Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

In April, 1649, the time was ripe—so Winstanley and his friends judged—for making a start to get rid of this evil.

The Council of State, but a few months old, and much occupied with dangers in Scotland and Ireland, and with mutinous Levellers in the army, was suddenly informed of the strange activities of “a disorderly and tumultuous sort of people” by one Henry Sanders, of Walton-upon-Thames.

Sanders’ testimony affirmed that “there was one Everard, once of the army but was cashiered, who termeth himself a prophet, one Stewer and Colten, and two more, all living at Cobham, came to St. George’s Hill in Surrey, and began to dig on that side the hill next to Camp Close, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans. On Monday following they were there again, being increased in their number, and on the next day they fired the heath, and burned at least forty rood of heath, which is a very great prejudice to the town. On Friday last they came again, between twenty and thirty, and wrought all day at digging. They did then intend to have two or three ploughs at work, but they had not furnished themselves with seed-corn, which they did on Saturday at Kingston. They invite all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes. They do threaten to pull down and level all park pales, and lay open, and intend to plant there very shortly. They give out they will be four or five thousand within ten days, and threaten the neighbouring people there, that they will make them all come up to the hills and work: and forewarn them suffering their cattle to come near the plantation; if they do, they will cut their legs off. It is feared they have some design in hand.”[126]

The date of this information was April 16th, and Bradshaw, the President of the Council, at once asked General Fairfax “to disperse the people so met, and to prevent the like for the future, that a malignant and disaffected party may not under colour of such ridiculous people have any opportunity to rendezvous themselves in order to do a greater mischief.”

Fairfax sent Captain John Gladman to attend to the matter, and Gladman reports three days later that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard are the chief men responsible, that he “cannot hear that there have been above twenty of them together since they first undertook the business,” and that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard will wait upon Lord Fairfax. He adds; “I believe you will be glad to be rid of them again, especially Everard, who is no other than a mad man. I intend to go with two or three men to St. George’s Hill this day and persuade these people to leave this employment if I can, and if then I see no more danger than now I do I shall march back again to London to-morrow.” Gladman’s opinion is that “the business is not worth the writing nor yet taking notice of.”

The interview between Fairfax and Winstanley and Everard took place on April 20, and Everard explained that the Diggers “did not intend to meddle with any man’s property nor to break down any pales or enclosures, but only to meddle with what was common and untilled, and to make it fruitful for the use of man: that they will not defend themselves by arms, but will submit unto authority; that as their forefathers lived in tents, so it would be suitable to their condition now to live in the same.”

Fairfax evidently decided that the movement was not so alarming as the Council of State had represented, for Winstanley and his Diggers resumed their work, and at the end of May, Fairfax, with the officers of the army, paid a visit to St. George’s Hill. Winstanley returned “sober answers” to the inquiries of Fairfax, “though they gave little satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their action.” Winstanley’s argument, often enlarged in his pamphlets, was that the people were dispossessed of their lands by the crown at the Norman Conquest, and that “the king who possessed them by the Norman Conquest being dead, they were returned again, being Crown Lands, to the Common People of England.”

This was not conclusive to their visitors, and “some officers wished they had no further plot in what they did, and that no more was intended than what they did pretend.” To the objection that the ground was too poor to repay cultivation, “the Diggers answered they would use their endeavours and leave the success to God, who had promised to make the barren ground fruitful.” Public opinion gave out that the Diggers were “sober, honest men,” and that “the ground will probably in a short time yield them some fruit of their labour, how contemptible soever they do yet appear to be.”

Encouraged by Fairfax’s “kindness and moderation,” Winstanley appeals to him in June against the interference of the local landowners, and getting no response (for Fairfax had said that the Diggers were to be left to “the Gentlemen of the County and the Law of the Land”), publishes an appeal to the House of Commons against his arrest for trespass by the Lords of Manors in Surrey. The House of Commons, occupied with State matters, turned an indifferent ear to Winstanley’s complaint, and the leader of the Diggers sent a “Watchword to the City of London and the Army,” telling the wrongs the Diggers suffered at the hands of the law for “digging upon the barren common”—how they were mulcted in damages at £10 a man, with costs at twenty-nine shillings and a penny, and taken in execution, and how their cows were seized by the bailiffs. At the end of November the very huts they had built were pulled down, and it was a hard winter for the little colony still left on St. George’s Hill.

Winstanley does not merely relate his injuries in these publications, he is all the time urging that his plan for setting people upon the common lands is the needful thing in England, that a common ownership of land is God’s will, and that the crown lands taken by the Normans must revert to the people on the execution of the king.