DR JUN.-16
In April 1649, the soil of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disrupted by a group known as the ‘True Levellers’—later memorialised as the ‘Diggers’—who had resolved to reclaim the wasteland of Walton parish. Their intention was not merely to cultivate barren land, described by 1650 surveyors as “nothing but a bare heath & sandy ground,” but to symbolically and materially resist the enclosure movement, which had been systematically converting common lands into parcels of private property, stripping away the customary rights and access that had historically been held by commoners. Despite the land’s poor quality, the Diggers believed in its potential fertility. Over the ensuing months, they diligently worked the soil—applying composted turf, planting parsnips, carrots, beans—and even erected cottages, signaling a permanent commitment. Many among them were local, their participation shaped by years of rural discontent, heavy Civil War taxes, and continual friction with landlords. Yet their protest was not confined to Walton; it gestured towards a broader resistance to the protracted, exploitative trajectory of enclosure across England.
While the Diggers’ immediate struggle appeared provincial—rooted in the tangible conflicts of Surrey villagers against manorial powers—their vision, as articulated in The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649), was unfathomably expansive. Gerrard Winstanley, the principal theorist, proclaimed the Earth itself to be a “common treasury of relief for all, both beasts and men,” a declaration aimed not only at England’s ruling powers but at “all the powers of the world.” The Surrey ground was but the embryonic site of a global insurrection. They envisioned, as Winstanley wrote, not merely the reclamation of one common, but of “all the commons and waste ground in England and in the whole world.” Over a brief but fervent four-year span (1648–1652), Winstanley’s texts and the Diggers’ actions coalesced into an anti-capitalist cosmology, one that erased distinctions among persons and borders, grounded in an egalitarian ethos that foreshadowed Marxist, Guevarist, and postcolonial discourses. Their communitarian labours, albeit modest, were saturated with a revolutionary ambition that remains eerily resonant in the lexicon of modern resistance—from Standing Rock to Palestine.
This era of English radicalism, catalyzed by the 1649 regicide of Charles I and the temporary installation of a republican Commonwealth, fostered myriad insurgent sects—Levellers, Ranters, Seekers—all of whom, like the Diggers, sought to dismantle entrenched hierarchies. Yet, it is the Diggers whose legacy metastasized across centuries and continents. Rediscovered in the 1890s by German Marxist Eduard Bernstein, Winstanley’s writings were subsequently immortalised in 1918 Moscow when Lenin’s government inscribed his name—rendered ‘Uinstlei’—on an obelisk alongside Marx, Engels, and other revolutionary luminaries. In 1960s San Francisco, an anarchist collective named themselves the Diggers, providing free services and food as homage. In 1999, activists from The Land Is Ours symbolically reoccupied St George’s Hill to reaffirm environmentalist and communal ideals. The Diggers, thus, persist not only as historical actors but as a malleable template for global insurgency, championing ‘commoning’ as a counterforce to capitalist privatism.
However, their radicalism was not insulated from empire. Their experiment in Surrey was coterminous with England’s expanding imperial ventures—the East India Company, the colonisation of Ireland, the commodification of enslaved bodies across the Atlantic. Even as Winstanley called for a shared human family, English soldiers were interrogating their role in foreign conquest: “What have we to do with Ireland… to fight and murder a People and Nation… which have done us no harm?” The Diggers’ anti-hierarchical visions were entangled in the very networks of exploitation they implicitly critiqued. Winstanley himself had been shaped by transregional commerce: born into a family of textile traders in Wigan, he migrated to London where he established a business rooted in cloth—woven locally but dependent on Irish flax and global markets. Thus, his commitment to a universal commons was paradoxically conditioned by the very material flows and global inequalities his philosophy sought to transcend.
Difficult Words & Meanings
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Enclosure – The legal process of converting common land into private property.
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Pamphlet – A small booklet or leaflet containing information or arguments about a single subject.
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Fervid – Intensely passionate or enthusiastic.
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Millenarian – Relating to a belief in a coming transformation of society, often involving the end of the world or a utopia.
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Cosmology – A theory regarding the origin and structure of the universe or a broader worldview.
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Communitarian – Focused on the interests of the community over individualism.
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Metastasized – Spread or developed extensively (used metaphorically here).
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Coterminous – Occurring simultaneously or sharing the same boundaries.
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