"Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act,
thou dost nothing." — Gerrard Winstanley.
John Gurney (1960–2014) died of cancer at 54, just as his
work on the Diggers was reaching its full strength. He was not a Marxist
historian. Yet his two books on Gerrard Winstanley, and his posthumously
published essay "Gerrard Winstanley and the Left", did more than any
recent scholarship to restore the Diggers to their social setting. This review
argues that Gurney's local, archive-driven method produced what is, in
substance, materialist history: an account of the Diggers rooted in land, property
and class conflict. It also argues that his work leaves open questions, above
all about religion and the national crisis, which a Marxist reading must take
further.
Those who knew him stressed how closely his scholarship and
his sense of place were bound together. His friend and colleague Scott Ashley
recalled that John "could sniff out a story and extract the gold from the
archive that made time and place shine fresh", and that for him being a
historian and making a home were "part of a common enterprise".[1]
Gurney's method
Gurney's distinctive strength was his willingness to spend
long periods "grubbing in the archives" of a single locality. Most of
his career was devoted to the history of the North East, where he lived. When
he turned to Surrey and the Diggers, he brought the same habits: manorial
records, court cases, parish material and tax returns, read closely and
patiently.
This was never parochial. Done properly, local study tests
general claims against the lives of particular people. Marc Bloch, the
historian of feudal society, put the principle well in The Historian's Craft:
a historical phenomenon cannot be understood apart from its moment in time, for
"men resemble their times more than they do their fathers."[2] Gurney
applied this rule to Winstanley. Instead of treating him as a disembodied
thinker, he asked what the manor of Cobham, the commons of St George's Hill and
the economic crisis of the 1640s did to the man and his neighbours. He combined
this with two other gifts: a clear prose style that made complex questions
accessible, and a refusal to claim more than the evidence supported.
Brave Community (2007)
Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English
Revolution was, remarkably, the first full-length modern study of the
Diggers. Its achievement was to place the colonies at St George's Hill and
Cobham inside the society that produced them. Henk Looijesteijn judged that it
"successfully blends social and intellectual history" and should be
the starting point for any student of Winstanley.[3]
The book's most valuable evidence concerns Cobham's long tradition of social conflict. The manor, once held by Chertsey Abbey, passed to Robert Gavell in 1566 and stayed with his family until 1708. From the later sixteenth century, the Gavells fought a running battle with their tenants. In the Court of Requests, the husbandman William Wrenn accused Robert Gavell of overturning manorial custom, raising rents above customary levels and despoiling the timber on Wrenn's copyhold. Gavell was also charged with shifting his tax burden onto the poorer tenants. In the 1590s tenants renewed the fight in Chancery against Robert and his son Francis. This matters for interpretation. The Diggers did not appear from nowhere in 1649, conjured by war and millenarian excitement. They drew on a local memory of resistance to lords who were turning customary land into a source of profit.
The Digger's Life and Legacy (2013)
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy is
shorter and aimed at a wider readership, but it is just as carefully
researched. One reviewer ranked it alongside Eamon Duffy's The Voices of
Morebath as a model of local history. Gurney traces Winstanley from his
Wigan childhood, through his years as a London cloth trader, to his ruin in the
early 1640s and his move to Surrey.[4]
Gurney rejects the view that the war alone radicalised men like Winstanley. Radical ideas, he shows, were already in circulation across the country before 1642. He also insists that Winstanley's significance is not purely historical. Winstanley has been claimed by Marxists and libertarians, by squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners and greens. Gurney treats this afterlife as part of the subject, not a distraction from it. Even Mark Kishlansky, no friend to the radical heroes of the Revolution, praised the book as clear-eyed, sympathetic and full of new information.
"Gerrard Winstanley and the Left"
Gurney's last essay is the one most directly relevant to
Marxists, and it shows him at the height of his powers. It takes on a familiar
story. On that account, the Diggers were forgotten until the 1890s, when Eduard
Bernstein rediscovered Winstanley in London while writing on English radicals
for Karl Kautsky's history of socialism. In the 1940s the Communist Party
Historians' Group picked up Bernstein's baton and fashioned the communist,
materialist Winstanley still familiar today.
Gurney shows that this story is too simple. The Diggers
never vanished from view as completely as supposed; they were reasonably well
known across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and perhaps remembered
more accurately than the Levellers, with whom they were often confused.
Detailed research on them was not confined to the Left, and Bernstein was not
alone in reading Winstanley in the 1890s.
The conclusion Gurney draws is important. There has never
been a single, definable left-wing interpretation of the Diggers. For Marxists,
the corollary is uncomfortable but useful: there has never been a consistent
classical Marxist position on Winstanley either. The Historians' Group carried
considerable ideological baggage, and not all of it has aged well. Gurney's
essay clears the ground for a more rigorous account.
Diggers and Levellers
Any such account must start by separating the Diggers from
the Levellers, as Gurney does. The Levellers were the democratic wing of the
revolution's small producers: artisans, traders and yeomen who demanded a wider
franchise and religious toleration, but who explicitly disowned any plan to
"level men's estates". Their concern for the poor sat uneasily with
their defence of property. This is the class contradiction that Marxist
historians from Brailsford to Brian Manning identified at the heart of Leveller
politics.
The Diggers went further. They called themselves the
"True Levellers" precisely to mark the difference. Winstanley located
the origin of oppression in private property in land, and argued that the earth
should be a "common treasury" for all. In April 1649 the Diggers
began to cultivate the commons on St George's Hill. That was not merely a
protest but a programme: a practical demonstration of how the landless could
live without wage labour or landlords. The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652)
then set out a full constitution for a society without the buying and selling
of land.
The Diggers never became a mass movement, and Winstanley
rejected armed force. But they were the one current of the English Revolution
that directly challenged the property relations the revolution was
consolidating.
Gurney and the revisionists
Gurney wrote in an unfavourable climate. From the 1970s,
revisionist historians such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill and Mark Kishlansky
challenged the idea that the 1640s were a revolution at all. As Michael
Braddick observes, they tried to cut the English Revolution down to size, and
in doing so cast a critical eye over its radical heroes.
Kishlansky's own verdict on Winstanley is typical. He
described him as a small businessman who wholesaled cloth, then grain, with
"a mid-life crisis of epic proportions" in between. The jibe is meant
to deflate. In fact, it poses the central question: what was the relationship
between Winstanley's economic position, his religion and his politics?[5]
Gurney's work does not belong to the older Marxist tradition
of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Nor does it
accept revisionist minimalism. It sits alongside the rigorous textual
scholarship of the Oxford Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009),
and against the sceptical readings of J.C. Davis. Its distinctive contribution
is to give Winstanley a fully documented social context, something neither the
Marxists nor the revisionists had supplied.[6]
A Marxist assessment
Take Kishlansky's question seriously, and Gurney's evidence
points to a materialist answer. Winstanley was a petty trader ruined by the
disruption of the early 1640s, when war, credit failure and the collapse of the
cloth trade bankrupted many small men. He fell from the margins of the London
bourgeoisie into the condition of the rural labouring poor, herding cattle in
Surrey. There he met a community with a long memory of struggle against
enclosing, rent-raising lords. His vision of the earth as a common treasury was
not a mid-life crisis. It was the ideological expression of a real social
experience: the expropriation of small producers that marked England's
transition to agrarian capitalism.
That is why religion cannot be set aside. Winstanley thought
and wrote in the language of scripture, and his communism took the form of a
theology in which Reason, not a distant God, dwelt in every person. As Cliff
Slaughter argued, the study of religion is indispensable to understanding
social revolt, for religious forms are how classes without a developed
political language first articulate their interests. Gurney documents the
social roots with great care. He is less concerned to explain why those roots
produced a religious communism rather than a secular one, or why that communism
failed.[7]
The local method has a second limit. Cobham and St George's
Hill are seen in fine detail, but the national crisis of 1648–49 recedes: the
defeat of the Leveller mutinies, the consolidation of the Commonwealth by the
grandees, and the alliance of local landlords and the new state that broke up
the Digger colonies. A Marxist account needs both scales at once. Gurney
supplies the local foundation; the connection to the class balance of the
revolution as a whole remains to be drawn.
Conclusion
Gurney's work on Winstanley and the Diggers marks a new
starting point for the historiography of the English Revolution's radical wing.
It is the best available antidote to revisionist minimalism, not because it
restates older Marxist claims, but because it grounds the Diggers in evidence
those claims never had. His last essay is honest about what follows: there has
never been a settled left-wing, let alone classical Marxist, interpretation of
Winstanley.
The task Gurney leaves is to build one. That means joining
his local history of land and class to an account of the revolution as a whole,
and explaining, rather than explaining away, the religious form of Winstanley's
communism. Winstanley himself insisted that action is the life of all. Gurney's
scholarship has given Marxists the material to act on.
Notes
- Scott
Ashley et al., "Brave Community: A communal and personal tribute to
our friend and colleague, John Gurney (1960–2014)"
- Marc
Bloch, The Historian's Craft.
- Henk
Looijesteijn, review of Brave Community.
- John
Gurney, "Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger movement in Walton and
Cobham".
- Mark
Kishlansky, endorsement of Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and
Legacy.
- John
Gurney, "Gerrard Winstanley and the Left", Past & Present.
- Cliff
Slaughter, "Religion and Social Revolt", Labour Review,
vol. 3, no. 3 (June 1958).
Books reviewed: John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger
Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007); Gerrard
Winstanley, The Digger's Life and Legacy (Pluto Press, 2013).
