On a sunny April morning in 1649, a small band of impoverished men gathered on the scrubby, uncultivated slopes of St. George’s Hill in Surrey, England. They were not soldiers or protestors in the usual sense. Armed only with spades and hoes, they began to dig, preparing the earth to plant parsnips, carrots, and beans. This simple act of cultivation was, in fact, a revolutionary declaration. These men, who came to be known as the Diggers, were staking a claim not just to a patch of soil, but to a whole new vision of society: one without private property, where the Earth was a “common treasury for all.”

A World Turned Upside Down

To understand the Diggers, we must first understand the world that forged them. Mid-17th century England was a nation in turmoil. The bloody English Civil Wars (1642-1651) had shattered the old certainties of God, King, and social hierarchy. King Charles I was beheaded in January 1649, an act that sent shockwaves across Europe. The traditional structures of state power and the Church of England had crumbled, and in the resulting power vacuum, radical new ideas flourished.

Years of war had devastated the economy. High taxes, poor harvests, and the enclosure of common lands—a process where wealthy landowners fenced off land previously used by commoners for grazing and foraging—had created widespread poverty and desperation. Amid this chaos, London and the army camps buzzed with debate. Groups like the Levellers argued for political equality, popular sovereignty, and an expanded voting franchise. But the Diggers, who called themselves the “True Levellers”, believed political rights meant little without economic justice. They aimed to take the revolution a radical step further.

The Voice of the Diggers: Gerrard Winstanley

The intellectual and spiritual leader of the Diggers was a man named Gerrard Winstanley. Born a cloth merchant, Winstanley had been bankrupted by the economic disruption of the war. This personal crisis triggered a profound spiritual and political awakening. He began writing pamphlets, blending mystical Christianity with a searing critique of social inequality.

In his 1649 work, “The New Law of Righteousness”, Winstanley laid out his foundational belief. He argued that God had not created the world for a few to own and exploit while others starved. “In the beginning of time”, he wrote, “the great creator Reason made the Earth to be a common treasury.” For Winstanley, private property was the original sin, the “curse” that had brought slavery, oppression, and misery into the world. He believed the execution of the King had not just removed a tyrant; it had broken the entire chain of property-based power, which he called the “Norman Yoke”—the belief that England’s landowning aristocracy was an illegitimate, conquering force imposed since the Norman Conquest of 1066. The time had come, he declared, to reclaim the earth for the common people.

The Earth as a Common Treasury: Digger Ideology

The Diggers’ philosophy was a potent, ahead-of-its-time mix of communism, anarchism, and environmentalism. Their core principles were simple yet revolutionary:

• Abolition of Private Property: They rejected the very concept of buying and selling land. All land, they believed, should be held in common for the benefit of all.
• Communal Living and Labor: They intended to work the land together and share its fruits equally, living “in love, and the bond of peace.”
• Pacifist Direct Action: Unlike other factions, the Diggers were committed to non-violence. Their revolution was to be waged with spades and plows, not swords and muskets. They sought to create their new society by example, encouraging others to join them in cultivating the millions of acres of common land across England.
• Rejection of Authority: They opposed not only the authority of landlords but also that of priests and lawyers, whom they saw as agents of the propertied class.

Spades, Not Swords: The Colonies in Action

The colony at St. George’s Hill was the Diggers’ first and most famous experiment. Starting with just a dozen or so people, their numbers swelled to perhaps 50. They built simple dwellings, cleared land, and planted crops. Their actions did not go unnoticed. Local landowners, furious at this challenge to their property rights, saw them as dangerous squatters and thieves.

The Diggers faced immediate and relentless harassment. Their crops were trampled, their tools broken, and their huts burned down by hired thugs and angry mobs. They were dragged through the courts on charges of trespass. At one point, the head of the New Model Army, Lord Thomas Fairfax, came to see the colony for himself. He found Winstanley and his followers to be peaceful and seemingly harmless, and he left them be. However, this did little to deter the local gentry.

Despite the persecution, the Digger movement spread. Small colonies sprang up in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, Cobham in Surrey, and a handful of other locations. The Wellingborough Diggers published a manifesto declaring their intent to “not meddle with any man’s propriety but only to meddle with the commons”, and called on other “well-affected friends” to provide them with seed and grain.

The Inevitable Collapse

The Digger dream was short-lived. Faced with constant legal battles, mob violence, and the destruction of their work, the movement could not sustain itself. The harsh winter of 1649-1650 made survival even more difficult. The Diggers’ commitment to pacifism meant they would not fight back, and they lacked the numbers and resources to withstand the onslaught. By the spring of 1650, less than a year after it began, the colony at St. George’s Hill was dispersed. The other small settlements soon met similar fates.

A Seed Planted for the Future: The Digger Legacy

Though their practical experiment failed, the Diggers’ ideas were far too powerful to disappear entirely. Defeated but not silenced, Winstanley wrote his final major work in 1652, “The Law of Freedom in a Platform”, a detailed blueprint for a future communist republic. In it, he outlined a society with a moneyless economy, common ownership of all resources, and a democratic government, demonstrating a political vision centuries ahead of its time.

For centuries, the Diggers were a largely forgotten footnote in a chaotic period of English history. But their story and writings were rediscovered by radical thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Socialists, communists, anarchists, and even modern-day environmental activists have all drawn inspiration from Winstanley’s declaration that the earth is a common treasury for all.

The Diggers represent a fleeting but brilliant moment when the poorest of the poor dared to imagine a radically different world. Their spades may have been broken and their crops destroyed, but the seeds of their egalitarian vision were planted, ready to sprout again in the minds of future generations who dared to question the foundations of property and power.