"Action is the life of all and if thou dost not act,
thou dost nothing"– Gerrard Winstanley
There is no denying that the death of John Gurney was a
sad and terrible moment for both his family and the history community. His
passing at such a young age of 54 of cancer, removes from the scene a gifted
historian whose work was starting to produce results on a level of the great
Christopher Hill, with whom he met at Oxford.
Gurney was not a Marxist historian, but his latest work
published after his death showed a profound shift to the Left in his thinking.
His paper Gerard Winstanley and the Left is insightful and thought-provoking.
It is certainly one of the best analyses of left-wing historiography of the
English Revolution.
Contained within his writings is an excellent example of the
Historians Craft. I never met him but had some correspondence with him towards
the end of his life. Even with this brief connection, I could tell he was a
historian of great ability and tenacity. This was recognised by his friends and
colleagues. In a tribute to him, Scott Ashley wrote "John was someone who
in both his professional and personal lives could sniff out a story and extract
the gold from the archive that made time and place shine fresh. To walk with
him around North Shields was to see the streets and buildings with different
eyes, not only in the sometimes prosaic now but as part of a more poetic then,
as home places to Commonwealth-era churchmen, eighteenth-century ship captains,
Victorian professionals. Among the many things I learned from John during the
years, I knew him was that being a historian and making a home, physical and
imaginative, were part of a common enterprise" [1].
Gurney spent most of his historical life studying the area
around where he lived. However, his work on the Diggers and Gerard Winstanley
was far from parochial. In many ways, he was instrumental in bringing a fresh
perspective to the Diggers and Winstanley. He produced two books on them Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the
English Revolution published in 2007 and Gerrard
Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy of 2013[2]. Both books took our understanding of the Diggers
to a new level.
John had many skills as a historian, but three leap out at
you. He could explain complicated historical issues in a way that anyone could
understand. Secondly, he brought his subject to life and thirdly his stamina to
spend significant amounts of time "grubbing in the archives".
To deep mine, an archive may to a layperson seem odd, but
this ability gave him a more in-depth insight into the complicated problems
faced by revolutionaries such as Winstanley. These seventeenth-century
revolutionaries were working without precedents in which to guide their
revolution.
If Gerard Winstanley is more well known and highly thought
of today, it is because of Gurney. It is hard not to agree with
Michael Wood's claim that Winstanley's place in the pantheon of English
literature and political thought should be higher than previously thought. Wood
believes he should be put alongside Hobbes and Harrington as one of the great
writers of English prose of the seventeenth century. We should not forget that
Winstanley was also a man of action as well as words. In 17th century
eyes, he was a dangerous revolutionary.
Historians Craft
Gurney's attempt to recreate the past and therefore
understand it is done with much empathy and imagination. There is also a
doggedness and intellectual objectivity about his work. While some historians
seek to make an objective understanding of history, Gurney was almost religious
in his pursuit of historical truth.
Gurney's work exhibited a disciplined approach to complex historical
questions. He recognised that he did not know everything about his area of
study. But his work did show honesty which enabled him to have a greater
understanding of his role in the presentation of facts.
Gurney was also mindful of presenting his work in a way that
was never apart from its moment in time. Gurney's approach was similar to the
French historian of feudal society, Marc Bloch, who wrote in his book, The
Historian's Craft "In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be
understood apart from its moment in time. This applies to every evolutionary
stage, our own, and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: 'Men resemble
their times more than they do their fathers.'
Gerrard
Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy of 2013.
The book is 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 was 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". He
believed that Winstanley "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 Who was to him as a significant precursor".
Gurney's book is invaluable when it starts to trace the
origins of Winstanley's radicalism. Gurney did not subscribe to the theory that
it was solely down to the war radicalising people such as Winstanley. Gurney
believed that radical views were being expressed all over the country before
the outbreak of the 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" [3].
Who Were The
Diggers
Gurney was one of the few contemporary historians involved
in the study of Early Modern England who understood the importance of class in
understanding the English revolution and its radical wing.
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 right '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
programme 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.
Brave Community:
The Digger Movement in the English Revolution published in 2007
Gurney's study of his local area in this case Surrey was not
done from a parochial viewpoint. A survey of local events correctly done can
add to a more broad and objective understanding of events.
Brave Community was the result of painstaking
investigations. Somewhat surprisingly it was the first full-length modern study
of the Diggers.
It was well-received by academic historians. One review
of Brave Community by Henk Looijesteijn described it as "a study that
successfully blends social and intellectual history in recreating the
environment in which one of the most original thinkers of
mid-seventeenth-century England originated and acted. As such, this book should
be regarded as the starting point for any student of Winstanley and the Digger".
Gerrard Winstanley
and the Left
Gurney's last essay Gerrard Winstanley and the Left is a
very significant piece of work. It lays the critical groundwork for a further
examination of the Left's attitude towards the English revolution. Gurney
understood when writing about left-wing historiography on the English
Revolution that you had to be aware of the pratfalls especially when writing
about the Communist Party Historians Group. One must be cognizant of the
enormous amount of ideological baggage these historians carried around. It must
be said that some of this baggage was not always in perfect condition.
In many ways, this essay is in microcosm a summation of
Gurney's whole body of work. He was very much at the height of his powers when
he wrote this article. Gurney acknowledges that it is only recently that the
words of Winstanley have been fully appreciated.
However, he believed that it is not the case that nothing of note was
written before the 20th century. He thought that Winstanley's 'extraordinarily
rich body of writings' were read and studied between the years 1651 and the
1890s.
As he wrote in the essay "The historical legacy of the
Diggers is usually seen as being very different from that of their
contemporaries, the Levellers. If the Levellers were misremembered, the Diggers
have been understood as being largely forgotten before the 1890s, with
professional historians playing little part in their rediscovery. It
took, we are told, the Marxist journalist and politician Eduard Bernstein to
rediscover Winstanley quite independently of academic historians when he spent
part of his exile in London working on the section on seventeenth-century
English radical thinkers for Karl Kautsky's Die Vorla¨ufer
des neueren Sozialismus.
Later, in the 1940s, it was Marxist historians associated
with the Communist Party of Great Britain who are said to have picked
up Bernstein's baton and created the image of a communist and materialist
Winstanley which remains familiar to this day. The Left's responsibility for,
and role in, the rediscovery and promotion of the Diggers can, therefore, seem
quite clear and uncomplicated. There are, however, a number of problems with
this interpretation. For one thing, the Diggers had, before the 1890s, never
fallen from public view to the extent often imagined. In fact, it seems that
they were reasonably well known over the centuries — and
perhaps even more accurately remembered than the mainstream Levellers, who
were often confused with them. It is also evident that early detailed research
on the Diggers was not confined to the Left and that Bernstein was by no means
alone in taking an interest in Winstanley's writings in the 1890s" [4].
Revisionism
Where does Gurney's work fit in with today's in today's
historiography of the English Revolution? Due to no fault of his own Gurney's
work on Winstanley is an oasis in a desert of revisionism.
As Michael Braddick points out, revisionists have "have
tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to cast it in its own
terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over the reputation
and contemporary significance of its radical heroes".
The historian Mark Kishlansky' has a habit of cutting down
the radical heroes of the English Revolution. It is perhaps surprising that he
recommends Gurney's book saying "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 he is keen to
downplay 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".
Kishlanksky inadvertently raises an interesting question.
What was the relationship between Winstanley's religion, his economic status
and his politics? As the Marxist writer Cliff Slaughter says "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 long 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[5]".
Conclusion
Gurney's work on Winstanley and the Diggers is the start of
a new form of historiography on the English Revolution. His work is
groundbreaking in many ways and is an antidote to revisionist historiography. Gurney is correct to state there has never been what he
calls a definable left-wing interpretation of the Diggers and Winstanley or to
be even more precise there has never been a consistent classical Marxist
position on the Diggers. It is hoped that Gurney's work is used to
further our knowledge of the radicals of the English Revolution and present a
more unified theory as regards these radical gentlemen of the revolution.
[1] Brave Community: A communal
and personal tribute to our friend and colleague, John Gurney (1960-2014)
[2] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=john+gurney
[3] Gerrard Winstanley and the
Digger movement in Walton and Cobham- John Gurney
[4] Gerrard Winstanley and the
Left-John Gurney.
[5] Religion and Social Revolt
Cliff Slaughter Labour Review Vol 3 No 3 June 1958
