Rowan Wilson writes:

In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest enclosure, the process by which common land was parcelled into units of private property, stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. The land was bad – ‘nothing but a bare heath & sandy ground’, surveyors reported in 1650 – but the Diggers believed it could be made fruitful.

Over the coming weeks and months, they husbanded the earth, composting burnt turf, digging parsnips, planting carrots and beans. They even built cottages. Many knew the land well: the historian John Gurney estimated that about a third of the Diggers were local inhabitants. Their choice to join the Digger project was likely informed by years of local struggle: conflict with landlords, heavy Civil War taxation, the burdensome passage of troops through villages. But the object of their protest – enclosure – was hardly an issue confined to Walton: over several centuries, landowners across England had become ever more hungry to expropriate the commons from the commoners.

At first glance, this might seem like a local, intimate endeavour: Surrey men and women living and digging together, facing down attacks from manorial tenants and landowners animated, at least in part, by parochial resentments and rivalries. But the Digger imagination was vaster than St George’s Hill, than Surrey, than England even. The first Digger pamphlet, The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649), was addressed to ‘the powers of England and to all the powers of the world’. In it, Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers’ chief theorist, framed their digging as a means of claiming the whole ‘earth’ as a ‘common treasury of relief for all, both beasts and men’ (all quotes from the Christopher Hill edition, 1973). The scrubby, sandy Surrey ground would be the seed of an international revolution: ‘not only this common or heath should be taken in and manured by the people, but all the commons and waste ground in England and in the whole world …’ During four fervid years of textual and agricultural production between 1648 and 1652, Winstanley’s pamphlets laid out – and the Diggers enacted – a global vision of the commons, one that claimed to heed neither borders nor distinctions between ‘persons’. [Continue reading…]