SOURCE: "Winstanley and Freedom" in Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature, edited by R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden, Manchester University Press, 1986, pp. 151-68.

[In the following essay, Hill argues that the freedom Winstanley sought for his countrymen included economic, social, and religious freedom. Hill examines the implications behind such beliefs and demonstrates that Winstanley attempted to appeal to the people of England through his use of the common vernacular in his writings.]

Gerrard Winstanley was born in Wigan in 1609, into a middle-class puritan family of clothiers. He came to London, was apprenticed to a clothier, married and set up in business just before the Civil War. The war, severing communications between London and Lancashire, ruined him; he retired to the Surrey countryside where he herded other men's cows as a hired labourer.

The 1640s were years of religious and political turmoil—the Civil War, leading to the defeat of the King; Levellers in London; and the Army arguing for a republic and a wide extension of the parliamentary franchise. In 1647 the Army seized the King, hitherto a prisoner of Parliament, and in January 1649 he was tried and executed as a traitor to the people of England. An MP for Wigan was one of the regicides. The House of Lords was abolished, and England was proclaimed a Commonwealth. Millenarian expectations ran high: almost anything seemed possible, including the return of King Jesus as successor to King Charles. There was a ferment of political and religious discussion.

But the forties were also years of great economic hardship for the lower classes. Over the century before 1640 wages had halved. The years between 1620 and 1650, Professor Bowden has said, were among the most terrible the English lower classes have ever endured. The economic disruption of the war, leading to unemployment, was accompanied by exceptionally high taxation, billeting and free quartering of soliders, and plunder. On top of all this there was a series of exceptionally bad harvests, famine and disease. The problem of the poor was acute. Rioting crowds seized corn. Men were said to lie starving in the London streets.

In the years 1648-9 a spate of pamphlets was published advocating use of confiscated church, crown and royalist lands to provide for the poor, and even fresh land confiscations; there were those who suggested expropriating the rich and establishing a communist society. Many predicted the second coming of Jesus Christ, and foresaw a thousand-year rule of the saints in which a materialist utopia would be established on earth—egalitarian, just to the poor at the expense of the rich. So Winstanley, who brooded deeply over these matters in his poverty, was not alone. But he was the only thinker we know of to break through to a systematically worked-out theory of communism which could be put into immediate effect. More's Utopia, published in 1516, had been in Latin, and More rejected with horror any idea of making it accessible to ordinary people by translating it into English. But Winstanley wrote, at a time of acute social and political crisis, in the vernacular, and appealed to the common people of England to take action to establish a communist society. 'Action is the life of all', he wrote; 'and if thou dost not act thou dost nothing'.¹

It started, as so much seventeenth-century thinking did, with a vision, in which Winstanley received the messages 'Work together, Eat bread together', 'Let Israel go free: … Israel shall neither give nor take hire'. Winstanley decided he must 'go forth and declare it in my action' by organising 'us that are called the common people to manure and work upon the common lands'.² This was two months after the execution of Charles I. Winstanley, with a handful of poor men, established a colony on St. George's Hill, near Cobham, to take symbolic ownership of the uncultivated common and waste lands. It lasted a year.

Winstanley wrote a series of pamphlets defending the Digger colony and calling on others to imitate their example. At least ten more colonies were established. In the process Winstanley elaborated a quite original theory of communism. It is not possible to do full justice to the theory as a whole since we are concerned with Winstanley and freedom; but freedom was crucial to his thinking. It had indeed been crucial for the revolutionaries from the start. 'Liberty and property' was the slogan of the moderates; 'back to Anglo-Saxon freedom' the cry of the radicals. The word 'liberty' was hopelessly ambiguous. The close association of liberty and property in orthodox Parliamentary discourse is not fortuitous, for the Latin word 'libertas, like the French word franchise', came very close to meaning a property right: a 'liberty' is something you can exclude others from. To these Norman words Winstanley preferred the more plebeian Anglo-Saxon 'freedom'. Throwing off the Norman Yoke, as John Hare argued in a pamphlet published in 1647, involved a linguistic as well as a political revolution. There was no agreement on what liberty was, or should be.

'All men have stood for freedom', wrote Winstanley;

and now the common enemy is gone, you are all like men in a mist, seeking for freedom and know not where nor what it is … And those of the richer sort of you that see it are ashamed and afraid to own it, because it comes clothed in a clownish garment … Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies.³

He summed up in The Law of Freedom (1652): 'The great searching of heart in these days is to find out where true freedom lies, that the commonwealth of England might be established in peace'.⁴ (A few years earlier Edward Hyde, in exile, had observed from a more conservative viewpoint that 'though the name of liberty be pleasant to all kinds of people, yet all men do not understand the same thing by it'.)⁵

Winstanley listed four current versions of freedom; and the ordr in which he discusses them is perhaps significant:

1. 'Free use of trading, and to have all patents, licences [i.e. monopolies] and restrictions removed;' freedom for business men;
2. Freedom of conscience, no constraints 'from or to any form of worship'; the sort of freedom the sects called for;
3. 'It is true freedom to have community with all women, and to have liberty to satisfy their lusts'—Ranter libertinism;
4. absolute freedom of property, for landlords and their eldest sons—the freedom the gentry most wanted.

Curiously, there is no mention of constitutional liberty. None of these, Winstanley thought, are 'the true foundation freedom which settles a commonwealth in peace'.⁶

So Winstanley was aware that his concept of freedom differed from that of most Parliamentarians. He insisted on economic freedom for the poor as well as the rich, on social as well as religious freedom. 'If thou consent to freedom to the rich in the City, and givest freedom to the freeholders in the country and to priests and lawyers and lords of manors … and yet allowest the poor no freedom, thou art there a declared hypocrite'. All men had a 'creation birth-right' of access to cultivate the land.⁷ In his final pamphlet, published in 1652 after the defeat of the Diggers, Winstanley was quite specific: 'True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth … A man had better to have no body than to have no food for it … True commonwealth's freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth'.⁸ Living in a preponderantly agrarian society, Winstanley uses 'the land', 'the earth', to signify property in general; but he knew from his own experience in Wigan and London that England was already becoming an industrial country, and he had interesting things to say about a state monopoly of foreign trade and the abolition of commercial secrets.

In 1646 the Leveller John Lilburne had asserted that 'the poorest that lives hath as true a right to give a vote as well as the richest and greatest'.⁹ The Levellers were agitating for a wide extension of the parliamentary franchise. Next year there were debates at Putney in the Army Council between generals, elected representatives of junior officers and of the rank and file, as well as some London Levellers—a remarkable occasion. Discussing the parliamentary franchise, Colonel Rainborough echoed Lilbume in memorable words:—'the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore … the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under'. This led to a long debate with Commissary-General Ireton, who argued that 'liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense if property be preserved'. If the right to a vote derived from 'the right of nature', then 'by the same right of nature' a man 'hath the same right in any goods he sees, … to take and use them for his sustenance'. Natural right leads to communism: 'constitution founds property'.¹⁰

This argument nonplussed the Levellers at Putney, because most of them wanted to retain the institution of private property. William Walwyn was believed to be a theoretical communist, and the boundary line between Levellers and True Levellers (Diggers) was never clearly drawn. But Lilburne and other Levellers leaders repudiated the communism of the Diggers.¹¹ Many of them were prepared to exclude servants and paupers from the franchise. Winstanley, on the other hand, insisted uncompromisingly that 'the common people' are 'part of the nation'; 'without exception, all sorts of people in the land are to have freedom', not just 'the gentry and clergy'.¹²

Winstanley alone grasped Ireton's theoretical nettle. He agreed that a natural right to accumulate property was incompatible with liberty. 'There cannot be a universal liberty till this universal community be established."¹³ 'I would have an eye to property', Ireton had insisted.¹⁴ Winstanley preferred liberty. For him the introduction of private property—and he speaks especially of property in land—had been the Fall of Man. 'In the beginning of time the great Creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury'; and all men were equal, none ruling over another. But covetousness overcame Reason and equality together. 'When self-love began to arise in the earth, then man began to fall.'¹⁵ 'When mankind began to quarrel about the earth and some would have all and shut out others, forcing them to be servants: this was man's fall.'¹⁶ 'Murdering property' was founded on theft; and the state was set up to protect the property of the plunderers: 'You hold that cursed thing by the power of the sword'. Property is the devil, and to support it is 'rebellion and high treason against the King of Righteousness'.¹⁷ Buying and selling, hiring wage labour, the laws regulating the market, are all part of the Fall.

So long as private property survives, 'so long the creation lies under bondage'. The government that maintains private property is 'the government of … self-seeking Antichrist', 'the government of high-waymen'.¹⁸ Exploitation, not labour, is the curse of fallen man. Property and wage labour, Winstanley thought, must be abolished before all can enjoy freedom.

The Levellers and many in the Army argued that Parliament's victory in the Civil War over the Norman Yoke of King and landlords ought to lead to the establishment of political democracy. Winstanley held that it must lead to a restoration of economic equality. 'Everyone upon the recovery of the [Norman] conquest ought to return into freedom again without respecting persons … Surely all sorts, both gentry in their enclosures, commonalty in their commons, ought to have their freedom, not compelling one to work for another?' 'The laws that were made in the days of the kings … give freedom' only 'to the gentry and clergy; all the rest are left servants and bondmen to those taskmasters'. 'If the common people have no more freedom in England but only to live among their elder brothers [landlords] and work for them for hire, what freedom then can they have in England more than we can have in Turkey or France?¹⁹

This would necessitate wholesale change. 'All laws that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all but respecting persons, ought … to be cut off with the King's head'.²⁰ What Winstanley called 'kingly power' had survived the King: 'that top bough is lopped off the tree of tyranny, and kingly power in that one particular is cast out. But alas, oppression is a great tree still, and keeps off the sun of freedom from the poor commons still'.²¹ 'Everyone talks of freedom, but there are but few that act for freedom, and the actors for freedom are oppressed by the talkers and verbal professors of freedom.²²

Winstanley thus insisted that formal political liberty was inadequate unless accompanied by economic freedom, by equality. When J. C. Davis says that 'to Winstanley the only freedom that mattered was freedom from economic insecurity', he is, I think, quite wrong.²³ Winstanley said, indeed, that 'free enjoyment' of the earth 'is true freedom';²⁴ and that heaven is a 'comfortable livelihood in the earth'. 'There cannot be a universal liberty till this community be established.'²⁵ But freedom for Winstanley meant intellectual as well as economic freedom, meant the rule of Reason, the beginning of civilised life for all. 'When men are sure of food and raiment, their reason will be ripe, and ready to dive into the secrets of the creation.²⁶ He foresaw a commonwealth in which science would flourish. Hitherto 'fear of want and care to pay rent to task-masters hath hindered many rare inventions'. In a free commonwealth, men would be encouraged to 'employ their reason and industry'; inventions would benefit all, not just the inventor. Kingly power had 'crushed the spirit of knowledge'; now it could 'rise up in its beauty and fullness'.²⁷ His belief in the possibilities of democratically controlled science is one of the most attractive features of Winstanley's thought.

In his final pamphlet, Winstanley declared that 'all the inward bondages of the mind, as covetousness, pride, hypocrisy, envy, sorrows, fears, desperation and madness, are all occasioned by the outward bondage that one sort of people lay upon another'.²⁸ 'No true freedom can be established for England's peace … but such a one as hath respect to the poor as well as the rich.' But economic freedom is the beginning, not the end. 'Freedom', he declared, 'is Christ in you and among you'.²⁹

For Winstanley, Christ was not a person. The Biblical stories are allegories, not history. 'Whether there was any such outward things or no', he remarked nonchalantly, 'it matters not much'.³⁰ In a pamphlet written in his pre-communist phase, Winstanley explained that he preferred to use the word Reason rather than God, because he had been 'held in darkness' by the word God.³¹ Reason is 'the great Creator', not a personal God beyond the skies but the law of the universe which will ultimately prevail among all men and women. For Winstanley, the Second Coming is 'the rising up of Christ in sons and daughters'—Christ, the spirit of Reason entering the hearts of all men and women, 'comes to set all free'. Freedom 'is Christ in you'³²

And what will Reason tell us? 'Is thy neighbour hungry and naked today, do thou feed him and clothe him; it may be thy case to-morrow, and then he will be ready to help thee.'³³ Reason is co-operation, and the rising of Reason in all men and women will lead to recognition of the necessity of a communist society. The ethos of existing society was the negation of cooperation, of sharing. Here Winstanley drew on his own rudimentary version of the labour theory of value:

No man can be rich, but he must be rich either by his own labours, or by the labours of other men helping him. If a man have no help from his neighbours, he shall never gather an estate of hundreds and thousands a year. If other men help him to work, then are those riches his neighbours' as well as his; for they be the fruit of other men's labours as well as his own … Rich men receive all they have from the labourer's hand, and what they give, they give away other men's labours, not their own.³⁴

Men and women will be truly free when Reason 'knits every creature together into a oneness, making every creature to be an upholder of his fellow, and so everyone is an assistant to preserve the whole'.³⁵ 'To live in the enjoyment of Christ … will bring in true community and destroy murdering property.³⁶ 'True freedom … lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury; and this is Christ … spread abroad in the creation'.³⁷ 'This commonwealth's freedom will unite the hearts of Englishmen together in love, so that if a foreign enemy endeavour to come in we shall all with joint consent rise up to defend our inheritance, and shall be true to one another. Whereas now the poor … say …"We can as well live under a foreign enemy working for day wages as under our own brethren, with whom we ought to have equal freedom"³⁸

Every man subject to Reason's law becomes a Son of God. His ruler is within, whether it is called conscience, or love, or Reason, or Christ. After the Second Coming, when Reason has risen in sons and daughters, 'the ministration of Christ in one single person is to be silent and draw back' before the righteousness and wisdom in every person.³⁹ Religion will wither away.

But kingly power proved stronger than the Christ within. After the destruction of his communist colony in 1650, a less optimistic Winstanley asked why 'Most people are so ignorant of their freedom, and so few fit to be chosen commonwealth's officers?' His answer was that 'the old kingly clergy … are continually distilling their blind principles into the people and do thereby nurse up ignorance in them.'⁴⁰ He had a virulent anti-clericalism worthy of Milton. It made Winstanley almost anticipate Marx's 'opium of the people'.

'While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they see not what is their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living … And indeed the subtle clergy do know that if they can but charm the people … to look after riches, heaven and glory when they are dead, that then they shall easily be the inheritors of the earth and have the deceived people to be their servants. This … was not the doctrine of Christ'.⁴¹

'The upshot of all your universities and public preachers … is only to hinder Christ from rising', 'a cloak of policy' to cheat the poor of 'the freedom of the earth'. Only when the clergy have been deprived of their privileged position will each of us be free to 'read in your own book, your heart'.⁴²

The 'murdering God of this world', 'the author of the creatures' misery', who defends property and ensures that the clergy get their tithes, is covetousness. Any external God must be rejected: the Diggers would 'neither come to church, nor serve their God'. The true God is within, and each man has 'his God'.⁴³

Winstanley originally evisaged the transition to a communist society in ingeniously simple and peaceful terms. The example of the Digger community inspired ten or more similar communities in central and southern England. Winstanley believed that 'the work of digging' is 'freedom or the appearance of Christ in the earth'.⁴⁴ 'For the voice is gone out, freedom, freedom, freedom'.⁴⁵ The rising of Christ in men and women would be irresistible, starting from the lowest classes. 'The people shall all fall off from you, and you shall fall on a sudden like a great tree that is undermined at the root.' The poor would take over and begin to cultivate the commons and wastes everywhere.⁴⁶ Then a universal withdrawal of wage labour would be organised. The gentry would find themselves possessed of large estates which they were unable to cultivate. In time, they too would be influenced by the rising of Christ in them, would see that the only rational course was for them to throw the lands they could not farm themselves into the common stock and share in the advantages of a communist society. Winstanley even envisaged facilitating the transition by giving them specially favourable compensatory terms.

It was deliciously simple; but it failed to allow for the continued existence of 'kingly power' even after the abolition of kingship. Landlords, lawyers, clergy, all stood together to preserve the status quo and their privileged position. So, by the time he published The Law of Freedom in 1652, the experience of harassment, persecution, and finally violent suppression, had finally convinced Winstanley that Christ would be prevented from rising by lords of manors, priests, lawyers, and their state. The Law of Freedom was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell: 'you have power … to act for common freedom if you will: I have no power'.⁴⁷ Whether or not Winstanley really hoped that Cromwell would help to set up a communist state in England, he was right in thinking that it could not be done without the support of the revolutionary Army. And Oliver had not yet adopted the conservative posture he found appropriate after 1653.

Previously Winstanley had attacked all forms of state authority and punishment. 'What need have we of imprisoning, whipping or hanging laws to bring one another into bondage?' To execute a murderer is to commit another murder.⁴⁸ But now the title of his pamphlet, The Law of Freedom: Or, True Magistracy Restored, shows a new recognition that the state will have to be used if kingly power is to be overcome. Winstanley looks forward to a transitional period in which 'it is the work of a Parliament to break the tyrants' bonds, to abolish all their oppressing laws, and to give orders, encouragements and directions unto the poor oppressed people of the land'. Then 'the spirit of universal righteousness dwelling in mankind' and 'now rising up' would be able to take over.⁴⁹ 'In time … this commonwealth's government … will be the restorer of long lost freedom to the creation.' But till then, landlords, priests and lawyers must be curbed; so must be the 'rudeness of the people' from which the Diggers had suffered. Christ, 'the true and faithful Leveller', 'the spirit and power of universal love' 'or the law written in the heart',⁵⁰ would not rise in all men and women as quickly as Winstanley had hoped. Meanwhile the law of the commonwealth must 'preserve peace and freedom'.⁵¹ The battle had still to be fought, education and political education carried on (a subject on which Winstanley is very interesting). Choices had to be made. 'There is but bondage and freedom', he wrote, 'particular interest or common interest'.⁵²

For some especially grave offences, the death penalty would have to be retained as a deterrent during the transitional period: and it is interesting to see what these offences were. They were murder, 'buying and selling' (which 'killed Christ' and hindered his resurrection), taking money as a lawyer ('the power of lawyers is the only power that hinders Christ from rising') or as a priest; and rape.⁵³

But Winstanley was well aware that "freedom gotten by the sword is an established bondage to some part or other of the creation'.⁵⁴ 'Tyranny is tyranny … in a poor man lifted up by his valour as in a rich man lifted up by his lands.¹⁵⁵ Experience had taught Winstanley that a standing army separate from the people could swiftly lose its political ideals. Instead he wanted government by a really representative Parliament and magistrates, elected annually and responsible to 'their masters, the people, who chose them'. The ultimate check was that the people retained arms in their hands and had a right of insurrection.⁵⁶ Winstanley rejected in advance the theory of forcing men to be free, of dictatorship in the interests of democracy, which has defaced some later communist practice.

Winstanley's ideas were unprecedented. What is astonishing is the sophistication of his analysis, the distance he covered in the years from 1649 to 1652. At Putney, Rainborough and the Levellers could find no answer to Ireton's 'Liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense if property be preserved'. Basing political democracy on natural rights would leave no logical argument against a natural right to equality of property: the right to property derived from substantive laws, not natural rights. This was conventional wisdom by Ireton's day. Thomas Hedley had said in the Parliament of 1610 that property existed not by the law of nature but by municipal law.⁵⁷ But then, how did the state which passed these substantive laws get its authority?

Forty years later, Locke thought he had solved the problem. A right to property arises in the state of nature, anterior to the state. 'As much land as a man tills, plants, improves and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.'⁵⁸ All men by mutual agreement then set up a state to guarantee their property: all men were property-owners. Locke's theory is all very well as an explanation of the origins of property, avoiding the danger of giving all men a natural right to it. But how had gross inequalities of property developed? Could they be justified? Locke attributed them to the invention of money, which allowed some men to amass more property than they needed to sustain life; and the state protected them in their unequal ownership in the interests of law and order, of social peace. But what about those with no property at all? Locke seems always to have been uneasy about this part of his argument, insisting that the poor had a right to subsistence in time of dearth and to maintenance in old age. What kind of right?⁵⁹

Unlike the Levellers, Winstanley was able to answer this position, adumbrated by Ireton before being worked out by Locke. Money, buying and selling land, led to inequality. That was for Winstanley the Fall of Man. 'Thereby … man was brought into bondage and became a greater slave to such of his own kind than the beasts of the field were to him … The earth … was hedged into enclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made servants and slaves.' Property ever since has been held 'by the power of the sword'; even if the present owners 'did not kill or thieve', yet their ancestors had done so.⁶⁰ This state of affairs can be reversed only by abolishing buying and selling which, Winstanley agreed with Locke, was the source of inequality. 'This will destroy all government and all our ministry', Winstanley imagined someone objecting; and he replied 'it is very true'.⁶¹ It meant a total overthrow of kingly power and a reconstruction of society and the state on the basis of communal property. There was no other solution. It was a difficult programme, which could be put into effect only when Christ—-the power of Reason—had risen in all men and women. Then there would be a decent society.

Winstanley seems to have had an equally effective answer to Hobbes. Leviathan was not published until 1651, but in 1650 Winstanley seems to be answering Hobbist arguments. He was hardly likely to have read Hobbes in Latin, but Hobbism was in the air; the economic and political situation gave rise to Hobbist theories, in others as well as in Hobbes.⁶² Hobbes based the state on an original contract which all men had entered into to escape from the state of nature. In his state the competitive drives of individualistic men all roughly equal in physical strength, and enjoying equal individual rights, inevitably produced anarchy until they agreed to elevate a sovereign with, in the last resort, absolute authority. Winstanley agreed with much of Hobbes's analysis, but drew different conclusions. If you abolish competitive individualist property relations, you abolish the problem. Property was not created by sinful human nature but vice versa; so only the abolition of property could get rid of the coercive state and the preachers of sin, both of which had come into existence to protect property. Winstanley saw that Hobbes's system was based on challengeable psychological assumptions: 'This same power in man that causes divisions and war is called by some the state of nature, which every man brings into the world with him'.⁶³ Winstanley rejected the competitive spirit which Hobbes pushed back from his own society into the state of nature as something universal. Winstanley had a rival psychology. 'Look upon the child that is new-born, or till he grows up to some few years; he is innocent, harmless, humble, patient, gentle, easy to be entreated, not envious.' He is corrupted by the competitive world in which he grows up.⁶⁴ But Reason governs the universe; when Reason rules in man he lives 'in community with … the spirit of the globe'. Man stands in need of others, and others stand in need of him. He 'dares not trespass against his fellow-creature, but will do as he would be done unto'.⁶⁵

This strikes us as a fairly obvious criticism of the competitive psychology on which Hobbes's philosophy was based. But in the seventeenth century Hobbes seemed more difficult to refute on that plane. For his psychology was that of the almost universally accepted Calvinism, and was reinforced by the pressures of early capitalist society. Only someone who had emancipated himself from the ethos of that society (and from Calvinism) could attack Hobbes at what then seemed his strongest point.

One further point on Winstanley's refutation of Hobbes: 'Winstanley', says Dr Eccleshall, 'rejected, more fully and explicitly than any previous writer, the assumption that human nature was a fixed datum of which the established political system was the natural and invariable counterpart. Human nature … was an historical artefact', and was 'historically modifiable' as social relationships changed.⁶⁶ In his recognition that you can change human nature, Winstanley, unlike Hobbes and Locke, was in the modern world.

In the context of what mattered in the seventeenth century, a word on Filmer and patriarchialism seems necessary. His argument, that the authority of kings derives by direct descent from Adam and is therefore absolute over all subjects, seems puerile to modern readers; yet Locke felt it necessary to answer him seriously, and historians have pointed out what strong roots patriarchialism had in that society where (not to mention the Bible) the household was also the workplace (family farms, family businesses) and the father was responsible for the conduct and discipline of his apprentices and servants, no less than of his children. The father of a family indeed wielded over his dependants all the powers of the state except that of life and death. He could flog, fine and imprison his dependants. (Pepys locked up one of his maids in a cellar for the night). He was also responsible for their education, technical training, religious and moral behaviour. In the countryside, where the vast mass of the population lived, with no police force, no state educational system or social services, the authority of the head of the household could be highly beneficial as well as on occasion tyrannical. Recall too the deference still shown to fathers. In this society, where symbols mattered, Quaker sons who kept their hats on and thou'd their fathers had a painful time of it. The commandment, Honour thy father and thy mother, was regularly used in sermons and treatises discussing political obligation. As late as 1700, Mary Astell argued from the example of 1688 that if monarchial tyranny in the state was wrong, male tyranny in the family must be wrong too.⁶⁷

The household plays an important part in the community which Winstanley sketched in The Law of Freedom. But he totally rejected the political conclusions which Filmer drew from the authority of heads of households. Authority for Winstanley is based on the social functions which the father performs and acceptance of them by his dependants. The only justification of authority is 'common preservation … a principle in everyone to seek the good of others as himself without respecting persons'. For a magistrate to put self-interest above the common interest 'is the root of the tree of tyranny', which 'is the cause of all wars and troubles'. 'A true commonwealth's officer is to be … chosen … by them who are in necessity and judge him fit for that work', just as 'a father in a family is a commonwealth's officer because the necessity of young children chose him by joint consent'. The chain of authority goes upwards from the family to the parish or town, each of which is governed by elected officers, to MPs—all to be chosen annually. The implied contract is 'Do you see our laws observed for our preservation and peace, and we will assist and protect you'. And these words 'assist' and 'protect' imply the rising up of the people by force of arms to defend their laws and officers against 'any invasion, rebellion or resistance', or any who 'are fallen from true magistracy'⁶⁸—for example, by trying to restore private property. So the paternalism of the society, which Filmer used to justify absolute monarchy, becomes for Winstanley an argument for communities in his ideal state to defend their rights.

Only one of his contemporaries seems to have entered directly into controversy with Winstanley. This was Anthony Ascham. In 1648 he published A Discourse Wherein is examined What is particularly lawfull during the Confusions and Revolutions of Government. In the following year, after the execution of Charles I, an expanded version appeared under the title Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments. This included a new chapter called 'The Originall of Property'. 'Some authors of this age', Ascham said, 'by a new art of levelling, think nothing can be rightly mended or reformed unless the whole piece ravel out to the very end, and that all intermediate greatness betwixt kings and them should be crumbled even to dust'. Such men say 'the law enslaves one sort of people to another. The clergy and gentry have got their freedom, but the common people are still servants to work for the other'. 'I wonder not so much at this sort of arguing', Ascham continued patronisingly, 'as to find that they who have such sort of arguments in their mouths should have spades in their hands'.⁶⁹ The reference to the Diggers could hardly be more explicit.

Ascham's arguments against Winstanley are rather disappointing. He was critical of what he took to be the Digger's primitivism. In Hobbist vein he argued that the state of nature would have been a state of perpetual war. It was inequality that 'perfectly bred dominion, and that [bred] property'. Men are bound by the contract which got them out of this state of nature and legitimised private property. Significantly perhaps, in view of Locke's later argument, Ascham followed his chapter on property with another inserted chapter 'Of the Nature of Money'. Property, Ascham thought, had good as well as evil consequences: 'that some faultlessly lead indigent lives in a state is no argument of tyranny in property, but of the ill use of it'. The rich 'are unhappier than the poor', who do not suffer from diseases like gout and the stone.⁷⁰ It is possible that he wrote this chapter in rather a hurry!

My claims for Winstanley are being pitched high, setting him up against in some respects the greatest political thinkers to emerge from the fertile soil of the English Revolution—the Levellers, Hobbes, Filmer, Ascham, Locke. One remains—James Harrington. Both Winstanley and Harrington recognised the economic basis of society and of political change. Russell Smith speculated seventy years ago that Harrington might even have been influenced by Winstanley. It is an interesting coincidence that Richard Goodgroom, who signed one of the Digger manifestoes in 1649, wrote a tract (probably in 1654) which incorporates many of the ideas elaborated in Harrington's Oceana two years later.⁷¹

Harrington argued that the land transfers of the century before 1640 necessitated a commonwealth—by which he meant a state ruled by property-owners, who alone constitute 'the people'. 'Robbers or Levellers', servants and paupers, cannot be free and so are excluded from the franchise, and representation in Harrington's ideal state would be titled to favour the well-to-do. Harrington himself disliked anything like the oligarchy which complete freedom for capitalist development was to produce in eighteenth-century England. He thought to safeguard against oligarchy by two devices: an agrarian law—no one to inherit more than £2000 per annum—and secret ballot to prevent the domination of elections by money.

Harrington dedicated Oceana to Oliver Cromwell in 1656, when it seemed as little likely that the Lord Protector would establish an 'equal commonwealth' as it was likely in 1652, when Winstanley dedicated The Law of Freedom to him, that he would establish a communist society. In this sense, both writers were utopians. Harringtonianism was very influential in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when England was (in Harringtonian terms) not a monarchy but a commonwealth headed by a price. Harrington was interpreted as arguing that the men of property ought to rule, thus justifying the Whig oligarchy; and his prediction that a commonwealth would be far more effective than absolute monarchy 'for increase', for aggressive colonial expansion, proved well founded.⁷²

Complete freedom for private property was incompatible with Harrington's 'equal commonwealth'—as Winstanley could have told him. Winstanley rejected Harrington's starting point no less than he did that of Hobbes, from whom Harrington no doubt derived it. For Harrington, reason taught self-interest, not cooperation. (Primary allegiance is due to ourselves, Ascham thought).⁷³ Whether Winstanley's system would have proved any more workable than Harrington's is debatable; unlike Cromwell, Winstanley was never tested by having to exercise power;⁷⁴ but at least he had faced head on the intellectual problems which made Harrington's 'equal commonwealth' utopian.

Winstanley is arguably the most intellectually respectable and consistent of the great political theorists who emerged from the English Revolution. (Milton cannot be included in this context, since he was not an original political thinker). Central to Winstanley's vision was his argument that 'there cannot be a universal liberty till this universal community be established'.⁷⁵ True freedom and true equality can be guaranteed only when 'community… called Christ or universal love' rises unimpeded in sons and daughters and casts out 'property, called the devil or covetousness'.⁷⁶

Winstanley failed; but his writings justify the words he prefixed to one of his Digger pamphlets:

When these clay bodies are in grave, and children stand in place, This shows we stood for truth and peace and freedom in our days.⁷⁷

Notes

¹ G. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 127-8. See G. E. Aylmer, 'The religion of Gerrard Winstanley' in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution, Oxford, 1984; C. Hill, 'The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley', Past and Present Supplement 5, 1978; K. V. Thomas (ed.), 'A Declaration … [from] Iver, Past and Present, 42, 1969; D. W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War, London, 1940.

² G. H. Sabine (ed.), The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, New York, 1941, pp. 190, 194, 199.

³ Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, p. 128.

⁴Ibid., p. 294.

⁵ Edward Hyde's Commonplace Book, 1646-7, quoted by F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, A Changing Interpretation, 1500-1700, London, 1964, p. 148.

⁶ Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, p. 294.

⁷Ibid., pp. 129, 306.

⁸Ibid., p. 295.

⁹ Lilburne, The Charters of London, 1646, quoted in D. M. Wolfe (ed.), leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, New York, 1944, p. 14.

¹⁰ A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, London, 1938, pp. 53, 58, 69, 73. (2nd. ed., London, 1950, reprinted 1973.)

¹¹ See my The World Turned Upside Down, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 119.

¹² Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, pp. 182, 116.

¹³ Sabine, op. cit., p. 199.

¹⁴ Woohouse, op. cit., p. 57.

¹⁵ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 77-8, 193.

¹⁶ Sabine, op. cit., p. 424.

¹⁷ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 85, 99, 120-1, 141, 222, 266-8; Sabine, op. cit., p. 201.

¹⁸ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 244, 306-7.

¹⁹ Sabine, op. cit., pp. 287-8.

²⁰Ibid., p. 288.

²¹ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 166.

²²Ibid., p. 129.

²³ J. C. Davis, 'Gerrard Winstanley and the restoration of true magistracy', Past and Present, 70, 1976, pp. 78, 92.

²⁴ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 296.

²⁵ Sabine, op. cit., p. 199.

²⁶ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 365-6.

²⁷Ibid., pp. 355-6.

²⁸Ibid., p. 296.

²⁹Ibid., pp. 128-9.

³⁰Ibid., p. 232.

³¹ Sabine, op. cit., p. 105.

³² Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 216, 128; Sabine, op. cit., pp. 114-15, 162, 204-5, 225.

³³ Winstanley, The Saints Paradice, 1648?, p. 123.

³⁴ Winstanley, Law of Freedom, p. 287.

³⁵ Sabine, op. cit., p. 105.

³⁶ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 222.

³⁷Ibid., p. 129.

³⁸ Sabine, op. cit., p. 414.

³⁹ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 222, 227; Sabine, op. cit., p. 162.

⁴⁰ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 324.

⁴¹Ibid., pp. 353-4.

⁴² Sabine, op. cit., pp. 238-42, 213-14.

⁴³ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 138, 144, 196-8, 225-6, 271-2, 307-8, 310, 379; Sabine op. cit., pp. 197, 434.

⁴⁴ Thomas, op. cit., pp. 57-60; Sabine, op. cit., p. 437.

⁴⁵ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 217.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 203.

⁴⁷Ibid., p. 285.

⁴⁸ Sabine, op. cit., p. 193, 283; cf. p. 197, and Winstanley, op. cit., p. 192.

⁴⁹ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 340, 312.

⁵⁰Ibid., pp. 199, 203-4, 312.

⁵¹Ibid., p. 222.

⁵²Ibid., p. 342.

⁵³Ibid., pp. 171, 366, 383, 388; Sabine, op. cit., p. 238.

⁵⁴ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 190.

⁵⁵ Sabine, op. cit., p. 198.

⁵⁶ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 318-20.

⁵⁷ E. R. Forster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, New Haven, Conn., 1966, II, pp. 189, 194-6.

⁵⁸ Locke, Two Treatises, ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge, 1967, Second Treatise, p. 325.

⁵⁹ Locke's views are usefully summarised in J. Dunn, Locke, Oxford, 1984, especially pp. 29-41. They were perhaps not altogether original. Aquinas described appropriation as a dictate of natural reason and denied that uncorrupted reason dictated communal ownership (Beryl Smalley, 'Quaestiones of Simon of Henton's in R. W. Huht, W. A. Pantin, and R. W. Southern (eds.), Studies in Medieval History Presented to F. M Powicke, Oxford, 1948, p. 219.).

⁶⁰ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 77-8, 99.

⁶¹Ibid., p. 243.

⁶² Cf. The World Turned Upside Down, appendix I; Q. Skinner, 'Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy', in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646-1660, London, 1972.

⁶³ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 268. cf. p. 309.

⁶⁴Ibid., p. 269.

⁶⁵ Sabine, op. cit., pp. 109-12; Winstanley, The Saints Paradice, p. 123.

⁶⁶ R. Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1978, pp. 174-6.

⁶⁷ Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, 1706, preface. The work was first published in 1700. For Filmer, see Laslett's Introduction to Patriarcha and other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, Oxford, 1949.

⁶⁸ Winstanley, op. cit., pp. 314-20.

⁶⁹ Ascham, Of the Confusions, pp. 18-19.

⁷⁰Ibid., pp. 20-5. Ascham was assassinated in 1650 by royalist exiles when he was acting as agent for the parliamentary Commonwealth in Madrid.

⁷¹ H. F. R. Smith, Harrington and his Oceana, Cambridge, 1914. For Goodgroom see J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Political Works of James Harrington, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 11-12, 58.

⁷² See my The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries, London, 1984, ch. 10, section 5.

⁷³ Ascham, Of the Confusions, pp. 106-7.

⁷⁴ See Roger Howell on Cromwell, pp. 25-44, above.

⁷⁵ Sabine, op. cit., p. 199.

⁷⁶ Winstanley, op. cit., p. 268.

⁷⁷Ibid., p. 125.

Bibliography

J. Alsop, 'Gerrard Winstanley's later life', Past and Present, 82, 1979.

G. E. Aylmer, 'Englands Spirit Unfoulded, or an Incouragement to take the Engagement: a newly discovered pamphlet by Gerrard Winstanley', Past and Present, 40, 1968.

G. E. Aylmer, 'The religion of Gerrard Winstanley' in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution, Oxford, 1984.

C. H. George, 'Gerrard Winstanley: a critical retrospect' in C. R. Cole and M. E. Moody (eds.), The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland Carlson, Athens, Ohio, 1975.

P. H. Hardacre, 'Gerrard Winstanley in 1650', Huntington Library Quarterly, XXII, 1958-59.

T. W. Hayes, Winstanley the Digger: A Literary Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

C. Hill, 'The religion of Gerrard Winstanley', Past and Present Supplement 5, 1978.

C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London, 1972.

O. Lutaud, Winstanley: Socialisme et Christianisme sous Cromwell, Paris, 1976.

D. W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War, London, 1940.

G. H. Sabine (ed.), The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, New York, 1941.

D. C. Taylor, Gerrard Winstanley in Elmbridge, Elmbridge, Surrey, 1982.

K. Thomas, 'Another Digger broadside', Past and Present, 42, 1969.

K. Thomas, 'The date of Gerrard Winstanley's Fire in the Bush', Past and Present, 42, 1969.

G. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, Cambridge, 1983.

P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, London, 1954.