It was exhaustion from continued harassment which finally ground the Diggers down on St George’s Hill (or rather George’s Hill, as they called it, for the radical Protestant tradition rejected saints). It seems likely however that they were only the tip of the iceberg of True Levellerism. But while there were many more experiments throughout the Home Counties, none survived much later than 1650.8
Winstanley more than any other gave theoretical form to the Diggers’ aspirations, and the Diggers in turn spoke ‘for and in the behalf of all the poor oppressed people of England and the whole world’.9 The son of a Wigan mercer, Winstanley had failed in the cloth trade in London. He was then obliged to become a hired labourer. He first began writing mystical religious pamphlets but rapidly moved from mysticism to a system of progressive and democratic rationalism. Like other radicals of his day, he expressed his social aspirations in religious terms and in a vigorous vernacular prose. Christ for him was a symbol of liberty: ‘True freedom’, he wrote, ‘lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury, and this is Christ the true man-child spread abroad in the creation, restoring all things into himself.’10
Like the adepts of the Free Spirit before him, and like Tolstoy after him, Winstanley believed that God is not a personal deity or Supreme Being but a ‘spirit that dwells in all mankind’. He identified God with Reason and Reason with the law of the universe: it is ‘Reason that governs the whole Creation’ and ‘the spirit that will purge mankind is pure reason’.11 Every person subject to Reason becomes the Son of God. They are no longer ruled from without but from within, by their conscience, love or reason. As Winstanley wrote in the True Levellers’ Standard, ‘the flesh of man being subject to reason, his maker, hath him to be his teacher and ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any teacher and ruler without him’.12 It is the ‘riding and teaching power without [that] doth dam up the spirit of peace and liberty, first within the heart, by filling it with slavish fears of others; secondly without, by giving the bodies of one to be imprisoned, pounished and oppressed by the outward power of another’.13 This is the key to Winstanley’s anarchism: external government is no longer necessary if people govern themselves according to their God-given reason.
Impressed by the interdependence of all human beings, Winstanley concluded that reason operates in society as a principle of order for the common preservation of humanity and that the government of rational beings is therefore superfluous. It is private property, not unruly human nature, which is the principal source of social conflict. From these premisses Winstanley in his early pamphlets attacked the social and political order and advocated an anarchist form of communist society, without the State, army and law.14
In his The New Law of Righteousness (1649), issued two months before the setting up of the colony on George’s Hill, Winstanley recognized the close link between property and government: ‘buying and selling earth from one particular hand to another saying this is mine, upholding this propriety by a law of government of his own making thereby restraining other fellow creatures from seeking nourishment from their mother earth’.15 He also realized that once men gain power, they intensify exploitation and oppression:
everyone that gets an authority into his hands tyrannizes over others; as many husbands, parents, masters, magistrates, that live after the flesh do carry themselves like oppressing lords over such as are under them, not knowing that their wives, children, servants, subjects are their fellow creatures, and hath an equal privilege to share them in the blessing of liberty.16
Once established, the owners of property maintain their domination by government and law:
Let all men say what they will, so long as such are Rulers as call the Land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of Mine and Thine; the common-people shall never have their liberty, nor the Land ever [be] freed from troubles, oppressions and complainings; by reason whereof the Creator of all things is continually provoked.17
It was clear to Winstanley that the State and its legal institutions existed in order to hold the lower classes in place. Winstanley at this stage suggested that the only solution would be to abolish private property and then government and church would become superfluous. Magistrates and lawyers would no longer be necessary where there was no buying and selling. There would be no need for a professional clergy if everyone was allowed to preach. The State, with its coercive apparatus of laws and prisons, would simply wither away: ‘What need have we of imprisonment, whipping or hanging laws to bring one another into bondage?’18 It is only covetousness, he argued, which made theft a sin. And he completely rejected capital punishment: since only God may give and take life, execution for murder would be murder. He looked forward to a time when ‘the whole earth would be a common treasury’, when people would help each other and find pleasure in making necessary things, and ‘There shall be none lords over others, but everyone shall be a lord of himself, subject to the law of righteousness, reason and equity, which shall dwell and rule in him, which is the Lord.’19
Winstanley did not call for mass insurrection or the seizure of the lands of the rich. He was always opposed to violence, although he was not an absolute pacifist and advocated an extreme form of direct action. He estimated that between half and two-thirds of the country were wastelands which the poor could work together. He was prepared to eat his bread with the sweat of his brow and helped organize the mass squat on George’s Hill. Out of the experience he wrote his famous The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (1652) which offered a plan to reorganize English society on the basis of a system of common ownership.
The work has been called by Christopher Hill ‘a draft constitution for a communist commonwealth’ but it appears more like a blueprint for a communist State.20 In fact there are two clear phases to Winstanley’s thought. In his early work, he depicted an anarchist society, but after the experience of the Diggers’ colony at George’s Hill he began to revise his views about the immediate possibility of a free society.21
In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, he thus offered a new and authoritarian version of communist society. His fundamental premisses were the same. He held firm to his belief in God as the principle of motion and interdependence in nature, and in the efficacy of love, reason and justice in human affairs. He continued to assert with his doctrine of inner light that human beings act rationally and in accordance with natural law. He saw the natural state of humanity to be a co-operative and united society held together by common preservation. Above all, he still celebrated freedom as the free development of every individual and saw it only possible where there was economic security: ‘True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth’.22
But the experience of the Diggers’ colony on George’s Hill, especially of the Ranters within and the hostile freeholders without, made him have second thoughts about human nature. Man might be sociable and reasonable by nature, but in existing society he often appeared unruly and confused. Digger covetousness suggested to Winstanley the need for some form of external social control. Thus because ‘transgression doth and may arise from ignorance and rude fancy in man’, he now felt that law and government would be necessary in a commonwealth to regulate society.23