Thread by @_pasttense_

The main gate to the St. George’s Estate, Weybridge, Surrey, now a posh private estate & golf club.
#OnThisDay in 1649, a small group calling themselves 'True Levellers" squatted at St George’s Hill, & began to dig the land and plant vegetables.
More here: wp.me/p74yfw-HF

Often called 'Diggers', the ethos of the St George's Hill commune was an egalitarian agrarian communism: they advocated the taking over of waste lands of the manors, by the poor, to be worked collectively, to grow food and raise animals, to feed all, for need, not profit.

'...we begin to Digge upon George-Hill, to eate our Bread together by righteous labour, and sweat of our browes… not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in and Manured by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England, and in the whole World...'

'... shall be taken in by the People in righteousness, not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.”
(The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649)

The occupation of the waste land here followed a brief prelude when several soldiers had invaded the parish church at Walton, startling the congregation by announcing that the Sabbath, tithes, ministers, magistrates and the bible were all abolished.

To disrupt the pious parish sermons was shocking; but also outrageous was to disrupt the Sabbath by digging the land on Sunday. The group carrying out such actions were not only challenging accepted use of land, but flaunting their questioning of conventional religious practice.

On April 2nd, several other people arrived to join them, and they continued to dig and pant for several weeks. Although in number they amounted to 30-40 people, they confidently predicted that they would soon be joined by 5000 more…

The enclosure of common land - fencing off open fields, waste and woodland, for more intensive pasturing of sheep or more intensive agriculture, by landowners or their tenants - had become a major grievance in English rural society.

Lords of the Manors, newer aspiring farmers seeking profits and speculators were enriching themselves by shutting out people who had traditionally used common land to graze animals, collect wood and other fuel, and gather foodstuffs.

This gradual loss of access was catastrophic for many in rural communities, especially the poorest, for whom these customary rights formed a part of a precarious subsistence.
Revolt and protest against enclosure had been increasing for a 100 years...

But social and economic change had strengthened the pressure to enclose and ‘improve’. The economic upheavals that contributed to and were then reinforced by the English Civil War laid even more pressure in the rural poor.

Hand in hand with desperation, the civil war was a product of, & unleashed a further flood of, new rebellious ideas about religion, social order, the rights or liberties of wider and wider sections of society. Everything came into question.

A broad alliance of religious non-conformists, rising classes seeking more power, and opponents of arbitrary royal rule rebelled against the monarchy. The floodgates opened, censorship collapsed, crowds began bringing radical politics into the streets as well as the print shops

Opposition to the aristocratic and mercantile control of the land, fundamental to daily existence, was bound to come into question too. Royal lands previously enclosed but under parliamentary control were thrown open or raided by crowds for food.

And as the Civil War came to an end, the radical ideas that had emerged, often among the soldier-citizens of the New Model Army, found themselves expressed as ground-breaking thought and action on how land should be controlled, worked - and for whose benefit.

The group who took over St George’s Hill called themselves ‘True Levellers’, but were nick-named ‘Diggers’ - both names referencing previous social movements which had powerfully challenged enclosure of common land, in the ‘Midlands Revolt’ of 1607.

They may have chosen their local common & waste to squat, but the site was perfectly placed to make the news & arouse both support & hostility. Close to London; close also to Windsor Great Forest, where 100s of people had raided the king’s deer since the start of the civil war.

Close to the routes from the capital to Portsmouth, where news travelled fast. Near to Kingston, a radical centre in religion/politics years before & after, with a long puritan tradition and a stronghold of the New Model Army in their fight against parliamentary moderates in 1647

From the beginning of their project they encountered the violent opposition of local landowners, led by Francis Drake, lord of the Manor of Walton, John Platt, lord of the Manor of Cobham, and Sit Anthony Vincent, lord of the Manor of Stoke d’Abernon.

These co-ordinated attacks on the ‘diggers’. Over the first few weeks of the colony’s life, they were raided by mobs who burned houses they'd built, stole and destroyed their tools, forcibly dragged some ‘diggers’ to Walton Church where they were assaulted & abused.

Despite the attacks, digging at the St George’s Hill commune continued, and later in April, one or more of the ‘diggers’ again invaded the church at Walton, filling the pulpit with briars and thorns to prevent the parson from preaching…

Their activities had brought them to national prominence – on April 16th the group were discussed in the Council of State, after Henry Sanders of Walton informed the Council of their actions:

“On Sunday night last there was one Everard, once of the army but was cashiered, who termeth himself a prophet, one Stewer (Star) and Coulton and two more, all living in Cobham, came to St George’s Hill.. and began to dig on that side of the hill next to Campe Close..."

" ... and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots and beans... They invite all to come and help them, and promise them meat, drink and clothes. They do threaten to pull down and level al park pales, and lay open, and intend to plant there very shortly."

The Council of State saw this as a direct challenge to established order, an example which might rapidly spread in this most tense and rebellious of years. Council president John Bradshaw (slightly biased – he owned the old manor house of Walton) wrote to General Fairfax:

... commander of the New Model Army, suggesting he took action against the group:
“although... their being there... may seeme very ridiculous yet that conflux of people may bee a beginning whence things of a greater & more dangerous consequence may grow..."

Gerard Winstanley and William Everard were the main motivators of the 'True Levellers', or at least their most visible spokesmen. Winstanley was a cloth dealer who went bankrupt & moved to Cobham, Everard most likely a New Model Army soldier, a veteran of mutiny & agitation.

Winstanley is much better known as leader of the’ Diggers’, because his writings expressed their ideas clearly and have survived. But Everard was early on reckoned as spokesman. He is described by detractors as seeing himself as a prophet or preacher - as many radicals then did.

On 20th April, Everard & Winstanley appeared before Fairfax, refusing to remove their hats to show they had no respect for social rank. Everard declared that since the Norman Conquest, England had lived under tyranny more ruthless than the Israelites endured in captivity in Egypt

But God had revealed to the poor that their deliverance was at hand, and that they would soon be free to enjoy the fruits of the Earth. Everard reported that he had had a vision, in which he had been commanded to “arise and dig and plant the earth and receive the fruits thereof.”

The two men denied that they had any intention of seizing anyone else’s property and destroying enclosures, but were only claiming the commons, the rightful possessions of the poor. These they would work collectively, seeking to relieve the distressed.

They did, however, give voice to their hope that the poor throughout the land would follow their example and take over common land, and named Hounslow, Hampstead Heath and Newmarket as places where they felt groups would shortly follow their lead.

The True Levellers Standard presents the True Levellers' political and social program very much through what seem like a religious and mystical prism; as did many of the tracts and pamphlets of the civil war years.

The Christian heritage of all the radicals was a common launching point; in the preaching and writings of the 1640s and 50s the texts of the bible are opened up to a flowering of a thousand interpretations, many of with them carrying subversive and ground-breaking thoughts…

The pamphlet takes the biblical idea of the Earth as God’s gift to all, equally, and turns it into social commentary, echoing John Ball in the Peasants Revolt, who had preached ‘When Adam delved and Eve Span, Who was then the gentleman?’ –

God had intended no man to be lord over others. Greedy men had, by force and violence, set themselves up as lords over their fellows and over the earth.

“And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves:"

And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few... From the beginning it was not so.”

Private property is declared the Original Sin: “For it is shewed us, That so long as we, or any other, doth own the Earth to be the peculier Interest of Lords and Landlords, and not common to others as well as them, we own the Curse, and holds the Creation under bondage"

In seeing their actions on the commons as the beginning of that restoration of the earth as a Common Treasury, the 'diggers' also hail the Millennium - the impending return of Jesus, prophesied in the Book of Revelations, when earthly authority would be set down.

A 1000-year rule of the saints would begin. Many civil war radicals thought the Millennium almost upon them; things got dangerous for ruling elites when, like the millenarians of the middle ages, people started to see themselves as the instruments who would bring this change in.

The 'True Levellers' saw war and force as created only to defend private property:
“... wherefore is it that there is such Wars and rumours of Wars in the Nations of the Earth? and wherefore are men so mad to destroy one another? "

"But only to uphold Civil propriety of Honor, Dominion and Riches one over another, which is the curse the Creation groans under, waiting for deliverance.”
TheTrue Levellers Standard Advanced firmly stated the group's position as one of passive resistance, of Pacifism and healing

“And we shall not do this by force of Arms, we abhorre it, For that is the work of the Midianites, to kill one another; But by obeying the Lord of Hosts, who hath Revealed himself in us, and to us, by labouring the Earth in righteousness together..."

"... to eate our bread with the sweat of our brows, neither giving hire, nor taking hire, but working together, and eating together, as one man, or as one house of Israel restored from Bondage; and so by the power of Reason, the Law of righteousness in us..."

"we endeavour to lift up the Creation from that bondage of Civil Propriety, which it groans under.”
The ‘Standard’ strikingly references the sufferings of the civil war, the promises of liberty made by parliamentary leaders to enlist support from the common folk; promises broken-

“O thou Powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou has wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us..."

''... not only bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing..."

"First, Thou hast made the people to take a Covenant and Oaths to endeavour a Reformation, and to bring in Liberty every man in his place; and yet while a man is in pursuing of that Covenant, he is imprisoned and oppressed by thy Officers, Courts, and Justices, so called..."

"Thou hast made Ordinances to cast down Oppressing, Popish, Episcopal, Self-willed and Prerogative Laws; yet we see, That Self-wil and Prerogative power, is the great standing Law, that rules all in action, and others in words..."

Thou hast made many promises &protestations to make the Land a Free Nation: And yet at this very day, the same people... are oppressed by thy Courts, Sizes, Sessions, by thy Justices and Clarks of the Peace, so called, Bayliffs, Committees.."

"And all this, Because they stand to maintain an universal Liberty and Freedom, which not only is our Birthright, which our Maker gave us, but which thou hast promised to restore unto us, from under the former oppressing Powers that are gone before..."

"and which likewise we have bought with our Money, in Taxes, Free-quarter, and Bloud-shed; all which Sums thou hast received at our hands, and yet thou hast not given us our bargain…”

It’s worth comparing this to the pressure for social change post World War 1 and WW2 - the narrative of collective suffering, the hardships gone through deserving a new social contract: ‘we haven’t gone through all of this to live as badly as we did before and during the war.'

The belief that the time of righteousness was almost upon them must have seemed justified. Momentous change was already afoot: only two months before, the king had been tried, executed and monarchy abolished.
wp.me/p74yfw-2r

The struggle between the army leaders/moderates and rank and file soldiers & their political allies was coming to a head; mutinies breaking out in the New Model Army.
wp.me/p74yfw-7o

The sense of possibility, of boundaries being broken, of the social order of the world being turned upside down was electric.

While some dismissed them as “a distracted crack-brained people” (A Perfect Summary of an Exact Diary of some passages of Parliament, April 16-23 1649), others feared their example would indeed lead others into following them.

Newspaper Mercurius Pragmaticus warned “What this fanaticall insurrection may grow into cannot be conceived for Mahomet had as small and despicable a beginning whose damnable infections have spread themselves many hundreds years since over the face of half the Universe.”

The local worthies of Walton and Cobham were sure about the threat to their private property, & again and again led attacks on the little commune, repeatedly smashing houses, destroying plants and tools, and harassing and arresting diggers.

Read the 'True Levellers Standard Advanced':
diggers.org/diggers/tlsa.h…

In the following week, a crowd drove the ‘diggers’ from St George’s Hill, but they soon returned and resumed their planting.
In late May 1649, the 'diggers' issued a second manifesto, A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England.
diggers.org/diggers/declar…

... in which they announced they would cut and fell trees on the common to sustain themselves while they were waiting for crops to grow. The wood on the common belongs to the poor, they said, and they warned the lords to stop carrying off this wood.

Over the next few months there were repeated attacks, arrests, prosecutions for trespass.
The church also entered the struggle: Surrey ministers preached that noone should not give food or lodgings to the 'diggers' who were denounced as atheist, libertines, polygamists & ranters

Still the communists continued to return to St George’s Hill and replant crops of wheat and rye, and build little houses, declaring that only starvation could deter them from their mission of making “a common treasury” of the earth.

The thousands the True Levellers hoped would shortly follow their example, however, did not materialise. There were some expressions of solidarity. In May, A Declaration of the Wel-Afected in the County of Buckinghamshire was published...

This asserted that the ‘middle sort’ of the County had been labouring under oppression, championed the ‘diggers’ and denounced anyone interfering with the “community in God’s way”.

(An earlier tract from this county, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, had possibly influenced, and certainly chimed with, the ideas of Winstanley and his group.
marxists.org/history/englan…

At some point, the St George’s Hill commune sent out a delegation to travel around and urge the poor in other areas to follow the group’s example and to collect financial aid for the beleaguered experiment.

This delegation, consisting of at least 2 of the original group, travelled through Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Berkshire, Huntingdonshire & Northamptonshire, visiting more than 30 towns and villages..

They carried a letter signed by Winstanley and twenty-five others, declaring that they would continue their struggle but appealing for funds, as their crops had been destroyed.

These ambassadors were arrested in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire; perhaps because here their message inspired a second digger revolt. In March 1650, poor inhabitants of the town began to dig collectively on a “common and waste-ground called Bareshank”.

They managed to secure the support of several freeholders & local farmers, but faced similar repression as the Surrey commune.
On April 15, 1649, the Council of State ordered Mr Pentlow, a justice of the peace in Northamptonshire to proceed against 'the Levellers in those parts'

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, a leader of the failed 1649 "Banbury mutiny" of Levellers, was apparently killed - in a skirmish on his way to join the Digger community in Wellingborough - by soldiers loyal to Oliver Cromwell in May 1649.

Another digger collective also started up at ‘Coxhall’ in Kent; the location of which is uncertain (it as been suggested it was northwest of Dover; or was Cox Heath near Linton, Cock Hill near Maidstone or even Coggeshall in Essex, the latter being a radical hotspot).

It’s though that the travelling delegation visited areas where the diggers had contacts or thought they would meet a sympathetic audience. There may well have been digger groups or attempted communes at Iver (the origin of the Light Shining in Buckinghamshire pamphlet)...

And maybe at Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in Middlesex, Dunstable (Bedfordshire), Bosworth (Leicestershire), and other unknown locations in Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire. Many of these are listed as being visited by the digger ambassadors...

Also visited was Hounslow Heath, site of many anti-enclosure struggles. Were some of those resisting landlords over common rights also involved in digger-like action? Another colony was seemingly planned here.
Enclosure & resistance on Hounslow Heath
wp.me/p74yfw-1p1

Enfield Chase, another area the digger delegation visited, was another hotly contested space, where enclsoure was resisted for centuries. There were anti-enclosure riots in 1649 at Enfield, and 10 years later a huge struggle erupted here:
wp.me/p74yfw-Da

Enclosure battles at Enfield also inspired William Covell to write a pamphlet, A Declaration unto the Parliament, Council of State and Army, suggesting a radical new approach to land use, which bore some resemblance to the diggers’ program.
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A34778.…

It’s worth noting that both Covell and the 'Diggers' did not take their starting point as the re-opening of enclosed common land with a resumption or preservation of common rights as then understood.

Common rights as evolved under several centuries of tradition were a complex web of custom, class relations and toleration. Although they had been created by struggle between landowners and local residents, they were rarely simple.

Rights could be bought and sold, and ‘commoners’ with defined interests in manorial waste or fields could be wealthy themselves, sharing some but not all interests of the poor whose access was a matter of tradition.

Commoners in one manor could be enclosers or encroachers on the common there or elsewhere; some supported enclosure with promise of compensation; some opposed from their own point of view or from feelings of social conscience or desires to maintain social peace.

In contrast to this, Winstanley proposed common land be collectivised for need, by those in most need, and worked and controlled from below. In this can possibly be seen their class awareness that commoners and poor did not share the same interests.

Rights of well-to-do commoners would go out of the window with the ‘rights’ of the lords of the manors. The common good would determine land use. This in itself was a threat not only to the landowners but the wealthier tenants and the church, and to many ‘commoners’ as well.

It also may have unsettled some poorer residents who feared their own slender rights were under question: who may have been easy to whip up against the diggers by the richer locals, ‘Look these people will take away the little you have!’ (say them already taking it away)

The communists moved from St. George’s Hill to nearby Cobham Heath early in 1650.
The Council of State had ordered army intervention, to prevent the diggers encouraging “the looser and disordered sort of people to the greater boldness in other designs...”

By April 1650, the St George’s Hill commune was in effect defeated and the second experiment at Cobham also followed shortly. A week before Easter local Parson John Platt attacked a man and a woman working on the heath.

A week later Platt returned with several men and set fire to houses and dug up the corn. 11 acres of corn and a dozen houses were destroyed; a twenty four hour a day watch was put on Cobham heath to prevent any resumption of digging.

The diggers were threatened with death if they returned. A ‘Humble Request to the ministers of both universities and to all lawyers in every Inns-a-Court’ complaining of Platt’s actions, but without result.

This marked the end of the active communist phase of the True Levellers, though Gerard Winstanley continued to write and set out radical egalitarian ideas.

But land and access to it remained a central issue for English radicals. Enclosure gained pace, and agricultural improvement brought in new farming methods, displacing thousands from rural existence. The profits of enclosure partly funded the Industrial Revolution...

All these factors led to a massive influx into cities and a transformation from a mostly rural to a mostly urban industrial society. But the grievance of dispossession remained a bitter memory, and a yearning to regain or take control of land remained part of radical traditions.

Among others giving birth to the ideas of Thomas Spence, whose agrarian communism echoed Winstanley; to the ideal of emigration to more open societies where land was plentiful (eg the US), resettlement projects like the Chartist Land Plan...

... to land nationalisation movements such the Land and Labour League...
pasttense.co.uk/2018/04/15/tod…

The feeling that land ownership, land use and control was crucial to creating a more equitable society was at the heart of social programs.

But Winstanley's and the True Levellers' program remained revolutionary - most of the plans and proposals for use of land developed by radials in the hundreds of years following 1649 had nowhere like as ground-breaking implications.

Their ideas for the sharing of land, both in use and in its produce, for need not for profit, are still revolutionary today.
In the last century, food production has become more and more divorced from urban life.

Capitalism and mass production have altered how people farm, distribute & consume agricultural produce. UK Land ownership remains largely the province of the wealthy - still in the hands of the aristocracy, or huge transnational corporations & utility companies & quangos.

The True Levellers' words are as true as ever: “The common People are filled with good words from Pulpits and Councel Tables, but no good Deeds; For they wait and wait for good, and for deliverances, but none comes; While they wait for liberty, behold greater bondage comes..."

We're still hounded and bounded by "taskmasters, from Sessions, Lawyers, Bayliffs of Hundreds, Committees, Impropriators, Clerks of Peace, and Courts of Justice, so called, does whip the People by old Popish weather-beaten Laws..."

"Professors do rest upon the bare observation of Forms and Customs, and pretend to the Spirit, and yet persecutes, grudges, and hates the power of the Spirit; and as it was then, so it is now: All places stink with the abomination of Self-seeking Teachers and Rulers."

"everyone Preacheth for money, Counsels for money, and fights for money to maintain particular Interests... And none of these... that pretend to give liberty to the Creation, do give liberty to the Creation; neither can they, for they are enemies to universal liberty..."

"So that the earth stinks with their Hypocrisie, Covetousness, Envie, sottish Ignorance, and Pride.”

But as they wrote, our time WILL COME:
“Take notice, That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures."

"For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State Servants..."

"... but that the Oppressed might be set Free, Prison doors opened... making the Earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together... united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one Earth their Mother.”

"the Landlords that live in their Inclosures"

As mentioned above: the site of the True Levellers' camp, is now the posh private St. George’s Estate & golf club. Gated, CCTVed, guarded, the very rich live here, in Hypocrisie, Covetousness, Envie, sottish Ignorance, and Pride.

In 1999, 300 people, under the banner of campaign group The Land is Ours, re-occupied St George's Hill as a commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the launch of the Diggers’ Commune...
bilderberg.org/land/diggers.h…

The Land Is Ours were attempting to kickstart a new movement to discuss land use and ownership and encourage action for social change on control of land... As well as the diggers re-occupation they carried out some other brilliant actions...
tlio.org.uk/past-camapigns…

The 1999 "true levellers' marching through Walton on Thames

A carved memorial stone to the 'Digger' Commune of 1649-50 was erected in Weybridge, outside the Estate, and still stands.

Leon Rosselson, who wrote a great song about the 'Diggers', came along in 1999.
Here's his song, the World Turned Upside Down:

However, on the Hill, he sang a song written by the 1649 True Levellers themselves, 'You Noble Diggers All'

Take note, St George's Hill golfers, Comfortably in your Inclosures, We'll be back!
And that not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England, and in the whole World, shall be taken in by the People in righteousness

Not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.

@threadreaderapp Unroll, please...