SOURCE: "The True Levellers" in The Levellers and the English Revolution, edited by Christopher Hill, The Cresset Press, 1961, pp. 657-70.

In the following essay, Brailsford traces possible influences on Winstanley's thought, discussing his religious ideas and his political philosophy.

On Sunday, I April, 1649, a band of a dozen landless men with their families camped on St George's Hill, near Walton-on-Thames, and proceeded to dig and manure the common.' Their leader, William Everard, had served in the New Model Army, until his radicalism caused him to be cashiered: but this was to be for him and his comrades a peaceful, albeit revolutionary act. The 'True Levellers', as they called themselves, had lost their faith alike in the men of property who dominated the Long Parliament, and in the Grandees who commanded the Army. But with unflagging courage they meant with their spades to open yet another campaign for freedom. They would by direct action make good their natural right to use the earth and enjoy its fruits: they would undo the Norman Conquest and challenge the slavery of property, which had oppressed Englishmen through six centuries. They sang, as they dug in company, a naive chorus:

You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now, You noble Diggers all, stand up now,The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by nameYour digging does disdain and persons all defame.

The song, of which the tune may have been better than the verse, went on to defy by turns the gentry, the lawyers and the clergy. 'The club is all their law … but they no vision saw.' The Diggers meant 'to conquer them by love' for 'freedom is not won neither by sword nor gun'. A century had passed since the Saints had used those weapons at Munster in vain. Once more, this time in England, the broken bodies of peasants manured the fields that others owned. The Diggers, with a faith that no disillusionment could quench, would attempt a new way to establish 'community'. They were the pioneers: presently, as they believed, five thousand of their proletarian comrades would join them in digging the waste lands. But their movement was also the culmination of the long guerrilla struggle against enclosure (see Chapter XXI). The True Levellers fought the last bloodless battle in this war, which differed from the obscure skirmishes that preceded it in this—that these rebels were inspired by a simple but clearcut communist theory and had worked out a tactic by which they believed they could end the usurpations of property and establish a classless society. For the first time they made articulate the instinctive belief of every peasantry that God gave the earth to his children (to use the Diggers' phraseology) as their 'common treasury'.

The story of this spirited enterprise is soon told. The Diggers were men of courage, whose faith gave them a stubborn perseverance against impossible odds. First at St George's Hill, and afterwards at Cobham, they challenged the rights of two lords of the manor, not merely by squatting on the commons and cultivating them, but also by defiantly felling timber. They succeeded in causing considerable alarm to the Council of State, and troops of horse were twice sent to repress them. Twice their doings brought them into court. Fairfax, with his usual courtesy, listened to what they had to say, but the lords of the manor were less tolerant and twice their hired men, helped by the troopers, broke up the Diggers' settlement, destroyed the cottages they had built and turned the cattle into the growing corn. Their numbers grew, none the less, from twelve men to fifty: they managed to raise corn on eleven acres of waste land, not to mention other crops, and they kept up their defiance of the landlords, the Army and the law for rather more than a year. Their missionaries, meanwhile, were touring England in carts and preaching their gospel as they went. They had some success. Their example was followed at Cox Hall, in Kent, and at Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. There, as a broadsheet published for the Diggers in 1650 tells us, there were, in one parish alone, 1,169 persons dependent on alms. They had petitioned the Justices in vain to be set to work, but nothing was done for them. The itinerant Diggers organised them and they set to work 'to dig up, manure and sow corn upon the common and waste ground called Bareshank, belonging to the inhabitants of Wellingborough'. They evidently met with a good deal of sympathy in the town and some farmers gave them seed, but they, too, were suppressed; which is not surprising since their broadsheet, which their leaders had the courage to sign, boldly proclaimed the right of all to the use and enjoyment of the land.

Fortunately for posterity, there was among the Diggers a man of rare talent and originality, Gerrard Winstanley, who has left behind him in his voluminous writings a record of the faith and beliefs with which he inspired this movement. Though Everard may have been its leader in the early days of its adventure, it is probable that Winstanley inspired it from the start and certain that he soon took over the leadership. During its hectic year of activity he poured forth pamphlets in which he addressed by turns the Army, the City of London and the Parliament. In these, in simple but vigorous English, in the language of the Bible and of daily life, he gave a straight-forward narrative of what the Diggers had done and suffered and set forth the principles on which they acted. Of his life very little is known. He was born at Wigan in 1609 and doubtless had a grammar school education and no more. He then went up to London, where he was in business in some branch of the cloth or linen trade. Like many others, he was ruined in the Civil War and withdrew to the country, somewhere in the Thames Valley, where friends gave him a lodging: in return, he took charge of their cattle. Here he had leisure to think, and during 1648 he published no less than four pamphlets in which, without touching on politics, he set forth his daring theological opinions, which evolved rapidly through a pantheistic mysticism to a position that can only be described, if we may use modern terms, as agnostic and secularist. He bravely signed his name to them, though the least unorthodox of them exposed him to the grim penalties of the Long Parliament's Blasphemy Act. They went into several editions, but he escaped the fate that overtook some less audacious heretics even under Cromwell's relatively tolerant rule.

Suddenly, in this year, his interest turned to politics and he wrote the most characteristic of his books, The New Law of Righteousness, which is in reality a Communist Manifesto written in the dialect of its day. Throughout the next year, 1649-50, he was the life and pen of the Diggers' adventure. When that failed, after writing Fire in the Bush, a defence of his ideas addressed to the churches, he published in 1652 the most mature of his books, The Law of Freedom in a Platform. It was dedicated, in an eloquent and plain-spoken address, to Cromwell, whom it summoned to lay the foundations of a communist commonwealth. The sketch of a classless society that follows is a deeply interesting blend of the radical democracy professed by the main body of the Levellers with the communism of More's Utopia and a secularism that was Winstanley's own. Like More, he advocated an economy without money, organised round public storehouses. To these each should carry the products of his work and from them each should satisfy his needs. Though the book lacks the literary and imaginative grace of More's work, it is in the history of socialist thought the more significant of the two, since it sprang from a proletarian movement and proposed a strategical plan by which communism could actually be realised. This was the last of Winstanley's writings, and all that we know of the rest of his life is that in 1660 he was living at Cobham and had evidently become more prosperous, since he was able to file a suit in Chancery to clear up his financial affairs. The traditional belief that he joined the Quakers is mistaken, though he had much in common with them. Of his death we have no record.

How did Winstanley come by his ideas? There is nothing to suggest that he read widely. He quotes no book except the Bible and never mentions Utopia, though he must have read it carefully. Once he exclaims 'England is a prison', which may be an echo of Hamlet. Once, and only once, he quotes a Latin line. He tells us that in his early years he listened attentively to sermons and was 'dipped' as a Baptist. There we have the first important clue. Communist thought in the sixteenth century had two chief sources, the persecuted left wing of the Bohemian Hussites and the Anabaptist movement, whose doctrines were preached underground in England by the persecuted Family of Love (see Chapter II). This tradition, of which the main stream was pacifist, filtered through most of the more radical sects of the Commonwealth period, kept alive by word of mouth. There is one outstanding passage in Winstanley which echoes almost verbatim a revolutionary sermon by Munzer, the German peasants' leader—though it is unlikely that Winstanley had ever heard of him.

The other decisive formative influence was the controversial literature of the Leveller movement, though Winstanley never refers to it. It is probable that he came in contact with the Levellers of the Chilterns and the Thames Valley, who published Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Winstanley cannot have been the author, for the crude style of the pamphlets is not his; but he may well have had a share in drafting them.…

Winstanley, then, was no lonely theorist, but if we could have asked him where he got his communism he would have mentioned neither the Anabaptist tradition nor the Leveller movement. It came to him by direct revelation from God. Three times, as he tells us, in trance and out of trance, he heard a Voice which uttered these three commands:

Work together; eat bread together; declare this all abroad.

Israel shall neither take hire, nor give hire.

Whosoever labours the earth for any person or persons, that are lifted up to rule over others, and doth not look upon themselves as equal to others in the creation: the hand of the Lord shall be upon that labourer: I the Lord have spoken it and I will do it.

In obedience to this Voice he went to work with the first pioneers on St George's Hill. For the benefit of others, who had not yet learned in silence and patience to listen to the Voice of the Spirit within, Winstanley would argue his case, if need be from Scripture, but preferably from history and experience. Fundamentally, his argument was ethical. He assumes throughout, as men have done from the earliest days of the cult of ancestors, that mankind is naturally, was originally, or was by God's ordinance and promise, a family of equals.

This was the commonplace of every peasant movement from the days of John Ball downwards. But Winstanley saw much more than this and he contrives to analyse the society round him with a shrewdness unusual in mystics. The only difficulty in understanding him comes from the simplicity of his language. He has no technical terms and it is only when we translate his Biblical idiom into modem phraseology that we realise how much he understood. More clearly than any of the instinctive communists who preceded him, he saw the source of all exploitation and of most of the misery round him in the private appropriation of the means of life, which, in the green England of his day, meant the land. When men take to 'buying and selling the earth', as he puts it, 'saying This is mine … [they] restrain other fellow-creatures from seeking nourishment from their mother earth.… So that he that had no land was to work for those, for small wages, that called the land theirs; and thereby some are lifted up into the chair of tyranny and others trod under the foot-stool of misery, as if the earth were made for a few; not for all men.' Again and again he declares that labour is the source of all wealth and that no man ever grew rich save by appropriating the fruits of others' work. '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 neighbour, 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 fruits of other men's labours as well as his own.'

Winstanley perceived that this institution of 'particular propriety' was inevitably the source of all oppressions and all wars. 'All the strivings,' he writes, 'that is in mankind is for the earth', and again of those who own land he says 'that they or their fathers got it by the sword'. Property can be maintained only by the sword, or by the law which originally sanctioned the feudal claims of 'the Norman bastard's' officers. He saw, too, and said plainly, that economic inequality degrades those who must submit to it and infects them with a consciousness of their predestined inferiority. The enslaved worker, as he puts it, 'looks upon himself as imperfect, and so is dejected in his spirit'.

Winstanley's revolutionary strategy was prescribed by 'the Voice of the Spirit within him'—or, as we should say, by his sub-conscious self, clarifying, it may be, the confused discussions he had held with the Levellers of the Chiltems. In one passage he says, as Rousseau did, that no man should retain more land than he can till with his own hands. But his ideal was not peasant ownership. He aimed at 'community', which meant for him both team work and eating at a common table. He saw two ways of reaching this. Landless men were to join together to dig the waste lands. But even more emphatically he insisted on making an end of all hired service. In plain words, he summoned the workers to withdraw their labour from employment on the land. This was, as he saw it, more than a general strike: the strikers would find permanent work in cultivating the commons for themselves. This may sound to our ears more simple-minded than it was. Did he really forget that the Council of State had Fairfax and his dragoons behind it? But he believed, as well he might, that revolution was on the march, and he knew that many a troop of these same dragoons was on the verge of mutiny. But to grasp Winstanley's approach to communism we must try to understand his whole Weltanschauung.

The difficulty in grasping Winstanley's view of the universe and human society is that his thought was in flux and underwent a rapid development. His voluminous writing was all done, much of it rapidly, in four years: he had little sense for form or order in his compositions and often seems to be thinking aloud. His was an intuitive mind rather than a trained intellect, and his ideas reach us most clearly in single phrases or sentences which often have a poetical colour. In his early religious pamphlets he had not yet reached his own distinctive position, which may have come to him in his talks with William Everard. In the first of these he argues for 'universalism', at that date a most dangerous heresy: he will not believe that any soul can be eternally damned: there will be a final delivery, by God's mercy, even of the wicked from hell. In his later writings he abandoned any belief in hell. It was in the daring pamphlet Truth Lifting Up Its head Above Scandals (1648) that he first outlined his theological opinions by way of defending Everard, who had been thrown into gaol at Kingston for blasphemy. In this, as in all his subsequent works, Winstanley throws over the idea of a personal God, reduces to very narrow limits the significance of an historical Christ, and offers us in their stead the pantheistic conception of an ordered cosmos. These, needless to say, were not his words—he rarely used an abstract term—but they render his meaning fairly in modern phraseology.

Let us try, first of all, to reach his positive beliefs. He first startles us by telling us that he proposes 'to use the word Reason instead of the word God' in his writings. He objects that when men tell him that 'God is the chief Maker and Governor, and that the chief Maker and Governor is God', he is 'lost in this wheel that turns round'. This seems to mean that he cannot distinguish God from the universe. For him Reason is 'that living power of light that is in all things'. The Spirit Reason 'lies in the bottom of love, of justice, of wisdom'; 'it doth govern and preserve all things … for Reason guides them in order and leads them to their end, which is not to preserve a part, but the whole creation'. Again, he tells us that Reason 'hath a regard to the whole creation and knits every creature into a oneness'.

This, it may be, is poetry rather than metaphysics. So, too, are many of his happier sayings. Thus he tells us that 'the whole creation is the clothing of God'. But what he is trying to say is quite clear. In flashes of insight, before Newton wrote his Principia, he had grasped the idea of the order and unity of the universe. God for him was this order and 'the incomprehensible spirit Reason', of which he might have said what Wordsworth said of Duty: 'Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong.'

How much did he mean by this identification of God with the cosmos? The test must be sought in the negative side of his thinking. There he did not flinch. 'What other knowledge have you of God,' he asks, 'but what you have within the circle of the creation?' In one passage he even speaks of 'The law of nature (or God)', as Spinoza used to write 'Deus sive Natura'. To these must be added the many passages that amount to a denial of a personal God. 'Neither are you to look for God in a place of glory beyond the sun, but within yourself and in every man … He that looks for a God outside himself and worships a God at a distance worships he knows not what.'

This did not prevent him from using the word God fairly often, for he did not stick to his resolution to use only the word Reason. Even more often he uses the name Christ, and declares more than once that Christ is 'the true and faithful Leveller'. Elsewhere he speaks of 'Christ, or the spreading power of light'. He gives this name, with no thought of its historical connotations, to the spirit of love, order and reason that dwells in the heart of all men—and even, as he expressly insists, of the beasts. Again and again he repeats that men cannot be 'saved by believing that a man lived and died long ago at Jerusalem'—and he insists that Christ is 'not a man at a distance, but the wisdom of the Father'. Always he rejects from his theology any 'outward Christ'—a word we may fairly translate by 'historical'. He defines Him as 'a meek spirit drawn up to live in the light of Reason', which is his way of sublimating the story of the Resurrection. The passage implies quite clearly that any man may become such a 'meek spirit'. He goes on to deny the physical resurrection and ascension pretty bluntly: the Apostles cannot have seen Christ 'arise and ascend' to God in heaven, for God is in no 'particular place' but 'in every place and in every creature'. Again and again, in one phrase or another, in all his books he declares that 'heaven is not a local place of glory at a distance': a good man has 'heaven within himself'. Neither are we bound to believe that there is 'a local place of hell': 'as yet none ever came from the dead to tell men on earth, and till then men ought to speak no more than they know'. In his last book his agnosticism about the after-life is even more outspoken: he is not sure of man's personal survival after death. 'After the man is dead' he may be scattered 'into his essences of fire, water, earth and air of which he is compounded'. He recommends to us the example of 'wise-hearted Thomas', who believed nothing but what he saw reason for. Elsewhere he sweeps away the whole body of Hebrew and Christian mythology as 'the deceit of imagination and fleshly wisdom and learning; it teaches you to look altogether upon a history without you of things that were done 6,000 years ago and of things that were done 1,649 years ago'. He is never weary of tilting at the Bibliolatry of the Puritan divines, and likes to remind them that they have no better ground than 'tradition' for trusting the 'copies of the Scriptures in their universities' and that there are 'many translations and interpretations, which differ much one from another'. He could, none the less, quote these Scriptures copiously when they suited his purpose.

It is proper to stress this negative side of Winstanley's thought, since in the Puritan England of the seventeenth century it was all but unique. None the less, in his own individual way, his was a deeply religious mind. One belief he retained with intense conviction, which he shared with the whole of the Puritan left—the Second Coming of Christ. It is true that he sublimates it almost beyond recognition. It is no sudden miracle that he means. He was as far as possible from expecting, as General Harrison and the Fifth Monarchy sect did, that the Saints will conquer the earth, with the Lord of Hosts ordering their ranks. What he did believe was that 'Christ, or the spreading power of light', will penetrate men's minds so that they will cease to covet and oppress, and 'community' will be realised without recourse to the sword. When that happens 'the whole creation will laugh in righteousness' and even the waste commons will blossom. It will make an end of government as we have known it in the past: 'the state', as Marx put it, 'will wither away.' 'You soldiers may see the end of your trade.' With his sharp consciousness of class, he loves to quote the Biblical prophecies which assure this triumph to 'the despised ones of the earth' and bid the rich men 'weep and howl'. He predicts that this revolution will be accomplished 'ere many years wheel about'. It is a law of human nature that every revolution must attain this certainty before it risks its all. Men got it in that century from the Book of Revelation as they get it in ours from the Marxist interpretation of history. If we could delve into the deeper strata of Winstanley's consciousness we might discover that he got it as much from observation as from prophecy. He had seen the mighty hurled from their seats. A king's head had fallen in Whitehall before he flung his challenge at property. The revolution he desired was to come through a change wrought by 'the Spirit Reason' in men's hearts. But that in no way deterred him from devising a shrewd tactic to hasten the process of conversion.

The positive side of Winstanley's creed was an unshaken faith in the 'inner light', which he shared with the Anabaptists before him and his contemporaries, the first Quakers. Like them, he held that the spirit of Reason and Love will reveal itself to a mind that waits in patience and silence. To dismiss this conviction of his as a pre-scientific way of saying that the mind has its sub-conscious processes would be a superficial misunderstanding. He meant much more than this. The self-discipline he prescribed consisted of 'righteous actions and patient silence'. The mind must cease to dwell on outward objects; it must strip itself of covetousness and acquisitiveness, which lead inevitably to oppression; it must practise the golden rule towards its fellow-men and also towards the cattle; it must aim at universal love, which is for him the whole basis of 'community' (i.e. communism). In a long definition of prayer he dismisses words as unimportant and stresses only conduct and the rule of 'waiting with a meek and quiet spirit'. A man who lives thus will discover that he has 'a teacher within himself, for he is brought 'into community with the globe'. To grasp his meaning we have only to remember that it is Reason, or God, that 'knits every creature into a oneness'. By right conduct and patient waiting we overcome our finitude and become conscious of our part in the cosmos: then, and then only, it will reveal itself to us and speak to us. This doctrine of the 'inner light' is often interpreted as the extremest expression of Protestant individualism. As Winstanley understands it, it is, on the contrary, an inference from his mystical pantheism. The ordered whole of the universe becomes conscious and vocal in a mind that lives according to Reason.

From this doctrine of the inner light, Winstanley drew the extremest consequences without flinching. The Scriptures may be useful, but the inner light is a superior authority, and it alone can interpret them. He boldly sweeps away all organised religion, churches, Independent meetings, and all the sacraments, including marriage, baptism and funeral rites. 'What is the end of all this but to get money?' He will not use what the Puritans called the means of grace. 'That which you call means doth harden your hearts.' He pours his scorn on the universities which claim 'to own the writings of the Apostles'. He despises the hired clergy: 'you go on selling words for money to blind people you have deceived'. 'Men must leave off teaching one another' and speak only from 'the original light within'. A strong consciousness of class colours all he writes about the universities and the clergy. 'A ploughman that was never bred in their universities' may know more of the truth: the first prophets and apostles were shepherds and fishermen.

This contempt for the hired clergy was a common attitude among the Levellers and far outside their ranks: Milton shared it. But Winstanley, in his anti-clericalism, went much deeper. He compares the 'imaginary' science of the 'divines'—their 'divining doctrine', as he calls it—to witchcraft, and broadens his assault into an attack on all supernatural religion, with its by-products of melancholia and hysteria. What is even more important, he saw that organised religion had become the instrument of the owning class. One outstanding passage from The Law of Freedom deserves to be quoted in full:

There is a threefold discovery of falsehood in this doctrine.

For first it is a doctrine of a sickly and weak spirit, who hath lost his understanding in the knowledge of the creation … and so runs into fancies either of joy or sorrow.

And if the passion of joy predominate, then he fancies to himself a personal God, personal angels and a local place of glory, which, he saith, he and all who believe what he saith shall go to after they are dead.

And if sorrow predominate, then he fancies to himself a personal devil and a local place of torment that he shall go to after he is dead, and this he speaks with great confidence.

Or, secondly, this is the doctrine of a subtle running spirit to make an ungrounded wise man mad.… For many times when a wise understanding heart is assaulted with this doctrine of a God, a devil, a heaven and a hell, salvation and damnation after a man is dead, his spirit being not strongly grounded in the knowledge of the creation nor in the temper of his own heart, he strives and stretches his brains to find out the depth of that doctrine and cannot attain to it. For, indeed, it is not knowledge but imagination. And so, by poring and puzzling himself in it, loses that wisdom he had, and becomes distracted and mad. And if the passion of joy predominate, then he is merry and sings and laughs, and is ripe in the expression of his words, and will speak strange things; but all by imagination. But if the passion of sorrow predominate, then he is heavy and sad, crying out, He is damned; God had forsaken him and he must go to hell when he die; he cannot make his calling and election sure. And in that distemper many times a man doth hang, kill or drown himself. So that this divining doctrine which you call spiritual and heavenly things, torments people always when they are weak, sickly and under any distemper.…

Or, thirdly, this doctrine is made a cloak of policy by the subtle elder brother to cheat his simple younger brother of the freedoms of the earth. For saith the elder brother, 'The earth is mine, and not yours, brother; and you must not work upon it, unless you will hire it of me: and you must not take the fruits of it, unless you will buy them of me, by that which I pay you for your labour: for if you should do otherwise, God will not love you, and you shall not go to heaven when you die, but the devil will have you and you must be damned in hell.… You must believe what is written and what is told you; and if you will not believe, your damnation will be the greater'.…

Well, the younger brother being weak in spirit, and having not a grounded knowledge of the creation, nor of himself, is terrified, and lets go his hold in the earth, and submits himself to be a slave to his brother for fear of damnation in hell after death, and in hopes to get heaven thereby after he is dead; and so his eyes are put out, and his reason is blinded.

So that this divining spiritual doctrine is a cheat; for 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: This is the filthy dreamer, and the cloud without rain.

And indeed the subtle clergy do know, that if they can but charm the people by this their divining doctrine, 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.

Thus, two centuries before Marx, Winstanley, in the simplest of plain English, dared to say that 'religion is the opium of the people', and not only did he write it, he thrust it under Cromwell's eyes.

In this last book of his, though he was sketching an ideal community, Winstanley has his feet firmly on the earth. His mood of exaltation has passed and the long internal conflict in his mind between the tradition in which he was reared and the rationalism he won by wrestling, ends in the complete victory of his new outlook. He was, after all, the contemporary of the pioneers who were soon to found the Royal Society, but it may have been from More that he derived the enthusiasm for experimental science that glows on so many pages of The Law of Freedom. He was impatient with universities because, as he said, they were busy only with words and traditions. He now proposes to organise research into all thesecrets of nature, largely with a practical purpose. The only titles of honour he would bestow are to go to inventors. He suggests that the postmaster of his commonwealth shall conduct a weekly gazette, to which correspondents in every district shall contribute not merely news of local happenings, especially where help or relief is needed, but, above all, reports of the discovery of 'any secret in nature, or new invention in any art or trade, or in the tillage of the earth'.

The most significant detail in his picture of an ideal community is his sketch of Sunday, for it is entirely his own. It is 'very rational and good,' he writes, that 'one day in seven be still set apart' for fellowship and rest. Under the charge of a 'minister' (a layman, of course) elected annually, each parish is to hold its meetings. For these he will have no ritual of any kind. The minister may read aloud the laws of the commonwealth, which are to be few, simple and brief, and also the reports on 'the affairs of the whole land' contained in the postmaster's gazette. Then are to follow 'speeches' or 'discourses' on history and the sciences, among which he mentions especially botany and astronomy:

'Likewise men may come to see into the nature of the fixed and wandering stars, those great powers of God in the heavens above; and hereby men will come to know the secrets of nature and creation, within which all true knowledge is wrapped up.'

Other lectures may deal with the nature of man. He stipulates that others, beside the minister, shall speak, as the latter may arrange: but 'everyone who speaks of any herb, plant, art or nature of mankind is required to speak nothing by imagination, but what he hath found out by his own industry and observation in trial'. In plain words, experimental science was Winstanley's substitute for the dogmatism of the chapels and churches. Another touch is significant: he suggests that some of the lectures should be given in foreign languages: from the days of the Hussites downwards, communists had always an international outlook. 'By this means,' he sums up, 'in time men shall attain to the practical knowledge of God truly; that they may serve him in spirit and truth, and this knowledge will not deceive a man.'

Truly, we are an ungrateful and forgetful nation. Never, though its population counted less than five millions, has England produced in thought and action so many daring pioneers as in these days of the Commonwealth, when men staked their all for an idea, and lived with an intensity their descendants have never touched. Among them, buried though he is in oblivion, Gerrard Winstanley ranks high, as much by his startling courage as by the clarity of his intellectual vision.

Note

¹ [As explained in the Editorial Note, this chapter was not written by Brailsford for this book. It is reprinted from an article which he wrote for The Plain View (July 1945), published by The Ethical Union. This article has been slightly abbreviated, in order to avoid repetitions; the first two paragraphs were extracted from Brailsford's original Chapter II.—Ed.]