The Diggers, the land and direct activism

[Darren]

http://stirtoaction.com/?p=2324

August 20th 2012

The Runneymede Eco Village has, at the time of writing, continued in 
being for seven weeks, despite the bad summer weather and the frequent 
and inevitable attempts by the authorities to move the Diggers on. The 
action began on 9 June, with a march from Syon Lane Community Allotment 
towards Windsor, where activists aimed to set up a self-sustaining 
community on disused land belonging to the Crown Estate. Eventually they 
settled on land surrounding the former Cooper’s Hill campus of 
Shoreditch College of Education and Brunel University, and it was here 
that they began building a long house, complete with wattle and daub and 
cob. The published demands of the participants in the venture were 
simple and direct. Everyone should have the right to live on disused 
land, to grow food and to build a shelter: ‘no country’, they claimed, 
‘can be considered free, until this right is available to all’. As so 
often in the past, the question of access to land, shelter and 
livelihood had led people to articulate demands for a radical shift in 
society’s attitudes, and to engage in constructive and imaginative 
direct action to advance their cause.

The Runneymede activists’ demands might, at first sight, appear to 
present something of a paradox. On the one hand, they address very real 
twenty-first-century problems, among them today’s serious housing 
shortages and the reluctance of politicians of all major parties to take 
action to bring rents and house prices down to affordable levels. Allied 
to this is the issue of how best to promote viable strategies for 
sustainable living on an increasingly crowded planet. On the other hand, 
the activists’ demands very deliberately invoke those of the original, 
mid-seventeenth-century Diggers, a group of activists whose world was 
very different from the one we now inhabit. What possible relevance 
could the example of seventeenth-century Diggers have for activists today?

It was in April 1649 that the Diggers, inspired by the writings of 
Gerrard Winstanley, occupied waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, 
and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots and beans. For Winstanley, 
the earth had been corrupted by covetousness and the rise of private 
property, and the time was ripe for it to become once more a ‘common 
treasury for all’. Change was to be brought about by the poor working 
the land in common and refusing to work for hire. The common people had 
‘by their labours … lifted up their landlords and others to rule in 
tyranny and oppression over them’, and, Winstanley insisted, ‘so long as 
such are rulers as calls the land theirs … the common people shall never 
have their liberty; nor the land ever freed from troubles, oppressions 
and complainings’. The earth was made ‘to preserve all her children’, 
and not to ‘preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for 
them to bag and barn up the treasures of the earth from others, that 
they might beg or starve in a fruitful land’ – everyone should be able 
to ‘live upon the increase of the earth comfortably’. Soon all people – 
rich as well as poor – would, Winstanley hoped, be persuaded to throw in 
their lot with the Diggers and work to create a new, and better society. 
To Winstanley, agency was key, for ‘action is the life of all and if 
thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’.

Winstanley’s vision was as much religious as political; he was strongly 
influenced by the mystical writings that were so popular among 
seventeenth-century radicals, and he shared fully in the millenarian 
excitement of the age. Yet in many respects the central elements of his 
programme remained resolutely practical, and it is largely this that 
explains the continuing interest in his ideas. The Diggers were active 
at a time of severe economic hardship and rapid political change. 
England had only recently emerged from several years of debilitating 
civil war, an experience made worse by a series of disastrous harvests 
in the immediate post-war years. King Charles I had been executed just 
two months before they began their digging, and England was in the 
process of being transformed into a republic. The Diggers’ programme was 
both revolutionary and practical: in occupying the commons Winstanley 
and his companions hoped both to advance their aim of ridding the land 
of private property and monetary exchange, and also to provide people 
with the opportunity to subsist in a time of scarcity. We should not be 
surprised to find that many of those who joined Winstanley on St 
George’s Hill, and who stayed with him until their settlements were 
destroyed, were local inhabitants. The traditional view that the Diggers 
were naive urban radicals, who descended upon an unsuspecting rural 
community before being swiftly driven away by outraged locals, now has 
little to commend it. It is clear that Winstanley’s vision, and his 
astute social criticism, had particular resonance for rural inhabitants 
whose livelihoods had suffered in the years of war and scarcity, and for 
whom England’s unprecedented political changes appeared to offer the 
chance to radically re-order their community.

Digging lasted for just over a year from April 1649. The Surrey Diggers 
abandoned their St George’s Hill colony in the summer of 1649, after 
having succumbed to frequent assaults and legal actions, and by late 
August they had relocated to the neighbouring parish of Cobham. Here 
they remained until 19 April 1650, when local landowners brought hired 
men to destroy their houses and burn the contents and building 
materials. New Digger colonies had, however, sprung up elsewhere, 
inspired by the Surrey Diggers’ example and by Winstanley’s 
extraordinarily rich body of writings. The longest lasting was probably 
the one established at Iver in Buckinghamshire, but we know of others 
too at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and at Barnet, Enfield and 
Dunstable. Further colonies – most of them unspecified or difficult to 
identify – were reported elsewhere in Northamptonshire and 
Buckinghamshire as well as in Gloucestershire, Kent, Nottinghamshire and 
possibly Leicestershire. Clearly Winstanley’s ideas had – for a brief 
time at least – fired the imagination of significant numbers of radicals 
and country people.

After Winstanley had completed his last major work in 1651, his writings 
were little read for more than two centuries. It was not until the 1890s 
that they were picked up again, first by Marxists and then, 
significantly, by land reformers. Today knowledge of Winstanley is 
widespread, and he has become one of the best-known figures from the 
period of the English Revolution. There have been numerous plays, 
novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often been cited 
as an inspirational figure by politicians of the left. It is, however, 
for modern activists that his ideas and achievements have come to be 
seen as particularly relevant, and the Diggers have become one of the 
historical groups with which activists today are most likely to 
identify. From the 1960s Haight Ashbury Diggers, through Britain’s Hyde 
Park Diggers and Digger Action Movement, to The Land is Ours, G20 
Meltdown and Occupy movement activists, one finds frequent echoes of 
Winstanley’s writings in modern social movements. His memory, and that 
of his fellow Diggers, has in recent years also been invoked by 
freeganists, squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, 
social entrepreneurs, greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists 
and libertarians have laid claim to him as a significant precursor. Last 
year’s Land and Freedom camp on Clapham Common included a timely showing 
of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s classic 1975 film Winstanley, and 
independent socialists in both Wigan (Winstanley’s birthplace) and 
Wellingborough (the site of a Digger colony) have begun holding annual 
Digger festivals. Even well-heeled Cobham now has its Winstanley Walk 
and Winstanley Close.

The best-known attempt in recent years to draw on the example of the 
Diggers was the campaign launched in the 1990s by The Land is Ours. In 
1995 TLIO activists set up camp at the disused Wisley airfield in Surrey 
and briefly invaded the fairways of St George’s Hill golf course. Four 
years later, on the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the start 
of the Digger experiment, activists marched to St George’s Hill – now an 
exclusive housing estate – and set up their tents, yurt and compost 
toilets on North Surrey Water Company land near the summit. The 
occupation lasted for just under a fortnight, when the site was 
abandoned before a possession order could be put into effect. Other land 
occupations soon followed. TLIO’s activities and their thoughtful 
publicity material helped draw attention both to pressing land-access 
issues, and to the continuing relevance of the Diggers’ example for 
modern activists.

It is often thought that TLIO were among the first activists to make the 
connection between modern land rights campaigns and the activities of 
the Diggers. Others had, however, got there some years before. More than 
a hundred years ago Stewart Gray, a mystic, hermit and former Edinburgh 
lawyer – and a figure now almost completely forgotten – travelled to 
Cobham to honour Winstanley, who had, he said, ‘grabbed a piece of land 
and taught the people how to grow their own food’. While living in 
Manchester, Gray had thrown in his lot with the unemployed and had 
become a pioneer of land grabbing. In 1906 he and others had seized 
church land at Levenshulme in Manchester, where they set up camp and 
hoped to ‘teach the unemployed to dig’. Soon other camps had appeared in 
Manchester, Bradford and Poplar. Gray later invaded the pulpit of 
Manchester Cathedral and led an unemployed hunger march – one of the 
first of its kind – to London. He planned, in anticipation of the 2012 
Diggers, to settle part of Windsor Great Park as a colony for the 
unemployed, but when this failed to materialize he announced instead his 
intention of going on hunger strike. It was at this time, in February 
1908, that he arrived at the gates of St George’s Hill. Finding the hill 
closed to himself and his companions, he took a growing cabbage from a 
cottage garden and planted it in protest outside the entrance to the hill.

Gray was not alone in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain in invoking 
Winstanley’s memory in connection with modern land-access campaigns. 
Lewis Berens, who in 1906 published the first full-length study of 
Winstanley’s life and ideas, had for many years been active in land 
nationalisation campaigns in Britain and South Australia, while Morrison 
Davidson, whose The Wisdom of Winstanley the Digger appeared in 1904, 
was also heavily involved in the cause of radical land reform. In 1910 
Joseph Clayton could claim that Winstanley’s ‘social teaching on the 
land question has thousands of disciples in Great Britain today’.

We should be careful not to assume that the popularity of Winstanley and 
the Diggers has persisted unabated since their rediscovery just over a 
century ago. The ‘land question’ that so exercised Edwardian radicals 
has never fully gone away, but by no means every land activist in the 
last hundred or so years has claimed to draw inspiration from the 
Diggers or been aware of their story. As Alun Howkins and others have 
argued, the many generations of activists that have addressed 
land-rights issues since 1649 have often responded to familiar problems 
in very similar ways, without necessarily being conscious of the example 
of their predecessors. But the place of the Diggers in modern popular 
memory is striking. In part this derives from the work of the historian 
Christopher Hill, who first wrote about Winstanley and the Diggers in 
the 1940s, when he was active in the Communist Party, but who presented 
a rather different, and to modern readers more sympathetic, view of 
Winstanley in his classic The World Turned Upside Down, published in 
1972. Here for the first time Winstanley was portrayed as the articulate 
representative of an early modern counter-cultural radical underground; 
Winstanley’s insights into the corruption of the earth were also now 
seen to have profound contemporary relevance for a generation alarmed by 
the destruction of the environment and by threats of nuclear war. Hill’s 
Winstanley could be seen to speak powerfully to the new social movements 
of the 1960s and 70s, and to those members of a younger generation who 
increasingly questioned the achievements of post-war capitalism and 
rejected its values. Others too helped to forge this image of 
Winstanley, most notably George Woodcock, whose influential book 
Anarchism contained an important section on Winstanley which portrayed 
him as a figure who ‘stood at the beginning of the anarchist tradition 
of direct action’.

David Caute’s 1961 novel Comrade Jacob, and the radio and theatre plays 
it inspired, also helped to bring Winstanley and the Diggers to new 
audiences, as did Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s film. All these 
brought home the importance of Winstanley’s attempt to deal with the 
land question of his day, in ways that continued to resonate across the 
centuries. Most influential, however, was Leon Rosselson’s song ‘The 
World Turned Upside Down: Part 2’. Rosselson wrote the song after 
reading Hill; it has since been memorably recorded by Dick Gaughan and 
Billy Bragg among others, as well as by Rosselson, and has been 
regularly sung by Roy Bailey in his performances with Tony Benn on their 
‘The Writing on the Wall’ tours. It has become one of the best-known 
protest anthems of recent times, known to activists not only in Britain 
but across the world. Over the years it has been adopted by activists at 
Greenham Common, by miners’ support groups, by land campaigners and by 
campaigners in the United States, Australia and Nicaragua. The BBC is 
even said to have once broadcast it as a traditional anthem of 
Nicaraguan coffee bean pickers. At Occupy London last year, Rosselson 
sung it memorably, and appropriately, at the camp at the foot of St 
Paul’s Cathedral. Rosselson’s song brilliantly captured Winstanley’s 
message, and articulated it for a new generation that could easily 
identify with the Diggers’ spirited aims and their sufferings at the 
hands of their opponents. ‘To make the waste land grow’, the slogan 
adopted by the Runneymede Diggers in 2012, echoes Rosselson’s song more 
directly than Winstanley’s own writings, and reminds us of the ways in 
which the arguments of 1649 have been so importantly refracted through 
Rosselson’s 1974 words. As long as Rosselson’s song continues to be 
sung, the memory of Winstanley and the Diggers will no doubt be kept 
alive, and future generations of activists will be reminded of the 
example and relevance of their seventeenth-century predecessors.



___________



John Gurney is author of Gerrard Winstanley: the Digger’s Life and 
Legacy (to be published by Pluto Press in November) and Brave Community: 
the Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester University 
Press, 2007; reissued in paperback, 2012).