hardship. Several local men guarded the site to prevent the Diggers’ return.

Scholarly work done on both the Diggers and their opponents reveals that the Diggers were local men from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, while opponents were wealthy landowners, who encouraged their renters and laborers to attack the Diggers. The landowners also had greater access to the local legal machinery, through which they brought legal charges against the Diggers. After Winstanley’s Cobham experiment was disbanded, he and some of his followers worked for Lady Eleanor Davies in Hertfordshire. This arrangement apparently ended on bad terms in December, 1650.

After the publication of Winstanley’s last work, The Law of Freedom on a Platform (1652), details of his life become sketchy. He lived in the Cobham area and held some minor local offices, including waywarden, overseer of the poor, churchwarden, and constable. It is ironic that the man who had offered revolutionary ideas challenging established authority should end up holding public office.

Winstanley apparently engaged in trade again, and from 1660 to 1662, he was the defendant in a lawsuit brought by a creditor seeking to recover debt from Winstanley’s 1643 bankruptcy. His wife Susan died sometime before 1664, and he remarried Elizabeth Stanley (or Standley), with whom he had three children, Gerrard, Clement, and Elizabeth. In 1675, he was resident in Saint Giles in the Fields, Middlesex. Most scholars accept that the Gerrard Winstanley, “corn chandler,” whose death was recorded in September, 1676, in the Westminster Quaker burial records was Winstanley the Digger. Apparently, he ended his days as a Quaker.

Significance

The radical, revolutionary ideas Winstanley expressed in his pamphlets are worthy of serious analysis. The most radical of these ideas was his rejection of private ownership of land in favor of communal property ownership and communal labor. He used biblical, theological language to express his views, but he used them in a metaphorical vein, which has caused great debate among scholars over Winstanley’s religion, with some questioning if he should even be considered Christian. He rejected the concept of a literal heaven and hell and referred to the “great Creator Reason.” In his early pamphlets and in his Digger experiments, Winstanley rejected local and national government and a state church and adopted pacifism in the face of opposition.

In his final published work, The Law of Freedom on a Platform, Winstanley addressed Parliament’s General Oliver Cromwell directly, asking him to impose Winstanley’s model of utopia upon the Commonwealth . In this society, there would be no use for money transactions, and Parliament would make laws supporting freedom, oversee foreign policy, and raise troops. Winstanley believed that office holders became corrupt if in office too long, so there was to be a rotation of office holders. Retirement from manual labor would come at age forty, when a man would become a supervisor. Education, which would focus primarily on vocational skills, would be free and mandatory. “Postmasters” would exchange information and news with other towns. Sunday was to be a day of rest, and church attendance was to be voluntary; the clergy would not deliver sermons so much as present learned papers.

The government in Winstanley’s utopian plan would retain punitive power; the death penalty would be in place for murder, rape, attempting to earn a living at law or religion, or claiming ownership of land. Although he shifted to a system in which society had this compulsory power, Winstanley remained consistent in his vision of the earth as a “common treasury” that should be worked through a communal effort. His views are rich and original, and he stands as an important precursor to later socialist and communist thinkers.

Bibliography

Bradstock, Andrew, ed. Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649-1999. London: Frank Cass, 2000. This collection of eleven essays provides an overview of the historical context in which the Diggers operated and Winstanley’s life and ideas, as well as the investigation of specialized topics. Especially valuable are the pieces by Gerald Aylmer, James D. Alsop, and John Gurney.

Hill, Christopher. The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley. Past and Present Supplement 5. Oxford, England: The Past and Present Society, 1978. The Marxist historian Hill has written extensively on radicals such as Winstanley, and in this fifty-seven-page essay he analyzes the origin, evolution and impact of Winstanley’s theological views.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. New York: Viking, 1972. This study, which many consider Hill’s masterpiece, provides the context for the radical groups that developed in England in the 1640’s and 1650’s. It contains extensive material on Winstanley.

Sabine, George H., ed. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1941. Reprint. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965. This collection of Winstanley’s pamphlets along with the editor’s introduction is an essential starting point for studying Winstanley’s thought.

Webb, Darren. “The Bitter Product of Defeat? Reflections on Winstanley’s Law of Freedom.” Political Studies 52 (2004): 199-215. This revisionist essay challenges the generally held view that Winstanley’s final pamphlet, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, was a major departure from his previous works by arguing that it is consistent with earlier expositions of his ideas.