Winstanley, Gerrard

▪ English social reformer

baptized Oct. 10, 1609, Wigan, Lancashire, Eng.

died 1676

      leader and theoretician of the group of English agrarian communists known as the Diggers (Digger), who in 1649–50 cultivated common land on St. George's Hill, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and at nearby Cobham until they were dispersed by force and legal harassment. They believed that land should be made available to the very poor.

      Of Lancashire origin, Winstanley was a cloth merchant in London until his business failed. In April 1649, in the revolutionary atmosphere of the Commonwealth period, he and William Everard took the lead in establishing the Digger colony, a timely project because of the unprecedented height of food prices in England. Although the colony ceased to exist in March 1650, Winstanley remained prominent as a pamphleteer, foreshadowing later communist and materialist ideas in his vigorous and racy prose.

      The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652), his sketch of a communist society, was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley believed that the English Civil War had been fought against the king, landlords, lawyers, and all who bought and sold, these being enemies of the landless and labouring poor, and against priests, whose preaching of heaven and hell diverted men from asserting their rights on Earth and who were an instrument of class rule. He was an advocate of universal religious toleration, and he would have replaced sermons by lectures on the natural sciences and on the English constitution. He died a Quaker in 1676.

Additional Reading

T. Wilson Hayes, Winstanley the Digger (1979), is a biography. George M. Shulman, Radicalism and Reverence: The Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley (1989), analyzes his work.

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