Abstract
It might be predicted that the Levellers and the Agreements of the People influenced Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers.1 Both contemporaries and later historians have explained the Diggers as a radicalised extension of the Levellers, and they seem, indeed, to have identified themselves as ‘True Levellers’. The first ‘Digger’ pamphlet, in which William Everard, Winstanley and others explained ‘our Reasons, why we have begun to dig upon George hill in Surrey’, proclaimed itself in one version as The True Levellers Standard Advanced.2 Opponents certainly conflated Diggers and Levellers. The political theorist Anthony Ascham, writing to encourage support of the new republic in 1649, condemned those who ‘by a new Art of levelling, thinke nothing can be rightly mended or reformed, unlesse the whole piece ravell out to the very end, and that all intermediate greatnesse betwixt Kings and them, should be crumbled even to dust, where all lying levell together as in the first Chaos’.3 The journalist Marchamont Nedham offered a more extended analysis. On his account, the original Levellers wilfully misinterpreted parliament’s own declarations:
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Notes
This essay is based on research undertaken for an edition of Winstanley’s writings, published as Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein (eds.), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2 vols., Oxford, 2009). I have learnt much from my co-editors, and I am very grateful to Mario Caricchio, Ariel Hessayon and John Gurney, who have generously shared ideas, references and unpublished work with me. Mario Caricchio’s (now published) essay, ‘News from the New Jerusalem: Giles Calvert and the Radical Experience’, in Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (eds.), Varieties of Seventeenth-and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context (Farnham, 2011), pp. 69–86, has been particularly useful. I am grateful to Dr Caricchio for a copy of this important essay based on his book, Religione, Politica e Commercio di Libri Nelle Rivoluzione Inglese: Gli Autori di Giles Calvert 1645–53 (Genova, 2003).
William Everard, Ferrard [sic] Winstanley et al., The True Levellers Standard Advanced (26 April 1649), p. 20 (E.552/5).
Anthony Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1649), p. 18 (Wing, A3922). For Ascham and the Diggers
see John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), pp. 179–80.
Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Common-Wealth of England, Stated (8 May 1650), pp. 69, 70, 79 (E.600/7). I am grateful to Jason Peacey for this reference.
[John Canne], The Discoverer: Wherein is set Forth (to Undeceive the Nation) the Reall Plotts and Stratagems of Lievt. Col. John Lilburn, Mr William Walwyn, Mr Thomas Prince, Mr Richard Overton, and that Partie (2 June 1649), pp. 9–14 (E.558/2).
[Humphrey Brooke], The Crafts-Mens Craft. Or the Wiles of the Discoverers (25 June 1649), pp. 5–6 (E.561/11). I am grateful to David Como for these references. It is worth noting that Brooke hints at some acquaintance with Winstanley.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 113–14, 124.
John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince and Richard Overton,AManifestation (1649), in Haller and Davies, Leveller Tracts, p. 276;
John Lilburne, To the Right Honourable, the Commons of England Assembled in Parliament (21 August 1650) (669.f.15/50) a petition opposing the death sentences passed on Eusebius Andrews and others who had not been tried by jury-are among many examples of their own descriptions. The September 1648 petition came from ‘divers well-affected persons inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets and places adjacent’. It, too, included a clause against ‘abolishing propriety, levelling men’s estates or making all things common’: Sharp, English Levellers, pp. 131 and 137. For the opposition to ‘levelling’, see Lilburne et al., A Manifestation, in Haller and Davies, Leveller Tracts, p. 279. The text of A Manifestation was also included in the news-book The Moderate, for 10–17 April 1649, and extracts were reprinted in most of the newsbooks for that week. The May 1649 Agreement of the People also repudiated any notion of levelling estates: Haller and Davies, Leveller Tracts, p. 327.
Gerrard Winstanley, A Vindication of Those, Whose Endeavors is Only to Make the Earth a Common Treasury, Called Diggers (n.p., 20 March 1650) (E.1365/1), a work directed against ‘Ranters’.
Lilburne did take the Engagement, but only so he could participate in the legal system, and with many qualifications: John Lilburne, The Engagement Vindicated and Explained (23 January 1650) (E.590/4).
Gerrard Winstanley, A New-Yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie (1 January 1650), p. 33 (E.587/6);
Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush (19 March 1650), p. 34 (Wing, W3043).
Keith Thomas, ‘Another Digger Broadside’, PANDP, 42 (1969), pp. 57–68, at p. 57 assumes that the True Levellers Standard is the later version, but analysis of the printing of A Declaration suggests it was based on a previously printed text. I am grateful to Thomas Corns for advice on this point. ‘A Declaration to the Powers of England…’ forms the heading to the main text in the True Levellers Standard, p. 6.
Jerrard [sic] Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (30 (sic) February 1652) p. 6 (E.655/8);
Gerrard Winstanley, John Barker and Thomas Star, An Appeal to the House of Commons, Desiring Their Answer (n.p., 11 July 1649), pp. 7, 9–10 (E.564/5). For a useful analysis of such arguments
see Darren Webb, ‘Contract, Covenant and Class-Consciousness: Gerrard Winstanley and the Broken Promises of the English Revolution’, HPT, 24 (2003), pp. 577–98.
Andrew Sharp, ‘The Levellers and the End of Charles I’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 181–201.
Gerrard Winstanley et al., A Declaration to the Powers of England and to all the Powers of the World (1649), p. 5 (Wing, D800A).
Winstanley, Law of Freedom, p. 8; cf. Winstanley, A Watchword to the City of London, and the Armie (10 September 1649), pp. 5–6 (E.573/1).
Gerrard Winstanley, An Humble Request to the Ministers of Both Universities, and to all Lawyers in Every Inns-a-Court (1650), p. 8 (Wing, W3044).
Richard Smith et al., A Declaration of the Grounds and Reasons why we the Poor Inhabitants of the Town of Wellinborrow… Have Begun and Give Consent to Dig up… the Common, and Waste Ground (12 March 1650) (669.f.15/21);
Henry Norman et al., A Declaration of the Grounds and Reasons, why we the Poor Inhabitants of the Parrish of Iver in Buckinghamshire, Have Begun to Digge… the Common and Wast Land (1650), in Thomas, ‘Another Digger Broadside’, p. 63.
Winstanley, New-Yeers Gift, pp. 26–7; Winstanley, The Saints Paradise (July 1648), p. 15 (E.2137/1). The reference is to Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, his wife’s maid. It was with Isaac, his son by his wife Sarah, that God’s covenant was made: Genesis 16: 11–12; 17: 19–21.
Winstanley, Humble Request, p. 3; Winstanley, A Letter to the Lord Fairfax, and His Councell of War (13 June 1649), p. 10 (E.560/1).
David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 79–80, 98–100.
Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousnes (1649), p. 38 (Wing, W3049).
Gerrard Winstanley, Several Pieces Gathered into one Volume (1650), preface.
George Foster, The Sounding of the Last Trumpet: Or, Severall Visions, Declaring theUniversall Overturning and Rooting up of all Earthly Powers in England (1650), sigs. A2v–A3r. This tract was first issued in April 1650 and then reissued with his second pamphlet in November 1650. Thomason has two copies: E.598/18, dated 24 April, and E.616/4, dated 15 November 1650.
Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–60 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 56 and 62. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 223–4, suggests that Foster may indeed have been mad.
George Foster, The Pouring Forth of the Seventh and Last Viall Upon all Flesh and Fleshliness (n.p., 15 November 1650), sigs. A1r, A2r–v (E.616/4*).
Richard Coppin, Saul Smitten for not Smiting Amalek According to the Severity of the Command (20 August 1653), p. 32 (E.711/8); Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 220–3.
For John Warr, see his The Priviledges of the People (5 February 1649), pp. 5–6, 8–9 (E.541/12) and
John Warr, The Corruption and Deficiency of the Lawes of England (11 June 1649) (E.559/10), where criticism of the law as the vehicle of the Norman Yoke is combined with an anti-formalist hostility to any fundamental law.
Jonathan Scott, ‘Radicalism and Restoration: The Shape of the Stuart Experience’, HJ, 31 (1988), pp. 453–67.
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Hughes, A. (2012). Diggers, True Levellers and the Crisis of the English Revolution. In: Baker, P., Vernon, E. (eds) The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291707_10
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