The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth: As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer
The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth: As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer
The Diggers were England's first communists. In 1649, as the country tore itself apart over the question of monarchy, a former cloth trader named Gerrard Winstanley led a small band of believers to dig up waste land on St. George's Hill and plant it communally for the poor. This is their story, told through Winstanley's own incendiary writings. Lewis Henry Berens' 1906 study remains the essential portrait of this brief, radical experiment in equality. Winstanley emerges as a singular figure: part mystic, part rationalist, part firebrand preacher, arguing that private property was the root of all inequality and that the earth should be a common treasury for all. The Diggers were crushed within two years by landowners and Parliamentarian alike, but their ideas about communal ownership would echo forward through every subsequent wave of radical thought. For anyone curious about where modern socialism came from, or the religious radicals who hid inside the English Revolution, this is a vital piece of forgotten history.
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Berens, Lewis Henry. The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth: As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-digger-movement-in-the-days-of-the-commonwealth-as-revealed-in-the-writings--695e41c5-9f6d-4ab3-a24f-74d8ea37b23a.Berens, L. H. (n.d.). The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth: As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-digger-movement-in-the-days-of-the-commonwealth-as-revealed-in-the-writings--695e41c5-9f6d-4ab3-a24f-74d8ea37b23aBerens, Lewis Henry. The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth: As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-digger-movement-in-the-days-of-the-commonwealth-as-revealed-in-the-writings--695e41c5-9f6d-4ab3-a24f-74d8ea37b23a.