1609 His origins are obscure (where in the large parish was he born? Who was his mother?), but he was well enough known in his day, with over twenty books and pamphlets to his name – all but one of them reprinted. After that his fame was eclipsed again, until revived by left-wing historians like D.W. Petegorsky and Christopher Hill. What his published work proves is that Gerrard Winstanley was one of the most original political thinkers in English history. Why? He took Christianity seriously as a political programme. Hill put it well: ‘Winstanley’s relation to traditional theology is like Karl Marx’s relation to Hegelianism: he found it standing on its head and set it the right way up.’1
Take the Apostles, for example – as Winstanley himself did. In the Book of Acts (2: 43–5) they and those they converted to Christianity ‘had all things in common; / And sold their possessions and parted them to all men, as every man had need’. So in The New Law of Righteousness, published in 1649 just four days before Charles I’s execution, Winstanley plotted England’s predicament against the grand narrative of the Bible itself, tracing unequal distribution of property back to the original Fall of mankind, and proposed a new socialist dispensation based on the New Testament.
When that didn’t catch on, Winstanley and his followers acted out their ideals in real time and space. Occupying a piece of common land near Cobham, Surrey, on the first Sunday in April 1649, they proceeded to dig it over and sow beans, carrots and parsnips in it. Their enemies called them ‘Diggers’. They didn’t mind. Their own name for the movement was the ‘True Levellers’, as distinct from the ‘Levellers’, those agitators for political reform under John Lillbourne, who pressed for the right of all to own property. The True Levellers wanted to abolish the ownership of property altogether.
But then, property is violence, as Proudhon might have said, but didn’t, and as the local landowners proved, when two yeomen led a group of men dressed as women to assault and beat four Diggers sowing a winter crop. Following this setback, Winstanley went silent for a while, before producing the book for which he is best known today.
In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (1652), to give it its full title, Winstanley continued to analyse the recent history of England in terms of the Bible, but now he was turning increasingly to the apocalyptic books, Daniel and Revelations, for his terminology. Thus ‘kingly government or monarchy’ is ‘the government of the Beast’ and ‘the very city of Babylon, full of confusion’; while ‘commonwealth’s government’, ‘whereby there is a provision for livelihood in the earth, both for elder and younger brother’, is ‘the ancient of days’ (an old man in Daniel, chapter 7, who prefigures Christ), ‘the true restorer of all long-lost freedoms’.
We’re still waiting.
1 Christopher Hill (ed.), Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and other Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, p. 53.