Diggers


The Diggers were a group of Protestant radicals in England, sometimes seen as forerunners of modern anarchism, and also associated with agrarian socialism and Georgism. Gerrard Winstanley's followers were known as True Levellers in 1649 and later became known as Diggers, because of their attempts to farm on common land.
Their original name came from their belief in economic equality based upon a specific passage in the Acts of the Apostles. The Diggers tried to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small, egalitarian rural communities. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time.

Historical background

The year 1649 was a time of great social unrest in England. The Parliamentarians had won the First English Civil War but failed to negotiate a constitutional settlement with the defeated King Charles I. When members of Parliament and the Grandees in the New Model Army were faced with Charles' perceived duplicity, they tried and executed him.
Government through the King's Privy Council was replaced with a new body called the Council of State, which due to fundamental disagreements within a weakened Parliament was dominated by the Army. Many people became active in politics, suggesting alternative forms of government to replace the old order.
Royalists wished to place King Charles II on the throne; men like Oliver Cromwell wished to govern with a plutocratic Parliament voted in by an electorate based on property, similar to that which was enfranchised before the civil war; agitators called Levellers, influenced by the writings of John Lilburne, wanted parliamentary government based on an electorate of every male head of a household; Fifth Monarchy Men advocated a theocracy; and the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, advocated a more radical solution.

Theory

In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and 14 others published a pamphlet in which they called themselves the "True Levellers" to distinguish their ideas from those of the Levellers. Once they put their idea into practice and started to cultivate common land, both opponents and supporters began to call them "Diggers". The Diggers' beliefs were informed by Winstanley's writings which envisioned an ecological interrelationship between humans and nature, acknowledging the inherent connections between people and their surroundings; Winstanley declared that "true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth".
An undercurrent of political thought which has run through English society for many generations and resurfaced from time to time was present in some of the political factions of the 17th century, including those who formed the Diggers. It involved the common belief that England had become subjugated by the "Norman Yoke". This legend offered an explanation that at one time a golden Era had existed in England before the Norman Conquest in 1066. From the Conquest on, the Diggers argued, the "common people of England" had been robbed of their birthrights and exploited by a foreign ruling-class.
The Diggers advocated for an early form of public health insurance and communal ownership in opposition to individual ownership.

Practice

St George's Hill, Weybridge, Surrey

The Council of State received a letter in April 1649 reporting that several individuals had begun to plant vegetables in common land on St George's Hill, Weybridge near Cobham, Surrey at a time when harvests were bad and food prices high. Sanders reported that they had invited "all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes." They intended to pull down all enclosures and cause the local populace to come and work with them. They claimed that their number would be several thousand within ten days. "It is feared they have some design in hand." In the same month, the Diggers issued their most famous pamphlet and manifesto, called "The True Levellers Standard Advanced".
Where exactly in St. George's Hill the Diggers were is a matter of dispute. Sanders alleges that they worked "on that side of the hill next to Campe Close." George Greenwood, however, speculated that the Diggers were "somewhere near Silvermere Farm on the Byfleet Road rather than on the unprofitable slopes of St. George's Hill itself."
At the behest of the local landowners, the commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, duly arrived with his troops and interviewed Winstanley and another prominent member of the Diggers, William Everard. Everard suspected that the Diggers were in serious trouble and soon left the group. Fairfax, meanwhile, having concluded that Diggers were doing no harm, advised the local landowners to use the courts.
Winstanley remained and continued to write about the treatment they received. The harassment from the Lord of the Manor, Francis Drake, was both deliberate and systematic: he organised gangs in an attack on the Diggers, including numerous beatings and an arson attack on one of the communal houses. Following a court case, in which the Diggers were forbidden to speak in their own defence, they were found guilty of being Ranters, a radical sect associated with liberal sexuality. If they had not left the land after losing the court case then the army could have been used to enforce the law and evict them; so they abandoned Saint George's Hill in August 1649, much to the relief of the local freeholders.

Little Heath near Cobham

Some of the evicted Diggers moved a short distance to Little Heath in Surrey. were cultivated, six houses built, winter crops harvested, and several pamphlets published. After initially expressing some sympathy for them, the local lord of the manor of Cobham, Parson John Platt, became their chief enemy. He used his power to stop local people helping them and he organised attacks on the Diggers and their property. By April 1650, Platt and other local landowners succeeded in driving the Diggers from Little Heath.

Wellingborough, Northamptonshire

There was another community of Diggers close to Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. In 1650, the community published a declaration which started:
This colony was probably founded as a result of contact with the Surrey Diggers. In late March 1650, four emissaries from the Surrey colony were arrested in Buckinghamshire bearing a letter signed by the Surrey Diggers including Gerrard Winstanley and Robert Coster inciting people to start Digger colonies and to provide money for the Surrey Diggers. According to the newspaper A Perfect Diurnall the emissaries had travelled a circuit through the counties of Surrey, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire before being apprehended.
On 15 April 1650 the Council of State ordered Mr Pentlow, a justice of the peace for Northamptonshire to proceed against "the Levellers in those parts" and to have them tried at the next Quarter Session. The [|Iver Diggers] recorded that nine of the Wellingborough Diggers were arrested and imprisoned in Northampton jail and although no charges could be proved against them the justice refused to release them.
Captain William Thompson, the leader of the failed "Banbury mutiny", was killed in a skirmish close to the community by soldiers loyal to Oliver Cromwell in May 1649.

Iver, Buckinghamshire

Another colony of Diggers connected to the Surrey and Wellingborough colony was set up in Iver, Buckinghamshire about from the Surrey Diggers colony at St George's Hill. The Iver Diggers' "Declaration of the grounds and Reasons, why we the poor Inhabitants of the Parrish of Iver in Buckinghamshire..." revealed that there were further Digger colonies in Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in Middlesex, Dunstable in Bedfordshire, Bosworth in Leicestershire and further colonies at unknown locations in Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire. It also revealed that after the failure of the Surrey colony, the Diggers had left their children to be cared for by parish funds.

Influence

The San Francisco Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists and Street Theatre actors operating from 1966 to 1968, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.
Since the revival of anarchism in the British anti-roads movement, the Diggers have been celebrated as precursors of land squatting and communalism.
April 1, 1999, on the 350th anniversary of the Diggers' occupation of the English Civil War on the same hill, The Land Is Ours organised a rally, then occupied land at St. George's Hill near Weybridge, Surrey.
In 2011, an annual festival began in Wigan to celebrate the Diggers. In 2012, the second annual festival proved a great success and the sixth took place in 2016. In Wellingborough, a festival has also been held annually since 2011. Bolton Diggers were established in 2013 and have promoted the commons as a foil to privatisation. They have established community food gardens, cooperatives and the Common Wealth café, a pay-as-you-feel café using surplus food from supermarkets.

Influence on literature and popular culture