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Gerard Winstanley: 17th
Century Communist at
Kingston
By Christopher Hill
24 January 1996
Kingston University
[Originally found at:
http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cusp/Lectures/Hill.htm]
Well I was cheating a bit when I associated Winstanley
and Kingston in my title because Winstanley hadn't all
that much to do with Kingston. He turned up in a Court
of Law in Kingston but that perhaps was not a sufficient
reason for joining them together, but it enabled me to
drag Winstanley in and associate him with this exciting
new University. But Winstanley himself was a
Lancashire man; his father was a clothier in Wigan, quite
a significant figure in his town, and Winstanley himself,
Gerard, was apprenticed to a London clothier, which
suggests that his father had ambitions for him to get out
of the backward north. And it looked as though he was
going to follow in his father's trade. He married the
daughter of a London surgeon, quite classy, who owned
some property in Cobham parish, which we shall come
back to later. And Winstanley had set himself up in
business before the civil war started. He had possibilities
of trade with his native Lancashire I think, which he
presumably was relying on. But the civil war disrupted
trade links between London and Lancashire and like
many other people, Winstanley was ruined in the early
40s and he left London for Cobham where he presumably
lived on property belonging to his wife. And the only job
that he could get was herding other men's cows as a hired
labourer, not a good start. He was very horrified by the
poverty which he found around him and by his own
poverty and the powerlessness of the poor in face of
eviction by landlords or speculative land purchasers. The
law gave no protection once one lost one's holding in the
land and became dependent on wage labour, and he had a
thing against wage labour, which I shall come back to

later on, he kept on about it. So Winstanley took the
initiative in the early 1640s in the movement by landless
peasants to squat on waste and common land, something
that is perhaps more common today than it was a
generation or two ago, and cultivate them collectively.
He started off at St Georges Hill in the parish of Walton
on Thames and later moved to Cobham Heath. He was
attacked by local landlords who set the locals against him
and he was beaten up. A court case was brought against
him and he was tried at Kingston which, since Charles I's
Charter of 1628 had cognizance of legal actions in
Elmbridge and three other hundreds. One of the phrases
that he uses about this period is, the old world is running
up like parchment in the fire', and he saw the collapse of
the sort of civilization he had been used to. He hadn't
done very well out of it, but he was used to it and like
very many others he reflected deeply on what was
happening. All 17th century thinking about politics of
course took religious forms and Winstanley was deeply
concerned about how the helpless poverty of the masses
could be explained in terms of a loving and all-powerful
God. He was dissatisfied with the explanations of most
preachers, whether established Church of England
preachers or sectarians. Whether they believed in the
beauty of holiness, ceremonies, or had the puritan
emphasis on preaching and preaching and more
preaching, neither seemed to help the poor. It was no use,
Winstanley came to decide, repeating conventional
clichs, new remedies were called for. Men must think
for themselves, not repeat other people's thoughts, a point
that keeps recurring, you must think for yourself. His
own ideas crystallized in what he called a trance, which I
think we should call a period of deep meditation, which
perhaps sounds a little less mysterious, and he concluded
that until everybody had food to eat and some security of
livelihood, it was no good preaching pie in the sky to
them. He received messages in this trance, if it was a
trance, and the messages he received were, 'work
together', 'eat bread together', 'let Israel go free'. 'Israel
shall neither give nor take hire' and in his written works
for 'Israel shall not take hire' he referred to the Epistle of
James Chapter 5, verse 4. 'We must go forth and declare
it in action, calling upon us that are called the common
people to manure and work upon the common lands.' I'm
quoting again, I won't repeat that every time. 'True
religion and undefiled is to make restitution of the earth',
which hath been taken and held from the common people
by the power of conquests formerly' and so set the
oppressed free. And in another rather similar phrase he
said, 'true religion and undefiled is to give everyone land
freely to manure co-operatively.' 'Manure' is of course a
17th century word for cultivate but I think he intended to
use rather a vulgar word so as to contrast true religion
with the religion of ceremonies and/or preaching. True
religion and undefiled is to give everyone land freely to
manure co-operatively, and he quoted the Bible to the
effect that the poor shall inherit the earth and said this is
really and immediately to be fulfilled. So he and a
handful of poor men established a colony on St Georges
Hill to take symbolic ownership of uncultivated common
and waste land and came under a great deal of attack.
In addition to collective labour on this farm, which the
Diggers occupied, Winstanley wrote pamphlet after
pamphlet defending their cause. This was a national
issue. The traditional village was breaking up under the
pressures of the capitalist market. Some richer peasants
were doing very well producing for the market,
employing the labour of their less fortunate co-villagers
who were evicted or otherwise had to give up their
smallholdings and become dependent on wages which
were inadequately paid by the richer farmers. But as
Winstanley pointed out (I'm quoting again) one third part
of England lies waste and barren when children starve or
want in regard lords of manors will not suffer the poor to
manure it. If the wasteland of England were manured by
her children it would become in a few years the richest,
the strongest and the most flourishing land in the world',
advancing economic reasons for cultivating the
wasteland as well as reasons of social justice.
A couple of years earlier in the Putney debates of 1647,
the leveller Colonel Rainborough had argued that, 'the
poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the
richest he and therefore every man that is to live under a
government ought first by his own consent to put himself
under that government.' This was in a discussion in the
Army Council. Commissary General Ireton replied,
'liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense if
property is preserved.' That might be almost Winstanley's
starting point. He realised that property must not be
preserved if you are going to have justice for all people.
We're talking about 1649, just after the trial and
execution of Charles I, with one of Wigan's MPs (who
Winstanley may have known) as one of the judges in the
trial. Levellers in London were arguing for a wide
extension of the parliamentary franchise and for a
republic. The House of Lords had just been abolished.
There were new hopes that the millennium was
approaching. Anything seemed possible in those exciting
days, including King Jesus as a successor to the executed
Charles. There was an outburst of religious and political
discussion. And Winstanley argued, plunging into this
discussion, that the poor, the rank and file of Parliament's
army, should benefit by victory over the King, the
Bishops and the landlords. 'The King's blood was not our
burden, it was those oppressive Norman laws whereby he
enslaved us that we groaned under.' Norman laws, he's
harking back to the legend of the Norman yoke: all the
evils from which the English lower classes suffer go back
to the Norman Conquest, where a foreign aristocracy
established itself as the ruling gentry of the land. This of
course was not a new problem. Keith Thomas, some time
ago suggested that, 'the whole Digger movement can be
plausibly regarded as the culmination of a century of
unauthorised encroachment upon the forests and wastes
by squatters and local commoners, pushed on by land
shortage and the pressure of population.' Winstanley was
trying to organise them in his locality. It was of course a
time of great economic hardship for the lower classes.
Over the century before 1640, real wages, they tell us,
had halved, and the years 1620-50 were among the most
terrible the lower classes had ever endured. That's saying
quite something. The civil war added to these burdens,
high taxation, pillaging and plunder by both sides. Men
were said to lie starving in the streets of London. The
rioting crowds seized corn.
A lot of other pamphlets as well as Winstanley's
advocated using lands belonging to the King, the Church
and the Royalists to provide for the poor and even to
introduce new land confiscations. Others before
Winstanley had suggested expropriating the rich and
establishing a communist society but Winstanley was the
only pamphleteer who had a systematically worked out
theory that could be put into practice immediately.
'Action is the life of all', he wrote, 'and if thou dost not
act thou dost nothing.' But of course there was counter
action from the other side; the landlords in the Cobham
area had Winstanley arrested and while he was waiting
for his trial a friend of his was told by an officer of the
Kingston Court that, 'if the Diggers' cause was good,
nevertheless he would pick such a jury as should
overthrow them'. Winstanley said that the court was
upholding the Norman conquest, (going back to the
Norman yoke again) by fining him and others.
Winstanley refused to take off his hat in respect for the
court or to pay a lawyer to defend him and he was fined.
Others from the colony were too.
Nevertheless the colony lasted for a year, permanently
under siege, but during that period at least ten more
communes were established in imitation of that at
Cobham on similar lines, in the south Midlands. 'All men
have stood for freedom', wrote Winstanley about the civil
war, 'and now the common enemy has gone you are all
like men in a mist, seeking for freedom and know not
where nor what it is, and those of the rich among you 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'. Speaking to his landlord enemies, he said, 'if
thou consent to freedom for 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 a declared hypocrite. The land
was made for all as their creation birthright. 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. The
commonwealth's freedom lies in the free enjoyment of
the earth.' This emphasis on the land of course continues
all through England, still preponderantly an agricultural
country. Winstanley insisted that the common people are
'a part of the nation and, without exception, all sorts of
people in the land are to have freedom not just the gentry
and clergy. There cannot be universal liberty until this
universal community of property be established.' And in
a programmatic statement he said, 'seeing the common
people of England by joint consent of person and purse
have cast out Charles our Norman oppressor [Charles I of
course] we have by this victory recovered ourselves from
under his Norman yoke and the land now is to return into
the hands of those who have conquered, that is the
commons, and the land is to be held no longer by you
that were the gentry, from the use of them by the hand of
any who will uphold the Norman and kingly power still.
Otherwise we that are impoverished by sticking to the
parliament shall lose the benefit of all our taxes, water
and blood and remain slaves still to the kingly power in
the hands of lords of manors. In them kingly power
reigns strongly.' This is one of his key phrases, kingly
power reigns, a power not based on any just claim.
For Winstanley, the introduction of private property (and
he speaks especially of course of property in land) had
been the fall of man. 'In the beginning of time, the great
creator reason', (Winstanley's phrase for God, if he
believed in a god) 'made the earth to be a common
treasury' and all men were equal. 'When self love began
to arise in the earth, then man began to fall.' Property is
the devil and to support it is, 'rebellion and high treason
against the king of righteousness. Though their chief
captain Charles be gone, yet his colonels, landlords, his
councillors and divines, lawyers and clergy, and his
inferior officers and soldiers, freeholders and lords of
manors, which did steal our land when they murdered
our fathers in that Norman conquest', they represent
today kingly power. Buying and selling, hiring wage
labour are all part of the fall of man. 'Everyone without
exception, ought to have liberty to enjoy the earth for his
livelihood and to settle his dwelling in any part of the
commons of England without buying or renting land of
any.' Again, rather a modern note there. 'And surely if the
common people have no more freedom in England but
only to live among their elder brothers and work for them
for hire, what freedom then have they in England more
than you can have in Turkey or France?'
Levellers thought that Parliament's victory over the King
in the civil war ought to lead to the establishment of
political democracy. Winstanley saw no point in this
without a restoration of economic equality. 'Everyone
upon the recovery of the Norman conquest ought to
return to freedom again without respect of persons.
Surely all sorts, both gentry in their enclosures, and the
communalty in their commons, ought to have their
freedom, not compelling one to work for another for
wages. The laws that were made in the days of the kings
give freedom to the gentry and clergy, all the rest are left
servants and bondsmen to those taskmasters.'
Although he was fairly sweeping in his ideas and claims,
Winstanley was also very down to earth when it came to
practical things. He advocated a state monopoly of
foreign trade because there would be no private property
and common land would belong to the commonwealth so
he realised there would have to be a state monopoly of
foreign trade. Interestingly enough, that's one of the first
things that Lenin established after the Bolsheviks took
power in 1917, a Commissariat of foreign trade.
Winstanley had his own idiosyncratic interpretations of
the Christian myth. Whether one should regard him as a
Christian or not, I don't know. If so, he was he was a very
heretical Christian. He interpreted heaven as being a
comfortable livelihood in the earth and Adam for him
symbolises, 'the wisdom and power of the flesh'. Adam
and his successors advanced themselves of dust,
accumulated property and took political power.
Winstanley thus distinguished between the man of the
flesh, Adam, and the spiritual man, Jesus Christ. Kingly
power didn't perish with Charles I. It lives on in all great
landlords and there is something of the old Adam in
every man and woman. Adam will ultimately be defeated
by, 'the universal spreading of the divine power, which is
Christ in mankind, who will make them all to act in one
and spirit in and after the laws of reason and equity.'
Reason requires that every man should live upon the
increase of the earth comfortably. And Winstanley
revealingly said that he had been held under darkness by
the word God. He preferred the word reason, not a
personal god, an intellectual attitude, and he insisted that
in the ideal of society he was putting forward none ought
to be troubled for his practice in the matter of his God.
What I want to emphasise is 'his God', that as long as he
does it quietly he can worship as he likes and whom he
likes. And then again, allegorically interpreting the Bible,
in this garden of mankind, there is a tree of knowledge of
good and evil and the tree of life called universal love.
The first calls good evil and evil good. When he was
driven out of the garden man lived like beasts of the field
in fears, doubts, troubles, evils and grudges, wars and
divisions. They come to delight in riches, places of
government, pleasures, society of strange women. All
these lead to troubles until men come to see themselves
as naked and ashamed. The tree of life brings to the
kingdom within universal love or pure knowledge, which
is Christ. Not a person, but this universal love rather than
the kingdom which lives in objects outside, which is the
devil. The shame and misery of our age is that everybody
professes Christ and the spirit, preaches in praise of
them, but they know not inwardly by what spirit or
inward power they are ruled. Kingly power in its several
governments by the sword shall dash against one another.
There will be no peace and rest until Christ, universal
love, takes the kingdom. Bondage is Satan in you and
among you. And the Bible describes, for Winstanley,
three beasts, the clergy, the law and buying and selling.
The clergy, he's got it in for the clergy, will serve any
side like our ancient laws which will serve any master.
William the Conqueror in 1066 bought off the clergy by
instituting tithes to pay them. 'Yet the clergy tell the poor
people to be content with poverty now and heaven
hereafter. Why may people not have a comfortable
maintenance here and heaven hereafter too. We gave no
consent to acknowledge crown and royalist land, our
purchased inheritance, being sold.' - as they were being
sold of course in the late 40s and early 50s. Winstanley
thought they should be communal property. 'This man
will have no government', some will say, as yet the
power and dominion of the prince of darkness rules
everywhere and that must be thrown down. 'If you would
find true majesty indeed, go among the poor, despised
ones of the earth and there you shall see light and love
shine in majesty indeed, rising up to unite the creation
indeed into the unity of spirit and bond of peace. These
are too stately figures for Christ to dwell in, he takes up
his abode in a manger amongst the poor in spirit and
despised ones of the earth.' And so the battle, as
Winstanley sees it, the battle between the first Adam, the
first man Christ, and Adam the second man goes on in
the minds of all human beings till the Lord Christ rises in
multiplicities of bodies, making them all of one heart and
one mind, acting in righteousness one to another. This is
a process which will take place in the minds of men.
Ultimately Christ the restorer will stop up the stinking
waters of self-interest and cause the waters of life and
liberty to run plentifully in and through the creation.
When the king of righteousness comes to rule in
everyone's heart, then he will kill the first Adam,
covetousness, and man shall have meat and drink and
clothes by his labour in freedom. What more could he
desire? But this, Winstanley recognised, would be a long
struggle. There's not going to be any miraculous coming
of Jesus Christ. He won't come down from heaven and
impose a world of order. It will have to spring up in the
minds of men and women. 'Christ lying in the grave like
a corn of wheat buried under the clods of the earth for a
time, and Christ rising up from the power of your flesh
above that corruption and above the clouds, treading the
curse under his feet, is to be seen within each individual
human being, Christ. Heaven and hell, light and
darkness, sorrow and comfort, are all to be seen within
the power of darkness and the power of life and light,
good angels and bad angels, are all to be seen within and
are to be taken as allegories.'
An important aspect of the battle of ideas will be the
abolition of wage labour which I referred to earlier.
'Whoever shall help the man to labour his proper earth,
as he calls it, his own land, whoever shall help the man to
labour on the land for wages, the hand of the Lord shall
be upon such labourers, for they lift up the curse above
the spirit by their labour and so hold the creation still
under bondage.' Winstanley wanted to organise a
national strike of wage labour so that the rich wouldn't be
able to get their lands cultivated, wouldn't be able to sell
the proceeds and so would be reduced to the level of
everybody else. If they chose to turn their land into the
common stock they might get some compensation, but
this would be a voluntary cession of their land. It sounds
an easy way of arranging a transition from one social
system to another.
'In the day of restoration, Israel is neither to give nor to
take wages.' Winstanley's aims is rationalisation of the
traditional village economy which the spread of the
capitalist market was breaking up. 'The earth was meant
to be a common treasury for all, not a private treasury for
some. 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. Private property
is the cause of all wars, bloodshed, theft and enslaving
laws that hold the people under misery. The laws of
kings have been always made against such actions as the
common people were most inclined to. Whensoever there
is a people thus united by common community of
livelihood into oneness it will become the strongest land
in the world, for they will be as one man to defend their
inheritance.' It's property that divides us. 'If you look for
heaven, or for the manifestation of the father's love in
you in any place but within yourselves, you are deceived.
If you look for any other hell or for sorrows in any other
place than what shall be made manifest within the
bottomless pit, your very flesh itself, you are
deceived. When this bottomless pit is open to your view
it will be a torment sufficient, but when the second Adam
rises up in the heart of Christ, he makes a man see
heaven within himself and judge all things that are below
him. This is heaven that will not fail us, where moth and
rust cannot corrupt. This Christ is within you, your
everlasting rest and glory, and Christ within, when you
become conscious of him being there, leads to action. If
thou dost not act, thou dost nothing. Words and writing
are all nothing and must die.'
Winstanley's concern then is with the world as he knows
it, not at all with the after life. 'What are the greatest sins
in the world', he asks. 'One is for a man to lock up the
treasuries of the earth in chests or houses and suffer it to
rust or moulder, while others starve for want to whom it
belongs and it belongs to all. This is the greatest sin
against universal love', the sin covetousness. The second
sin is 'for any man or men first to take the earth by the
power of the murdering swords from others and then by
the laws of their own making do hang or put to death any
who takes the fruits of the earth to supply his necessaries
from places or persons where there is more than can be
made use of by that particular family where it is hoarded
up.' Winstanley has a rudimentary 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 an man hath no help from his neighbours he should
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. And what rich men give, they
give away other men's labours, not their own.'
'So, in the beginning of time, the great creator reason,
(whom some call God) made the earth to be a common
treasury and man the lord was to govern this creation.
But not one word was spoken in the beginning that one
branch of mankind should rule over another. But thanks
to covetousness, man was brought into bondage and
became a greater slave to those of his own kind than the
beasts of the field were to him. But when once the earth
becomes a common treasury again, as it must, then this
enmity in all lands will cease and none shall dare to seek
dominion over others.' And speaking to landlords again,
he says, 'you promised liberty to the English people for
defeating the King, lords and bishops, promising to make
the land a free nation for those who stand to maintain a
universal liberty which is our birthright and your
promise. Not by force of arms, we abhor that, but by
labouring the earth in righteousness together, to eat our
bread with the sweat of our own brows, neither giving
wages nor taking wages but working and eating together.
So we endeavour to lift up the creation from that
bondage of civil property it groans under. The King's old
laws cannot govern a free commonwealth.... Such laws
have always been made against such actions as the
common people were most inclined to ...' Private
property, 'hath made laws to hang those that did steal, it
tempts people to do an evil action and then kills them for
the doing of it. All laws that are not grounded upon
equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all
but to certain persons, ought to be cut off with the King's
head. England is not a free people till the poor that have
no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the
commons and so live as comfortably as the landlords that
live in their enclosures. .... Christ comes to set all free.
Kingly power, on the other hand, is like a great spread
tree, the old Adam. If you lop the head or top off and let
the other branches and root stand, it will grow again and
recover precious strength. In England that top power is
lopped off the tree of tyranny but alas oppression is a
great tree still and keeps the sun of freedom from the
poor commoners still. He hath many branches and
greater roots which must be grubbed up before everyone
can sing their songs in peace. If so be kingly authority be
set up in your laws again (as they are trying to do) King
Charles hath conquered you by policy and won the field
of you though you seemingly have cut off his head.'
(Nice phrase that) 'you seemingly have cut off his head,
but he's still going to beat you'. 'That government that
gives liberty to the gentry to have all the earth and shuts
out the poor commoners from enjoying any part, is the
government of imaginary self seeking... and every plant
which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be
rooted out. The work of digging is freedom or the
appearance of Christ in the earth', Christ rising in sons
and daughters and making an equal society. Whereas
now 'Cain is still alive in all great landlords'. (That's not
Winstanley actually, that comes from one of the
communes established in imitation of his colony at Iver
in Buckinghamshire.)
The dispersal of the Digger colonies was done by state
power - the army was sent down to clear them out,
though Winstanley thought the rank and file were on his
side, but he couldn't do anything about it. After this
dispersal, Winstanley made one last effort. He published
The Law of Freedom in 1652, with a dedication to Oliver
Cromwell. This is the description of an ideally free
commonwealth, in the hope that Oliver might introduce it
into England. This seems absurd to us with our hindsight
about Oliver, but he had done some odd things in his
time - co- operating with Agitators, accepting Pride's
Purge and himself dissolving the Rump and dismissing
them in 1653. 'You have power', said Winstanley to
Oliver, 'I have no power.' Perhaps he was not really
expecting Oliver to do it, but he thought this would be a
way of getting publicity for his ideas. But where else
could he turn .... ?
There are many interesting remarks in The Law of
Freedom. 'Money must not any longer be the great god
that hedges in some and hedges out others.' 'You have
taken the people's money in taxes and free quarter
whereby they are made worse able to live than before the
war.' 'Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside
down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies.' 'The word
of God is love, and when all thy actions are done in love
to the whole creation thou advances freedom, and
freedom is Christ in you and Christ among you.'
'Bondage is Satan in you and Satan among you.'
'Everyone talks of freedom but there are few that act for
freedom. The actors for freedom are oppressed by the
talkers and verbal professors of freedom.' 'The common
people who have cast out the oppressor by their
representatives have not authorised any yet to give away
their freedom.' 'Therefore England beware, William the
Conqueror's army begins to gather into head again and
the old Norman prerogative law is the place of their
meeting, though their chief captain, Charles, be gone, yet
his colonels, lords of manors, his councillors and divines,
which are our lawyers and priests, his inferior officers
and soldiers, which are the freeholders and landlords, all
did steal away our land from us when they killed and
murdered our fathers in that Norman conquest.' 'I see the
poor must first be picked out and honoured in this way,
for they begin to receive the word of righteousness, but
the rich generally are enemies to true freedom', he said.
'In Cobham on the little heath, the digging still goes on
and all our friends, they live in love as if they were but
one.' But it didn't last.
He's still asking these questions. 'Who are chosen state
officers but freeholders or landlords and you still prop up
that Norman yoke and slavish tyranny; and truly you
councillors and powers of the earth, know this, that
wheresoever there is a people thus united into oneness it
can become the strongest land in the world. Pleading for
property divides the people of the land and the whole
world into parties and is the causes of all wars and
bloodshed everywhere. Oh ye Adams of the earth, Jacob
has been low, but he is rising and will rise'.
Kingly power reigns strongly and in the lords of manors.
'Do not all strive to enjoy the earth as well as the poor;
and buying and selling are a cheat to get land into rich
men's hands. The people shall all fall off from you and
you shall fall .... like a great tree that is undermined ...
Jesus Christ who is that powerful spirit of love is the
head Leveller, as he is lifted up, he will draw all men
after him.' By this Winstanley meant Christ or the king of
righteousness in us. It is we who have to to be converted
and we have got to do the overthrowing. 'Will you be
slaves and beggars still when you may be free men?' 'The
clergy lay claim to heaven after they are dead and yet
they require their heaven in this world too and grumble
mightily against the people that will not give them a
comfortable maintenance. And yet they tell the poor
people they should be content with poverty, and heaven
hereafter. Why may we not have heaven, a comfortable
maintenance here and hereafter too?' And he argued,
rather speciously I think, that two acts of Parliament
worked in his favour. The first one he describes as the act
against Kingly Power, which I think is the act abolishing
monarchy, and the second was the Act declaring England
to be a free commonwealth by which they meant a
republic. He tried to interpret these as establishing
conditions in which his equal community could be
established. All the old laws have been abolished by
these two acts of Parliament; but now still under the old
laws, if the poor beg, they whip them by their law for
vagrants, if they steal they hang them. In England
bondages of the mind, he says in a perceptive phrase I
think, are all occasioned by the outward bondage that one
sort of people lay upon another. His adaptation of
Christianity to his own purpose is, I suppose, original: in
a letter to Fairfax, he speaks of your scriptures, not his. If
there is an afterlife he tells us nothing about it except that
we can't know anything. Heaven is a comfortable life in
the earth; heaven and hell are to be found now, within
men and women. Winstanley said he had been held in the
darkness by the word God 'as I see many people are'. He
preferred Reason as the name for God. And the name of
community and freedom is Christ. 'The word of life, the
restoring power, is to be found within you. Go read all
the books in your University, your heart still shall be a
barren wilderness till you read in your own book, your
heart.' I could go on but I've gone on enough.
I don't know much about Winstanley's life after he
published that pamphlet, that was itself after the
dissolution of his community. In it, he treated the civil
war as a true revolution in which the men of property
have been defeated and their land and with it their power
must be restored to the people. And he urges his readers
to become 'like wise-hearted Thomas, to believe nothing
but what they see reason for.' God is not in some
particular place of glory beyond the skies, he is within
each one of us. '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, then they shall easily be the inheritors of the earth
and have the deceived people to be their slaves.' This was
not the doctrine of Christ. 'When men are assured food
and raiment their reason will be ripe and they will be
ready to dive into the secrets of creation.' Winstanley has
a wonderful passage about the scientific discoveries that
will be made when more people have enough food to be
able to think for themselves and to join in intellectual
discussion. The spirit of knowledge will rise up in its
beauty and fullness in a free commonwealth. 'Fear of
want and care to pay rent to taskmasters have hindered
many rare inventions' but in future men will be able to
employ their reasoned industry in making discoveries to
benefit all, not just the inventors. There shall be a free
state medical service.
We know little about Winstanley's later life. He lived on
until 1676 in Cobham. A man called Gerard Winstanley
died in London in 1676 as a Quaker. He was described as
a corn chandler. It's uncertain whether this was our
Gerard Winstanley or not. But where else could he go
except to the Quakers, after the restoration of the Church
of England and the House of Lords and the monarchy?
But he was not altogether forgotten. He didn't figure
much in the history books until very recently; but in the
late 17th and early 18th centuries radicals like Benjamin
Furley, Anthony Collins, Thomas Hollis and the novelist
Henry Fielding, possessed or knew of Winstanley's
writings. In the 1790s, a group in a Welsh valley was
discussing Winstanley's ideas, an interesting place and an
interesting time. He was rediscovered at the end of the
last century and in the present century. He is particularly
famous, and rightly, not just for his ideas, interesting
though they are, but for his prose style, which is
something which stands out as remarkable even in that
great age of English prose. So if you get a chance, read
some of it, it really is quite good. Thank you.
Question: I was interested to what extent you think
Winstanley took a view of women and as to how much
he thought equality extended to women?
Hill: Winstanley's view of women? I would have said
something about that but I went on too long anyway. He
says that, I think I can quote him roughly, marriage
should not be a church ceremony and every man and
woman should be able to marry freely those whom they
love provided they get the willing consent of the other
party, and if they haven't enough money for a dowry,
there will be money in the common stock which will
exist in his society. Money will no longer be the main
object in marriage. So everyone shall have freedom to
marry those whom he loves, or she loves. He wishes to
treat women as equal to men, certainly in marriage but I
think in other respects too.


Last updated July 22, 2010
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