Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not
act, thou dost nothing '– Gerrard Winstanley.
Dr John Gurney is fast becoming a leading authority
on the Diggers and their leader Gerrard Winstanley. He is the author of a
previous book on the Diggers called Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the
English Revolution and also the author of several papers on the Diggers. Gurney's
latest book is a result of a paper published from 1994.[1] He
regularly lectures on Winstanley.
The book is a meticulously researched, scholarly
and well-presented. Gurney provides us with a good understanding of the origins
of the Digger movement. It has been praised for setting an "extremely high
standard for local histories of this sort and must rank alongside similar
studies such as Eamon Duffy's acclaimed The Voices of Morebath."
Gurney's biography runs to just over 162 pages. It
would be a mistake, however, to believe that the book is academically or
intellectually 'light '. It is nothing of the sort. Nor should it be
treated as an introductory to Winstanley, the reader to get the best out of
this book should at least have a rudimentary knowledge of the Digger leader and
the Diggers struggle.
Gurney's introduction sets the tone for the rest of
the book in the respect that it attempts to place his work in the context of
previous 'left-wing' or 'Marxist' historiography.
The sign of a good book is that it tells us
something new. Gurney's work can be seen as development on from the work
of Christopher Hill and others.
It is well known that previous Marxist's had
written on the English revolution. Gurney elaborates that the Russian
revolutionaries paid particular attention to the writings of Winstanley so much
so that Vladimir Lenin the then leader of the fledgling Soviet state issued a
decree that a previous Tsarist monument was to be changed with names of former
revolutionaries replacing old figures of earlier Russian history. Winstanley's
name appeared eighth on the list.
For their revolution, the Russian revolutionaries
were able to draw on the experiences of revolutionaries from England and
France. Winstanley had no such experience to draw upon. This, in some respect,
shows why the revolutionaries had such an empirical outlook.
On the plus side, the English revolutionaries were
as Ann Talbot explains "well-grounded enough in history to identify new
and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they
appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood
historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing".[2]
The book is well researched and for such a small
work shows many years of hard, painstaking research. The result is a very
readable narrative. The book is extremely informative and thought-provoking.
It is perhaps only recently that the words of
Winstanley have been fully appreciated. Gerrard Winstanley's 'extraordinarily
rich body of writings' were little read and even less written upon between the
years 1651 and the 1890s. It was only after an explosive revolutionary era
encompassing the late 19th and early 20th centuries that his writings were
systematically studied and written about. The first to do so were the early
Marxists and later the group of historians around the Communist Party of Great
Britain.
Gurney is clear that the study of Winstanley should
be not solely of historical value but must have a contemporary resonance. He
says: 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. More
specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained prescient, inspiring generations
of activists and social movements" his name he continues "has in
recent years also been invoked by freeganism, 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".[3]
Knowledge of Gerrard Winstanley's early life is a
bit sketchy. He was born 1609, and as one writer put it he was "one of the
most extraordinary and engaging figures to emerge during the English Revolution
of 1640 – 60".
He was the son of an Edward Winstanley. In 1630 he
moved to London and took up an apprenticeship, and in 1638, he was a freeman of
the Merchant Tailors' Company. His adult life is unremarkable he married Susan
King, who was the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639. It is clear
that without the English Civil War, his life would have moved at the same
pedestrian pace as before. But like many, his world was turned upside down. His
business took a beating during the early part of the war, and in 1643 he was
made bankrupt. He moved to Cobham, Surrey, where he found menial work as a
cowherd.
It was at Cobham in Surrey that the Diggers
movement was founded. Winstanley believed that the land was a "common
treasury for all". He began to recruit like-minded people and began to
work the ground on St George's Hill in the summer of 1649.
The Diggers were part of a group of men that sought
to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place
at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true 'Ideologues of the
revolution' and had a capacity for abstract thought. While the Diggers were
sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from their religion, they had no program
to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of
society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their
ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or that matter did the larger group the
Levellers constitute a mass movement. The contradiction between their concern
for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners
caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore
they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a
lot of the poor to be made more equitable.
Where does Gurney's book fit in today's
historiography of the English Revolution? Until quite recently little has
been written on the Digger movement. This has been largely down to the fact
that over the last few decades historiography on the English revolution has
been dominated by a large group of revisionist historians who have sought to
move away from any Marxist understanding of the English revolution.
According to Michael Braddick, revisionists have "have
tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to cast it in its terms. In
so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over the reputation and
contemporary significance of its radical heroes".[4]
Given that Mark Kishlansky is one of those arch revisionists
mentioned by Braddick, it seems a bit strange that Kishlanskywrote of the book "This is a
clear-eyed yet sympathetic account of one of the most baffling figures of the
English Revolution. Gurney's painstaking research provides a wealth of new
information that is assembled into a highly readable narrative. An informative
and thought-provoking book."
Kishlansky despite recommending Gurney's book is keen to
downplay the role of Winstanley who according to him was "a small
businessman who began his career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain,
and in between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The
years when the world was turned upside down stand in the same relation to the
course of English history as Winstanley's wild years either side of his
fortieth birthday does to his subsequent life as a churchwarden".[5]
Gurney's work on the Digger's represents opposition
to this revisionism. I am not saying that it accounts for a new form of
historiography, but it does mean that opposition to present-day revisionism is
beginning.It is also no accident that interest in Winstanley coincides with one
of the biggest crisis to the capitalist system we have witnessed since the
1920s and 1930s..
Gurney's book is invaluable when it starts to trace
the origins of Winstanley's radicalism. Gurney does not subscribe to the theory
that it was solely down to the war radicalizing people such as Winstanley.
Gurney believes that radical views were being expressed all over the country
before the outbreak of civil war.
In a previous essay, Gurney elaborates on why the
Digger's achieved a level of local support in Cobham "Local support for
the Diggers may also have been connected with Cobham's marked traditions of
social conflict. The manor of Cobham, a former possession of Chertsey Abbey,
had passed into the hands of Robert Gavell in 1566 and was to remain with his
family until 1708. During the later sixteenth century the Gavell family became
involved in a long and protracted series of disputes with their tenants. In a
case brought in the court of Requests by William Wrenn, a Cobham husbandman,
Robert Gavell was accused of overturning manorial customs and of infringing his
tenants' rights, by seeking to extract more rent than was customarily paid, and
by spoiling the timber on Wrenn's copyhold. He was also charged with attempting
to escape the payment of tax by shifting the burden on to his tenants, laying
'a hevy burden uppon the poorer tennants contrarye to the Ancient usage,
equitie and Consciens'Actions against Robert Gavell and his son Francis were
resumed in the court of Chancery during the 1590s by tenants seeking to halt
the continued assault on manorial custom".[6]
It has been suggested that Winstanley was proto-communist
and early Marxist but as Geoff Kennedy commented in his Digger Radicalism and
Agrarian Capitalism Winstanley should also be placed in the context of his
times. Winstanley's thought and writings were profoundly religious, and as the
former Marxist writer, Cliff Slaughter said "for the understanding of some
of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity.
What is the relationship between the social divisions among men and their
beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended
periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the 'Utopians'
wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable
arrangement of social relations to proceed to its construction? It was out of
the examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of
religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of
society. 'The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism."[7]
To conclude, I would say that this no hagiography.
Gurney is not blind to Winstanley's weaknesses. He outlines that some of
Winstanley's ideas were not progressive, or that his attitude towards women's
emancipation was not the same towards men. Having said that Gurney's book has
the look of a labour of love. The author even goes as far as to include his
photos with the text. Gerrard Winstanley is an important book and should be
read by academics and the general public alike and for all those in favour of a
"common treasury for all".
[1] Gurney, J, 1994 Gerrard
Winstanley and the Digger Movement in Walton and Cobham, Hist J, 37(4), 775–802
[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[3] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-08-31/diggers-land-and-direct-activisim/
[4] https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/the-digger-years.html
[5] Radical Prophet: The
Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries Who Foretold the ...
By Christopher
Rowland
[6] http://www.academicroom.com/article/gerrard-winstanley-and-digger-movement-walton-and-cobham
[7] Religion and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labour
Review Vol 3 No 3 June 1958
