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Gerrard Winstanley, who was born four hundred years ago in 1609, was one of the most extraordinary and engaging figures to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640 – 60. As leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, he envisaged the peaceful creation of a moneyless, propertyless society from which poverty and inequality would be banished. In setting out to make the earth ‘a common treasury, without respect of persons’, he and a small band of followers occupied common land at St George’s Hill in Surrey in April 1649, and publicised their work in a series of remarkable writings. The Digger experiment lasted for little over a year, and was soon largely forgotten, but interest in Winstanley and his companions has revived in recent years. Today Winstanley is often spoken of as the foremost radical of the English Revolution, and as one of the great prose writers of the seventeenth century. His writings have inspired generations of radical activists including land reformers, single taxers and socialists at the turn of the twentieth century, to 1960’s hippies and squatters and twenty-first-century land rights activists, anti-roads protestors and environmental campaigners. This lecture will seek to place Winstanley in his historical context, to assess his significance and to chart his changing reputation over the centuries. Was he, as some have suggested, ‘England’s greatest radical’?

 

John Gurney is a Visiting Fellow in the School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University. He is the author of Brave Community: the Digger Movement in the English Revolution, published by Manchester University Press in 2007.

 

Reviewers’ comments on Brave Community: 

 

‘Meticulously researched... historians cannot fail to recognise the debt they owe to Gurney ... a gripping story, a vivid demonstration of the interactions in the mid-seventeenth century between economics, religion and politics, and a vindication of the continuing value and importance of history from below and of local history.’ Times Higher Education Supplement

 

‘A remarkable book... no historian dealing with this period can afford to ignore it.’ Southern History

 

‘Superb archival research... this study will stand the test of time for it is unlikely that the research will be surpassed.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History

 

‘An absolutely fascinating study... a hugely welcome addition to Winstanley scholarship... Gurney has left us massively in his debt... perhaps even the definitive work for a generation or more.’ Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society

 

‘Meticulously researched, scholarly and well presented... must rank alongside similar studies such as Eamon Duffy’s acclaimed The Voices of Morebath.’ Surrey Archaeological Collections