Andrew Bradstock, ed. Winstanley and the Diggers 1649-1999. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2001. 167 pp. $59.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7146-8157-3.

Reviewed by William Poole (Downing College, Cambridge University)
Published on H-Albion (July, 2001)

Hearts and Spades

Hearts and Spades

In 1999, 350 years after Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow Diggers occupied and cultivated the unyielding soil of St George's Hill, Surrey, a "not entirely symbolic restaging of that event" (p. 1) was re-enacted on the same hill as part of the commemorations of the short-lived but long-shadowed Digger experiment. This collection of essays is comprised mainly of papers given at a (slightly less active) companion event, the "Hearts and Spades" conference held at the same time in nearby Walton. Let us hope this volume has a longer life than the recent occupation, which, in historical caricature, saw the modern diggers evicted within two weeks from what is now "one of the most exclusive private estates in England" (p. 1).

One of the services of this collection is to remind us how much more there is to Winstanley and the Digger phenomenon than the year's digging they sustained. The young Winstanley was, for instance, apprenticed to one Sarah Gater, a clothier only four years older than himself, who, as Alsop writes, owned upon her death "a sizeable library on theology and medicine, including her manuscript notes on physic and surgery" (p. 22). She also conspicuously failed to mention Winstanley favorably in her will, her only apprentice to be so omitted. Gater also had strong Arminian contacts: her mentor Henry Mason, and none other than the fishing ecclesiastic Isaak Walton. We hear of other earlier activities, including Winstanley's defense of the future Quaker John Fielder. David Taylor recounts how he found "used as packing at the bottom of an old tea chest" (p. 39) some 1646 court proceedings naming Winstanley among a list of illicit peat-diggers. And John Gurney interestingly questions the accepted view that Winstanley's move to Cobham in 1643 after the collapse of his London business was prompted by his father-in-law William King's residence there, suggesting that King may have moved to Cobham after Winstanley, thereby "rais[ing] intriguing questions about Winstanley's first contacts with radical circles" (p. 44). These may involve his digging companion Henry Bickerstaffe, whose father had quarreled violently with one James Starr; is it a coincidence that the band of men dressed as woman who beat up the Diggers in June 1649 was led by Starr's son William?

After the Diggers' abandonment of Little Heath near Cobham, whither they had relocated after four hard months on St George's Hill by the more hostile Walton, Winstanley found brief respite on the estate of the mystic aristocrat Lady Eleanor Davies, but they too quarreled. In later life, Winstanley, far from abandoning Cobham, became successively waywarden, overseer of the poor, churchwarden, and even constable, named a gentleman in 1660-2; nevertheless, he appears to have been buried a Quaker. This disruptor-turned-constable, anticlericalist-turned-churchwarden, yet buried a Quaker: how complex a design this is compared to the common picture of Winstanley! These and other illuminations we owe to the scholarship of James Alsop, David Taylor, and John Gurney. While they do not always agree--and freely admit the indeterminacy of much of their evidence--their work consolidated here comprises the best biographical discussion of Winstanley available.

Other contributors provide political, theological, cultural, and literary analyses of the Digger phenomenon, and of varying quality. Gerald Aylmer discusses the doomed situation of the Diggers, while Warren Chernaik compares Winstanley's ideas of civil liberty with those of Milton and the Levellers. Both are excellent, terse accounts, stressing the economic woes of the 1640s, and the eventual gloom that settled over the radical reformers. Nigel Smith's rather excited prose seeks to locate Winstanley's writing within the wider radical milieu, including Coppe and Clarkson. Particularly interestingly, Smith demonstrates that the vegetarian writer Thomas Tryon looks as if he has read Winstanley. Winstanley was certainly read by other radicals. Smith mentions the cook and brewer William Rabisha, who actually quotes page-numbers of Winstanley's first pamphlet. Another writer to do this, not mentioned anywhere in this volume, is Nathaniel Stephens, Presbyterian curate and polemical wrangler with figures as substantial and diverse as George Fox and Jeremy Taylor.

Rather low-voltage writing on Winstanley, Everard, and Jewishness; and Winstanley and women comes from Claire Jowitt and Elaine Hobby respectively. Jowitt concludes "Digger interest in Jewishness must be seen as limited" (p. 98), which for me rather begs the question: Why discuss it at all? Granted, the 1655 Whitehall conference, which debated the possible readmission on the Jews to England, gives point and focus to the contemporary interest in Jewishness, but Winstanley's use of such language seems obviously typological and not at all interested in Jewishness as such. And why no mention of Thomas Tany, whose writings, interlarded with Hebrew characters, declared him "of the ra[c]e of the Jews, of the Tartarian line" (The Nations Right in Magna Charta, 1651)? He, not Winstanley, merits such attention. Hobby writes a better piece, but again I was unshocked to be told that Winstanley's use of Biblical allegory led him to uphold patriarchal patterns. And putting pressure on the term "mankind" as exclusively masculine is too easy a victory. Hobby is also displeased at Winstanley s use of "Father" to represent "the Spirit of community", and of "Mother Earth" (p. 69) as a solely maternal, passive femininity. Again, this all seems pretty conventional to me. If Hobby wants to find an abrasively sexist use of mother earth as an evil step-mother, she might look at La Peyrère's Men Before Adam, the ideas of which were circulating in these years. Both Clarkson, probably among the Diggers for a time, and Winstanley mention the pre-Adamite thesis (that Adam was not the first man) and this seems a more fruitful area for feminist research. I was also unmoved by Christopher Rowland's article on Winstanley, Blake, and Liberation Theology, not because Rowland is in any sense wrong, but because his prose seems pitched at a Christian, non-scholarly audience, and so sits oddly at the end of an otherwise academic collection. To be told that Winstanley propounded "a sophisticated use of the Christian doctrine of the Fall" (p. 149); that Winstanley's exegesis relies "on the spirit of the word rather than its letter" (p. 158), is either not to be told enough, or not to be told anything surprising.

The great contribution, I feel, is James Holstun's passionate defence of Winstanley the communist, who both can and should be compared with Marx. Identification of differences between Digger and Narodnik communism will, indeed, reveal differences, but "such a study would not and should not override the remarkable resonances of these two moments" (p. 137). This is a brave and just essay, and operates at a level of scholarship, methodological sophistication, and real engagement with the value of history that demands attention.

This collection, despite the above qualifications, will serve as an ideal introduction to current work on the Diggers, as well as an indispensable collection for serious scholars.

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Citation: William Poole. Review of Bradstock, Andrew, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers 1649-1999. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. July, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5320

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