Why a 17th-century cloth merchant tried to turn England into a communist commune

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: After his business collapsed during the English Civil War, Gerrard Winstanley turned to the soil. Leading a group known as the Diggers, he attempted to reclaim common land for the poor, arguing that the Earth was a shared treasury meant to sustain all people, not just the landed elite.

Born in 1609 in Lancashire, Gerrard Winstanley moved to London to work as a cloth merchant. His life took a radical turn following the First English Civil War, which disrupted his trade and led to his bankruptcy in 1643. Relocating to Cobham, Surrey, he began working as a cowherd, a transition that deeply influenced his political philosophy. By 1649, amidst the revolutionary fervor of the Commonwealth period and soaring food prices, Winstanley and William Everard spearheaded the Digger movement.

The Diggers, or True Levellers, occupied common land at St. George’s Hill and Cobham, where they cultivated crops to feed the impoverished. Winstanley’s ideology was rooted in the belief that the Earth was a 'Common Treasury' for all humanity. He argued that the English Civil War should have liberated the poor from the 'Norman yoke' of kings, landlords, and lawyers. He viewed the clergy as instruments of class rule, advocating instead for universal religious toleration and the replacement of sermons with lectures on natural sciences and the constitution.

The Digger experiment was short-lived. By March 1650, local landowners, threatened by the communal project, used force and legal harassment to disperse the settlers. Despite this failure, Winstanley remained a prolific pamphleteer. In his 1652 work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, he outlined a vision for a society where property and wages were abolished. Winstanley’s later life saw him work briefly as an estate steward before eventually becoming a Quaker, passing away in 1676.

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