John Lilburne died at Eltham in August, 1657, at the age of forty. A year later, and his old antagonist, and older comrade-in-arms, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, was dead, and the Commonwealth government which had contemned the agitation for democracy was doomed.
Winstanley the Digger
1649–1650
Authorities: Winstanley’s Pamphlets; Whitelocke—Memorial of English Affairs; Clarke Papers; L. H. Berens—Digger Movement in the days of the Commonwealth.
WINSTANLEY THE DIGGER 1649–1650.
In the spring of 1649, the “Digger” movement revealed a strange and unexpected manifestation of the democratic spirit in England. Free communism had been the creed of more than one Protestant sect on the continent in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists had been conspicuously identified with the proposal. But in England John Lilburne and the Levellers were attacking the parliamentary government in the name of political democracy, and social agitation had been unknown since the Norfolk Rising of 1549, save for a riot against land enclosures at the beginning of James I.’s reign.
Gerrard Winstanley was the leader at the sudden outbreak of social discontent, and his “Digger” movement was to end this discontent and all other miseries of the time by getting rid of enclosures of common lands, and allowing people to plough these common lands and waste spaces, “that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed.”
Little is known of Winstanley, and the movement is shortlived. The “Diggers” never threatened the safety of the Commonwealth government as Lilburne and the Levellers did, for Winstanley’s social doctrine included the non-resistance principles that later found exponents in the Society of Friends, and the agrarian revolution he preached could hardly be accomplished without force of arms. What is notable about Winstanley is his witness to the fact that a social question existed—that he saw beyond the Civil War, and the strife for political liberties, a great mass of poverty unheeded; and seeing the miseries of his fellows resolutely thought out some cure for their distress, and did his best, as it seemed to him, to get this cure adopted.
Neither the Council of State nor the republican army had time or patience for Winstanley’s schemes, and the “Diggers” were dispersed with little trouble; but Winstanley’s religious teaching was to exercise considerable influence in the world when George Fox became its preacher, and his social teaching on the land question has thousands of disciples in Great Britain to-day.