“Not a full year since,
being quiet at my work, my heart was filled with sweet thoughts... That the
earth shall be made a common treasury of livlihood to whole mankind, without
respect of persons; yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and
thoughts run in me that words and writings were all nothing and must die, for
action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing”.–
Gerrard Winstanley
"The life of this dark
kingly power, which you have made an act of Parliament and oath to cast out, if
you search it to the bottom, you shall see it lies within the iron chest of
cursed covetousness, who gives the earth to some part of mankind and denies it
to another part of mankind: and that part that hath the earth, hath no right
from the law of creation to take it to himself and shut out others; but he took
it away violently by theft and murder in conquest." The Law of Freedom in
a Platform
The release of the complete
works of Gerrard Winstanley was and is a major historical event. A vast collection
of Winstanley’s writings in one place was decades overdue. Put together by
three well-respected scholars the edition will be seen by future historians as
a definitive edition.
The editors have drawn on
the previous work of John Gurney and James Alsop among others. This edition
also contains original archival discoveries. The collection also contains extensive
notes which denote a substantial amount of work undertaken in the archives.
It is fitting that the new
volumes are dedicated to the memory of Christopher Hill who carried out an incredibly
important piece work to place the Digger movement and the “True Leveller”
Winstanley in an objective and historical materialist context.
Hill, in his seminal study,
The World Turned Upside Down, believed that Winstanley and his Diggers, “have
something to say to twentieth-century socialists”. In this, he meant that they
were an anticipation of future struggles. Hill was cognizant that despite their
radicalism, the social and economic conditions had not yet matured for them to
carry out a “second revolution” which would have seen the overthrow of Cromwell
and broader use of the popular franchise. Despite over thirty years of
revisionist attacks on Hill’s work The World Turned Upside Down continues to be
the defining work that historians have to work around.
It has unfortunately not
stopped revisionist historians from attacking his work, Michael Braddick
describes the modus operandi of the revisionists who “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. In Winstanley’s case, this led to an
emphasis both on the strangeness of his thought for twentieth-century
socialists and on the fact that he was a Digger leader only briefly in a long
and, in many other ways, very respectable life. His Digger year, 1649, falls in
the middle of four years of prolific and exhilarating publication, but that
period of his life appears in the historical record as an irruption into an
otherwise rather unremarkable and anonymous biography”.[1]
This deliberate playing down
of Winstanley and the Diggers importance is nowhere more clearly expressed than
in the writings of the late Mark Kishlansky. According to Kishlansky, Winstanley
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. For revisionists, 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 due to his subsequent life as a
churchwarden”.
To answer Kishlansky, it is
not the point to talk up or talk down Winstanley and the Diggers but to place him
and them in the proper context of the English Revolution. It is true that
Winstanley was a businessman, but his radicalism coincided with one of the most
revolutionary chapters in English history. This shows us that at certain times,
men and women are moved by such profound events such as wars and revolution.
Their thoughts and actions may move at a glacial pace in calmer times; during
revolutions, they speed up dramatically.
Kishlanksky does
inadvertently raises an important 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”[2].
Biography
An essential part of the two
volumes is that it establishes a much more accurate record of Gerrard
Winstanley’s life. It substantially complements the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biographies article by J.C Davies and J. D.Alsop very well[3].
Davies and Alsop’s article
should be studied with extreme caution. The historians both come from a
conservative strand of historiography. Their article plays down Winstanley’s communistic
beliefs and places his radicalism in the camp of religion rather than an early
form of socialism, Davies and Alsop write “The central historical puzzle remains: how
could someone who came from and returned to a conventional, or quiescent,
background have articulated a thoroughgoing repudiation of the values and
institutions of his society, based on a penetrating analysis of its underlying
weaknesses? One approach has been to impute an intellectual debt to
others—Thomas More, Francis Bacon, the Familists, or other sectarians—but there
is no evidence to sustain these links. Another has been to emphasise the
radical nature of his thought—the discursive breach with his
contemporaries—either by an intellectual leap into predominantly secular modes
of thought or, by contrast, through drawing on occult or hermeticist thinking.
Neither claim stands up to a reading of his work as a whole”.
It may be more instructive
to see him as revealing of the transformative potentials inherent in vernacular
scripture and protestant social thought as well as within the tensions of early
modern communities polarised by economic inequality but straining for communal
self-government. He was not the only writer of his time to suggest the
inequitable and unchristian nature of private property and its unequal
distribution, or that applied Christianity would end material inequalities, or
that the millennium will bring this about if men would not. But he was the most
systematic in formulating alternatives, the most prepared to argue through the
relationship between God and the creation which justified a more equitable
society and the divine history which was bringing it to pass, as well as the
most remorseless in pursuing the logic of the rhetoric of the English
revolution as a way to persuade his contemporaries of the justice of this
vision. In short, Winstanley and his ideas remain pivotal for the understanding
of the limits of the possible within seventeenth-century discourse and action”[4].
Winstanley was born in 1609
and died 10 September 1676, long life by 17th century standards. Although
much of his early life remains a mystery, he was the son of 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 revolution, his life would
have probably moved at the same pedestrian pace as before. However, 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 unskilled work as a cowherd.
During the highpoint of the
English bourgeois revolution from 1648 to 1649, he issued five religious tracts;
these tracts are in the two-volume set of his complete writings. It is known
that in early 1649, Winstanley and William Everard met with a small number of
similarly minded men to dig on common land on St George’s Hill in Walton
parish, near Cobham. Winstanley’s perspective was
put into practice through the occupation of land. In 1650 he felt bold enough
to send out others to expand the Digging. The South of England and areas of the
Midlands were settled.
Michael Braddick believes
“Winstanley’s five earliest tracts were prompted by the anxiety and suffering
of the war years: the certainty that this crisis was in some sense divine in
origin, and intended as a prompt to sinners to seek reformation, was for many
people matched by disabling uncertainty about what form that reformation should
take. Winstanley’s writings offered comfort and spiritual advice that was
essentially personal, directing believers to look inside themselves, and that
led increasingly towards criticism of scripture and learned commentary as
guides to practical action”.
Perhaps Winstanley’s most
remarkable body of work is The New Law of Righteousness. In this, he argued for
a form of Christian/Communism.
Verses 44 and 45 of the Book
of Acts, outline his fundamental core beliefs "All who believed were
together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and
goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. At the beginning of
time, God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one
branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up
one man to teach and rule over another."[5]
It is possible to trace
Winstanley’s radical thought in The New Law of Righteousness back through history.
While I do not share some historians perspective that England had an unbroken
line of radicalism, it clear that Winstanley draws inspiration from previous
radicals such as Watt Tyler and the Peasants' Revolt (1381)and the European
Anabaptists. Much of Winstanley and that of the Diggers thought was a primitive
form of Christian Communism. Although the writer David Petegorsky has
argued that "to search for the sources of Winstanley's theological
conceptions would be as futile as to attempt to identify the streams that have
contributed to the bucket of water one has drawn from the sea." [6]
Hill was very fond of
Petegorsky’s work saying "Petegorsky's book was a shining light in the
dark days of 1940. It is a pioneering study of Gerrard Winstanley, and it still
offers the best analysis of his ideas. Petegorsky's book did not attract the
attention it deserved. Petegorsky, alas, did not live to publish the major
works which would have transformed our understanding of the English
Revolution."[7]
In A Declaration from the
Poor Oppressed People of England Winstanley elaborated this egalitarian
viewpoint "The power of enclosing
land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the
sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or
steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children.
And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed
thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked
deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the
head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer
too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land".[8]
In The Law of Freedom, you
can see the influence of European Anabaptists who believed that all
institutions were by their nature, corrupt. Winstanley agrees with their early
anarchism. When he states " nature tells us that if water stands long, it
corrupts; whereas running water keeps sweet and is fit for common use".
Winstanley believed that in order to combat this corrupting nature, called for
all officials to be elected every year. "When public officers remain long
in the place of judicature they will degenerate from the bounds of humility,
honesty and tender care of brethren, in regard the heart of man is so subject
to be overspread with the clouds of covetousness, pride, vain glory”.
Winstanley's most well-known
work is The Law of Freedom published in February 1652 and written after the
failure of the commune. The failure of which must have hit Winstanley hard both
physically and intellectually because his next move was to appeal to Cromwell
who had no intention of helping.
Winstanley appeal was in
vain “now you have the power of the land in your hand, you must do one of these
two things. First, either set the land free to the oppressed commoners, who
assisted you, and paid the Army their wages; and then you will fulfil the
Scriptures and your engagements, and so take possession of your deserved
honour. Or secondly, you must only remove the Conqueror's power out of the
King's hand into other men's, maintaining the old laws still."[9]
"For you (Cromwell)
must either establish Commonwealth's freedom in power, making provision for
everyone's peace, which is righteousness, or else you must set up Monarchy
again. Monarchy is twofold, either for one king to reign or for many to reign by
kingly promotion. And if either one king rules or many rule by king's
principles, much murmuring, grudges, trouble and quarrels may and will arise
among the oppressed people on every gained opportunity."
In the pamphlet True
Levellers Standard Advanced, Winstanley sought to develop his ideas regarding
future developments. Many of his arguments were later to become standard
socialist perspectives. The Digger communes were only the first part of a
programme that would see people refusing to ‘work’ for rich people. The land
would be ‘a common treasury for all'.
Nobody would be for hire,
and the Diggers would not hire themselves. Rent would be a thing of the past.
In their day, these attitudes were revolutionary. However, the SWP (Socialist
Workers Party) and some other radical organisations have tended to equate this
type of action with a 20th-century proletariat withdrawing its labour from the
capitalist class in a sort of general strike. While communistic in its approach
it must be said we are talking about a working class that’s in a very embryonic
state, not an industrial proletariat led by a Communist party. The fact that
Cromwell and his allies in the rising bourgeoisie could easily defeat the Diggers
both politically and militarily tends to confirm my point.
John
Gurney’s Winstanley and the Left
According to John Gurney Marxist
writers in the 19th century such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky believed
that Winstanley’s work had provided a framework for a new socialist society.
The author of The Common
People (1984) John F. Harrison,believed: "Winstanley has an honoured place
in the pantheon of the Left as a pioneer communist. In the history of the
common people, he is also representative of that other minority tradition of
popular religious radicalism, which, although it reached a crescendo during the
Interregnum, had existed since the Middle Ages and was to continue into modern
times. Totally opposed to the established church and also separate from (yet at
times overlapping) orthodox puritanism, was a third culture which was
lower-class and heretical. At its centre was a belief in the direct
relationship between God and man, without the need of any institution or formal
rites. Emphasis was on inner spiritual experience and obedience to the voice of
God within each man and woman."[10]
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 Stalinist 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
a microcosm 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 primarily 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 is
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, several
problems with this interpretation. For one thing, the Diggers had, before the
1890s, never fallen from public view to the extent often imagined. 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”.
Gurney continues "the Russians have a saying:
‘The past is unpredictable.’ So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all
but one of his 67 years, he lived in obscurity, and then he died forgotten.
Generations of historians passed over him either in silence or derision. He
entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of
David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of
the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits ‘scarcely worthy of being
recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth
contained only two references to him, one a bare mention of his name. Then in
the early 20th century, Winstanley was rediscovered, and he has exerted a
magnetic pull on left-leaning intellectuals ever since. He is variously
credited as the father of English communism, socialism or environmentalism,
depending on which is seeking paternity. His notice in the Victorian DNB was a
scant 700 words; in the new DNB, it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has
been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works,
the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either
Hobbes or Locke”.[11]
Gurney spent most of his 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.
Gurney was clear that the
study of Winstanley should not solely be 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”.
The Diggers and Levellers
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 real ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a specific capacity
for abstract thought. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, which
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.
George
Sabines
As most people interested in
Winstanley will know these two volumes of collected works replace the work of
the distinguished American political scientist and historian of political
thought, G.H. Sabine. Sabine produced his work under challenging conditions
during the beginning of the Second World War in 1941. Sabine did not have the
luxury of the internet.
According to one writer it
has “for almost 70 years, remained a serviceable edition of Winstanley's works
and an invaluable resource for students of the English revolution. It was
reprinted in 1965. However, increasingly it has come to seem marred by an
outdated grasp of the biographical facts of the lives, both of Winstanley and his
associates in the famous ‘digging’ experiments; by the discovery of some
further, textual material; by an absence of annotation of the texts, and by
Sabine's selectivity. While his edition remains reasonably comprehensive,
Sabine reproduced only extracts of Winstanley's first three tracts, reducing
what in the Oxford edition now amounts to 306 pages to about ten. Sabine's
justification for this was partly space and ‘partly because less interest
attaches to books written before Winstanley's discovery of communism’. But, as
he demonstrated elsewhere in his introduction, the communism is almost
impossible to understand without the religion”.
Over time Sabine’s viewpoint
that Winstanley's politics were of a type ‘utopian socialism’ has come under
sustained attack from the same revisionists who downplay Winstanley’s
radicalism. While Sabine avoided completely secularising Winstanley's politics,
his labelling Winstanley as a Utopian Socialists is not far off the mark.
Conclusion
One writer posted this critical
question To what extent, then, does the new edition and its apparatus represent
a breakthrough or is it a consolidation of more recently received wisdom?.My
feeling it is a combination of both. It should be left to future historians to
make a judgement on the merits of this collection.
As Ariel Hessayon perceptively
writes “for now at last Winstanley, the ‘foremost radical of the English
Revolution’, who stands shoulder to shoulder with John Donne, Francis Bacon,
John Milton, Andrew Marvell and John Bunyan as one of the ‘finest writers’ of a
‘glorious age of English non-fictional prose’ (vol. 1, p. 65) has an
indispensable scholarly edition of his writings befitting both his undoubted
literary talents and profound insights. A complete edition of his writings what
is more, which will constitute the bedrock of future studies that ‘typically
follow, rather than precede, the establishment of a complete and reliable text’.[12]
[1] Gerrard Winstanley:
The Digger's Life and Legacy (Revolutionary Lives) Paperback – 20 Nov 2012
by
John Gurney (Author)
[2] Cliff
Slaughter-Religion and Social Revolt-www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1958/05/religion.html
[3] www-oxforddnb-com.
[4] https://www-oxforddnb-com.ezproxy2.londonlibrary.co.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-29755?rskey=49ov9f&result=4
[5] Gerrard Winstanley,
The New Law of Righteousness (1649)
[6] https://spartacus-educational.com/STUwinstanley.htm
[7] Left-Wing Democracy in
the English Civil War
[8]
https://www.bilderberg.org/land/poor.htm
[9] The Law of Freedom in
a Platform- www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/1652/law-freedom/introduction.htm
[11] Gerrard Winstanley
and the Left-John Gurney-Past & Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017,
Pages 179–206, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtx017
[12] Reviews_in_History_-_The_Complete_Works_of_Gerrard_Winstanley_-_2012-03-08.pdf
