A Radical History Of Britain
Page 19
The common land was to be worked by the people, who were to withdraw their labour from the landowning classes. But Winstanley’s vision saw no need for a class war against the rich. If they wished to keep their enclosed lands, he said (with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek), the gentry and aristocracy could plough them themselves. In time, the spirit of righteousness would make all mankind act in one spirit.
There was, however, a progression over the course of 1649 in the weight Winstanley gave to human agency in effecting this transformation. While the voice in the trance was clearly a call to action, The New Law also intimated that the new society would not be created by human efforts alone. Instead, ‘Everyone is to wait, till the Lord Christ do spread himself in multiplicities of bodies, making them all of one heart and one mind.’11 This stance had shifted by the time the first Digger manifesto, The True Levellers Standard, was published on 20 April 1649, a work defending the establishment of the first commune on St George’s Hill.* The religious language of Winstanley’s earlier works was still very apparent in The True Levellers Standard. Here he revisited his discussion of the Fall, explaining, via a dreadful pun, that Adam’s actions had dammed up – ‘A-dam’ – the spirit of righteousness. He justified the establishment of the Digger community with many biblical references, especially to the Book of Acts, whose vision of Christian charity had also proved an inspiration to earlier communitarian religious movements.
Now, though, the prophetic language was combined with specific reference to the immediate political context of the 1640s and to current political ideas. Like the leading Leveller writers, Winstanley reinterpreted the Parliament’s Solemn League and Covenant (to which, as already mentioned, he had himself subscribed) as a social contract between the Commons and the people ‘to endeavour a reformation and to bring in liberty every man in his place’, which Parliament had now defaulted upon by ‘imprisoning and oppressing’ men who attempted to fulfil the Covenant’s true ends.12 He also deployed the concept of the ‘Norman yoke’, which had been a feature of Leveller writing. According to this argument, the Norman Conquest had replaced England’s fair and equitable Anglo-Saxon constitution with oppressive and unjust laws. Moreover, it had imported into England a new political elite and it was this same ‘Norman’ class that continued to oppress the English. For Winstanley, England’s ‘Norman’ laws were no more than legal equivalents of the ‘cords, manacles and yokes’ worn by ‘Newgate prisoners’.13 However, he went further than Lilburne in arguing that the crucial element of this oppressive system was the private ownership of land: ‘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 enclosures.’14
The anger directed at the landowning class is much more evident in The True Levellers Standard: ‘those that buy or sell land, and are landlords have got it either by oppression or murder or theft’. Winstanley clarifies the plan to use the establishment of Digger communes to institute a strike of all agricultural labourers: ‘All labourers or such as are called poor people … shall not dare to work for hire for any landlord or for any that is lifted up above others: for by their labours they have lifted up tyrants and tyranny; and by denying to labour for hire they shall pull them down again.’15 Human activity was now clearly central to Winstanley achieving his prophetic vision. But in spite of the growing stridency and overt political engagement of his writings, he disavowed public disorder or the use of violence to achieve his ends: ‘There is no intent of tumult or fighting, but only to get bread to eat with the sweat of our brows.’16
Although he did not directly acknowledge its influence, Winstanley’s stance in The True Levellers Standard was similar to that adopted in a pamphlet published in December 1648, Light Shining in Buckingham-shire. This anonymous work, like Winstanley’s, linked the Fall of Man with enclosure, and landownership and private property with theft and murder. Although it was far more explicitly anti-monarchical – ‘Kings are the root of tyranny … Kings are of the beast’17 – than Winstanley’s writings, Light Shining also called for a ‘just portion for each man to live’ and employed the Book of Acts to justify establishing a ‘public maintenance and stock’ for the poor. Light Shining demonstrates that Winstanley’s was not an isolated voice, and that there were elements of the Leveller movement calling for social as well as political reform.
The hostility to the rich evident in his writings from 1649 onwards is also clearly present here, reminding us that civil war could also be viewed as class war. Indeed, the sequel to Light Shining in Buckingham-shire, published in March 1649, anticipated Marx’s theory of the appropriation of surplus labour value: ‘the flower of those industrious mens labours are boulted out from them, and only the Bean left them to feed on’.18 However, whereas A Light and More Light Shining on Buckingham-shire only advocated the redistribution of Crown and Church lands among the poor, Winstanley’s Diggers called for the utter transformation of English society – not merely for some of the land to be portioned out to the needy but for private ownership of the ‘common treasury’ of the earth to be abolished altogether.
The True Levellers Standard was presented as a multi-authored work and signed by thirteen others besides Winstanley and Everard. The historian John Gurney has demonstrated that about a third of those identified in Digger pamphlets were Surrey residents and most of them came from Cobham, explaining in part the less marked local hostility to the Digger settlement on Little Heath at Cobham than to the one first established on St George’s Hill, Walton. Perhaps more remarkably, given the latter commemoration of the Diggers as champions of the rural poor, many of these individuals were not rootless, homeless ‘peasants’ at all but local householders who retained their original Cobham homes at the same time as taking part in establishing the Digger community. There is something here reminiscent of the Buckinghamshire pamphlets: More Light complained that the ‘successful’ tenant farmers were overburdened with official duties; their ‘reward’ for hard work was more unpaid hard work. Again, what comes through is the voice of the overburdened ratepayer, not that of the poorest sections of the community.19
The Digger settlements, and Winstanley’s political writings, were, then, a radical response to longer-term economic changes, namely, the transformation of a feudal society to a form of agrarian capitalism. Labour services had, by and large, been replaced by cash rents, fens had been drained and more and more common land enclosed. However, instead of the sporadic resistance to these changes offered by enclosure rioters, such as placing checks on the encroachment of landlords on the commons, Winstanley and the Diggers proposed instead the common ownership of all land. This would have been anathema to most early Stuart anti-enclosure rioters, who believed that in defending the commons they were defending their personal property.20 Certainly the Digger movement matched other forms of direct action in meeting the crisis of subsistence provoked by the civil war, such as the taking of wood for fuel from enclosed forests. However, the radical approach of the Diggers, to cultivate the commons both as an example of the future form that the ideal society would take and as a means of freeing labourers and tenant farmers from the ‘tyranny’ of landowners, could also antagonise their social equals, who viewed these communal settlements as a threat to ‘their’ land. Here we can see a significant change from the nature of rural politics a hundred years earlier. In 1549 Kett, a wealthy yeoman farmer, had supported and led the rebels. Now, in Surrey, men of the same class were vehement in their opposition to this new communal movement.
The original Digger settlement at St George’s Hill soon attracted opposition from locals, many of whom were from the same middling background as the Diggers themselves and were concerned about the implications for their own use of the commons.21
The settlement at Walton was attacked almost as soon as the community was established. There is evidence that some of the Diggers, most likely the eccentric and occasionally violent William Everard
, may have responded in kind. A yeoman of the parish, Henry Saunders, formally complained to the Council of State, the executive body of the republic, on 16 April 1649 about the activities of twenty to thirty Diggers who had burnt about ten acres of heath. Lord General Fairfax was ordered by the Council to investigate. However, his agent, Captain John Gladman, saw little at Walton to concern the Council, viewing the activities of the Diggers ‘not worth the writing nor yet taking nottis of’.22 Gladman suspected that the Council’s time was being wasted with what was little more than a local land dispute. Everard and Winstanley were nonetheless summoned to Whitehall on 20 April to be interviewed by Fairfax, who treated the two men with leniency, allowing them to keep their hats on in his presence.* From this moment on, Fairfax was identified, rightly or wrongly, as a potential ally by Winstanley and became the target of further appeals from the Digger leader. In May, Fairfax visited Cobham and had another amicable exchange with Winstanley, who repeated his assurances that the Diggers were not violent.
However, hostility from some of the Walton community continued unabated. On 11 June that year, four Diggers were badly hurt in an assault led by Starr and another yeoman, John Taylor, accompanied by fellow male villagers dressed as women in order to further humiliate and shame the Diggers. In the same month, actions were brought against the Diggers at Kingston Assizes for trespass, which Winstanley appealed against in a pamphlet directed at the Rump Parliament, An Appeal to the House of Commons (24 July 1649). The appeals were unsuccessful, and it was at this point, in the face of ongoing attacks, that the Diggers were forced to move their settlement to Little Heath, Cobham, closer to where many of the Diggers themselves had originated.
The parish of Cobham was more polarised socially. Local gentry had aggressively attacked rights to commons and timber, which had led to greater solidarity among the yeoman class. Initially, the settlement at Cobham appeared to meet with less resistance than the one at St George’s Hill. But towards the end of the year hostile gentry, including Sir Anthony Vincent, Thomas Sutton and John Platt, Rector of West Horsley, were pressing the Council of State to deal with the Diggers. On 28 November, local soldiers tore down some of their dwellings, took away wood and cast three or four elderly squatters out into the open.
In the face of this opposition, Winstanley redoubled his efforts to promote the Digger movement, both in person and in print. A missionary tour conducted over the winter of 1649–50 seems to have met with some success. Settlements were established at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, Cox Hall in Kent, Iver in Buckinghamshire, Barnet in Hertfordshire and Bosworth in Leicestershire, as well as in Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire. Class hostility ran through the declarations produced by the Iver and Wellingborough Diggers: ‘Rich men’s hearts are hardened, they will not give us if we beg at their doors; if we steal, the Law will end our lives, divers of the poor are starved to death already, and it were better for us that are living to dye by the Sword than by the Famine.’23 The only remedy was for the poor to fertilise and farm the common and waste ground.
In his pamphlets Winstanley renewed the demand that the republic intervene to support the Diggers’ programme. In A New Year’s Gift for the Parliament and Armie published on 1 January 1650, he attacked the government for failing to carry through the work begun by the regicide. Kingly power could not be destroyed simply by cutting off the King’s head, but was like a ‘great spread tree’ that ‘would grow again and recover fresh strength’ if not removed root and branch.24 While laws protecting private landownership remained, regal power too survived. Winstanley stressed, though, that the Diggers were for good government, not anarchy. The acts abolishing kingship and establishing the Commonwealth had made ‘a firm foundation’ but needed to be followed up by attacks on the power of the lawyers and the clergy, and, most of all, by granting the people the right to cultivate the commons. Winstanley repeated his commitment to non-violent means of pursuing the Diggers’ goals, but he warned Parliament that if they did not fulfil their promise to abolish kingly power, then there would be no ‘law but club law amongst the people’.25 The Appeale to All Englishmen produced by the Little Heath Diggers in March 1650 went further, instructing copyholders that they were now freed from obedience to their lords of the manor and should not attend their ‘Court-Barons’ (manorial courts).
By the spring of 1650, however, Winstanley’s community at Cobham had been destroyed. John Platt, accompanied by fifty men, had set fire to half a dozen of the Diggers’ shelters and set a watch on the area for three days and nights to ensure that the squatters did not return. At Wellingborough, the Council of State on 15 April expressed support for one Thomas Pentlow’s campaign against the ‘Levellers’ (as his letter described them).
The Digger experiment was over, and Winstanley and his followers were forced to find work threshing wheat on the estate of the Hastings family in Pirton, Hertfordshire, where the prophetess Lady Eleanor Davies (she published almost seventy largely unreadable prophetic tracts) owned the rectory and manor. Winstanley had a difficult relationship with the unstable female mystic. While adopting the persona of Melchizedek King of Salem, Lady Eleanor confronted him about the threshing accounts in the tithe barn on 3 December. Winstanley, for his part, refuted the claim that he had ever taken the work for money, saying that his aim was ‘the convertion of your spirit to true Nobilitie, which is falne in the earth’. This was a clear dig at Davies’s social pretensions, for despite her support for the republic and her repeated pleas of penury, she continued to make much of her aristocratic lineage. But Winstanley too was guilty of holding on to traditional prejudices, finding her adoption of male roles absurd. Lady Eleanor, Winstanley said, had ‘lost the Breeches, which is indeed true Reason, the strength of A man’.26 Despite these problems, he promised to do what he could for her business and draw up a clear set of accounts.
Meanwhile, his fellow Digger William Everard had joined the household of the English Behmenists John and Mary Pordage at Bradfield rectory in Berkshire.* Also rumoured to be present at Bradfield at this time was the prophet Thomas Totney. Everard’s appearance heralded a series of unusual events. John Pordage was reported to have fled the local church in a ‘Trance … bellowing like a Bull’. The previous week, a thirteen-year-old boy had begun making strange prognostications about the appearance of the Lord Jehovah. The ‘conjuror’ Everard was reportedly responsible for the disturbances and in December of 1650 he was committed to Bridewell Prison before being moved, due to his ‘distracted’ state, to Bethlem Hospital in March 1651. No more was heard of him.27
While his former comrade languished in a lunatic asylum, Winstanley completed his last and best-known work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or, True Magistracy Restored, published in February 1652 and dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Here, the Digger leader laid out his most systematic vision of the new society. The earth would be worked in common, but individual families would continue to live apart rather than in communal dwellings. Private ownership of goods was not outlawed and families might keep animals for their own use, but most commodities, whether agricultural produce or manufactured goods, would be kept in storehouses. From the storehouses families could take what they needed, whether corn, meat, draught animals or household items.
What is most remarkable about The Law of Freedom, in contrast to Winstanley’s other works, is the prominent role given to the system of overseers and to the law in ensuring that all worked the earth for the common good. This has led some historians to suggest that Winstanley had shifted from being England’s ‘first socialist’ to becoming its ‘first Stalinist’.28 Elements of his system certainly seem repressive. Those who repeatedly refused to join the others in farming the land would be made slaves of the Commonwealth. Those who practised the law for money, or who engaged in trade for profit, or demanded money for preaching or praying, or who committed rape would be put to death.29 The belief in the imminent rising of the spirit of Christ in everyone seemed to have been replaced with a pessimistic bel
ief in the need for a strict penal code to coerce a recalcitrant public into working for the common good.
However, before we depict Winstanley as a seventeenth-century Pol Pot, offering the people the choice between hard agricultural toil and death, we must remember that, in comparison to the existing system of criminal law, his penal code considerably reduced the number of crimes that carried the death penalty. Winstanley himself justified the exercise of capital punishment only on the grounds that it was a ‘kinder’ punishment than imprisonment, which, given the state of early modern prisons, especially as experienced by the poor, was not unreasonable. Death as a result of ‘gaol fever’– typhus – commonly killed off inmates before they finished their sentences. Even if they avoided death, many left gaol physically shattered – one woman accused of witchcraft had to be carried to the assizes in a wheelbarrow as her toes had rotted off.30 Moreover, though the vision presented in The Law of Freedom paid much greater attention to law and institutions, it remained a millenarian vision nonetheless. The ‘spirit of universal Righteousness dwelling in Mankind’ was ‘rising up to teach every one to do to another as he would have another do to him’.31 It was also a broadly democratic vision. Government was to be founded on a contract with the people. There were to be regular elections and individuals were to hold office only for short periods in order to check corruption. Utopian optimism, rather than totalitarian power-hunger, continued to dominate Winstanley’s thought.
It is also important to remember the specific circumstances that prompted him to write his last work. In 1651, the Independent minister Hugh Peters had initiated a debate about the reform of the law, education and the clergy in his Good Work for a Good Magistrate. Cromwell himself was at this time encouraging such proposals and attempting to court radical opinion. Winstanley appears to have wanted to contribute to the debate stimulated by Peters’s work; indeed, portions of The Law of Freedom are a direct commentary on Good Work for a Good Magistrate. So Winstanley’s last work was intended less as a summation of all his earlier Digger pamphlets and more as a contribution to a specific contemporary debate. In this regard, it was only partially successful. A number of other contributors to the controversy poached elements of his work, but, like modern historians, they tended to concentrate on the coercive elements of his vision rather than those that stressed community.