LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI 



the people; (5) a Commonwealth "after the pattern of the Bible." 

 Here the land was expressly stated to be the property of the whole 

 people, and, as we should say, its "nationalisation" demanded. 



In April 1649, while Lilburne and other Leveller leaders were 

 confined in the Tower, there suddenly appeared at Cobham in Surrey 

 a number of men armed with spades, who began to dig up uncultivated 

 common land at the side of St. George's Hill, with the intention of 

 growing corn and other produce.^ They proposed to prove that "it 

 was an indeniable equity that the common people ought to dig, plow, 

 plant, and dwell upon the commons without hiring them or paying 

 rent to any." A fortnight later they were arrested by two troops of 

 horse, sent down by Cromwell, and their leaders, William Everard 

 and Gerrard Winstanley, brought before him. The examination 

 showed that these "true Levellers," as they called themselves, were 

 in reality trying to found what we should now call a "collective 

 farm," and their conviction was that, when men began to see the 

 success of their venture, they would join it, and so establish in course 

 of time a widespread co-operative system. The beginning was to be 

 on common-land, for which they asked no permission, since from 

 of old it had been the common property of the English people. 



Of course, these beginnings were not allowed to proceed far, and 

 though Winstanley succeeded in establishing collective farms at 

 several other places besides Cobham, they were very short-lived. The 

 "true Levellers" seem eventually to have joined other later movements, 

 such as that of the Quakers, which had a more other-worldly back- 

 ground. Winstanley produced a book, however {The Law of Freedom 

 in a Platform^ or True Magistracy Restored^ i<^5i)> which unfolded 

 his real principles without any concealment, and propounded a 

 complete social system based on communist principles. "The Earth," 

 he said, "should be a Common Treasury." Particularly interesting 

 here is his treatment of social prestige in a classless society: "As a 

 man goes through offices he rises to titles of Honour, till he comes 

 to the highest Nobility, to be a faithful Commonwealth man in a 

 Parliament House. Likewise he who finds out any secret in Nature, 

 shall have a title of Honour given him, though he be but a young 



^ See BerenSjL. H., The Digger Movement under the Commonwealth (Simpkin Marshall, 

 London, 1906); Davidson, M., The Wisdom of Winstanley the Digger (Henderson, 

 London, 1904); Gerrard Winstanley^ s Collected Works, ed. Sabine (Cornell Univ. Press, 

 Ithaca, New York, 1941). In the course of time Winstanley will come to be appreciated 

 as standing with Milton and Bunyan as among the greatest of seventeenth-century 

 Englishmen. 



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