by Matthew H. Young
Equality, Imagination, and Activism
Few songs so perfectly encapsulate the modern ideal of equality in a world marked by inequality as John Lennon’s “Imagine” – a misty-eyed plea for absolute human equality. “Imagine no possessions,” croons the Beatle, “I wonder if you can // No need for greed or hunger // A brotherhood of man.” The song contains all the hallmarks of contemporary discourse on inequality: a vague spiritualism that is, simultaneously, dismissive of organized religion; a sentimental idealism about the world’s prospects for peace; a focus on the economic and material dimensions of inequality. Yet perhaps no feature is more striking than the cognitive dissonance of the song, in which the sentimentalist call for equality is obscured by the complete separation of the singer from any normal experience of oppression or lack. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when A-list celebrities including Gal Gadot, Jimmy Fallon, and Will Ferrell collaborated to produce a cover-by-committee version of “Imagine,” the internet performance was widely panned by those who observed that the Hollywood elites were largely insulated from the difficulties of the pandemic by their wealth and social status. The tone-deafness of the “Imagine” cover is far from new, however. Lennon, after all, was fabulously wealthy. The music video for “Imagine” was filmed in Lennon’s palatial Berkshire home, Tittenhurst Park. “Imagine a world with no possessions,” – “Okay John, you first!”
Wealth aside, Lennon was not alone in his hopes for a more equal world. In fact, Lennon may very well have seen himself as the inheritor of an earlier tradition of English radicalism that dated back to the 17th century, when a variety of social movements arose to protest the enclosure and privatization of the commons and the political, social, and economic inequality of Civil War England. In fact, Lennon had lived for some time in a house (Kenwood) situated on St. George’s Hill in Surrey—a site that had, some three centuries before, played host to one of the most striking social movements of the 17th Century. In April of 1649 – 375 years ago, as of the time of this writing – a small group of smallholders, commoners, and tradesmen occupied a tract of “waste land” on St. George Hill, establishing a primitive agricultural commune. The “Diggers,” as the group came to be known, were led by a cloth merchant turned stockman turned mystic by the name of Gerrard Winstanley, who saw the Digger project as a divinely-mandated response to the political, social, economic, and legal inequalities of post-Civil War England. Like Lennon, Winstanley had called for the abolition of private property and the restoration of the earth as a “Common Treasury” for the subsistence of all mankind. “England is not a Free People,” Winstanley wrote in the group’s manifesto, “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 Inclosures.”1
Winstanley’s worries about the vast (and growing) economic inequality sprang from a period of economic crisis and transition. An economic recession, years of failed harvests, and the lingering financial burden of supporting the Parliamentary forces through the Civil War had hollowed out the subsistence of the independent and laboring classes of English society. At the same time, a series of agricultural reforms had led to the gradual enclosure, or privatization of the commons—land that had historically been reserved for the use of individuals who held statutory or traditional rights to collect wood, graze animals, and otherwise carve a basic subsistence from the fruit of the land (such individuals were referred to as commoners).
Unlike some of the reformists of their time, Winstanley’s ragtag band of Diggers had little immediate (or lasting, for that matter) impact. The group’s numbers never expanded past a few dozen, and a military officer dispatched to investigate their nascent commune reported to his superiors that “the business is not worth the writing nor yet taking notice of.” Some three hundred years after the Digger commune disbanded, Winstanley and his followers are almost exclusively known among the Left. Beginning in the 20th century, Marxist historians and social activists quickly enlisted Winstanley’s legacy for political purposes. Academic tracts, documentary films, and even musical numbers quickly painted Winstanley and the Diggers as home-grown proto-communists. Yet much distinguishes the Digger plea for equality from that of Lennon and his ilk.2 For Lennon, as for most of his 20th century ideology allies, material equality was the final step in a longer developmental process. After all, the famous “imagine no possessions” line comes, in true Marxian fashion, after two other verses imagining a world without heaven, hell, religion, or the nation state. Marx, likewise, believed that patriotism and religion were obstacles to the equality of man.
Yet for the Diggers themselves, religious faith posed no obstacle to the goal of equality. Instead, religious ideas themselves formed the very heart of the Digger argument for equality. Religion was not the “opioid of the masses,” but rather the very thing that has awakened Winstanley from his dogmatic slumber and catalyzed the Digger movement when a “voice in Trance” ordered Winstanley to “Work Together, Eat Bread Together, Declare all this abroad.”3 Contra the revisionist historians, for Winstanley and his band of egalitarian agrarians, the strongest argument for equality was derived from the idea and act of Creation. It was in God’s creation, they believed, that one could most clearly see the argument for legal and political equality. Moreover, while the Diggers became famous for their condemnation of economic inequality and their argument that the entire earth ought to be reserved for common usage, economic equality was far from their chief concern. Winstanley’s concern regarding enclosure what not merely that it had increased inequality. Instead, the process of enclosure represented a misuse of legal power and structures to remove what had been a critical means of subsistence from the downtrodden of the earth. For Winstanley, economic inequality and the greed of landlords was just one branch of tyrannical domination, each iteration of which was contrary to the fundamental equality of human beings that had been established in God’s creation.
In what remains of this essay, I hope to defend the Diggers from the secularized pall cast over them by 20th century revisionist historians, while showing how Winstanley placed the divine act of creation at the core of his commitment to equality. Many readers—including, I suspect, most of the readers of this journal—will hesitate to conclude with Winstanley that this Creation Equality demands returning the earth to Common use. Nonetheless, the ill-fated, short-lived, and yet striking Digger experiment demonstrates how the idea of equality under the law springs both historically and conceptually from within the Christian tradition.
Creation Equality
Winstanley places his political thought within an all-encompassing narrative of human history, from the Edenic condition of mankind prior to the Fall all the way to the future Second Coming of Christ in spiritual form. Following the lead of medieval chiliasts like Joachim of Fiore, Winstanley divides history into three epochs, each carrying its own distinctive political, social, and spiritual characters. The first epoch, that of Creation, is marked by equality: God “gives to all Mankind, equall freedom, without respect of persons.”4 The defining feature of God’s good creation is equality of persons: God does not give any particular person the right to rule or ‘lord’ over others in matters temporal or spiritual. Neither, then, does God give one person (or their descendants) unique and special claim to authority or to an unequal share of the produce of the earth. Yet the “fall of Mankind from this righteous law” soon dissolves the basic equality of creation and replaces it with striving, self-centeredness, the libido dominandi, and most of all, covetousness. While we are inclined to think of covetousness in purely material terms, it accepts a much broader definition. As the desire for what does not belong to us, covetousness even manifests itself in the desire to rule over or to be privileged over others. If equality was the byword of the first epoch of history, covetousness is that of the second. Winstanley describes it in apocalyptic terms as “the Beast,” and “King Flesh,” the antichristian spirit that underpins all forms of hierarchical domination.
According to Winstanley, the divine order of Creation entailed equality in all respects—yet given the political and economic pressures of his time, Winstanley emphasizes the equality of creation in respect to the earth. “In the beginning of time,” the earth had been established as a “Common Treasury” for all mankind. “The earth was not made purposely for you,” Winstanley rebukes the contemporary landed gentry, “to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggers.” Yet just as God had not intended the Earth to be gobbled up by a select few, neither did God intend to place a select few in command of political or spiritual matters. “Not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another,” Winstanley writes. Yet those who give themselves over to covetousness soon conspired to seize the Commons of the earth for their private enrichment, and “the earth that was made a common Treasury for all to live comfortably upon, is become through mans unrighteous actions one over another, to be a place, wherein one torments another.”
Likewise in spiritual and political affairs, as a few tyrants set themselves up to rule over other man, in direct opposition to the shape of God’s creation. The self-appointed spiritual tyrants of the church in the established religion, for instance, act to bring all of mankind into their own spiritual fiefdoms by coercion, while destroying God’s right to “choose his own church.” It was covetousness, Winstanley writes, that “did set up one man to teach and rule over another,” and so brought mankind into “bondage.”
The Fall of Man and the Corruption of the Law
For Winstanley and the Diggers, the basic equality of creation was undermined by covetousness, which set up tyranny. In a lengthy theological and political tract written during the Digger encampment, Winstanley describes tyranny (termed “kingly power”) as “a great spread tree,” composed of four branches. Contra most readings of tyranny, for Winstanley political domination is far from the most serious or evil aspect of unjust domination; political tyranny is surpassed by the economic domination of the “Lords of Mannors” who had led the enclosure of the Commons, the spiritual tyranny of the ecclesiastical authorities, and unjust tyranny exercised by those within the legal profession. These latter tyrants cause “the intolerable oppression either of bad Laws, or of bad Judges corrupting good Laws.”
Winstanley elaborates on the unique role that the legal profession—and legal systems—plays in sustaining inequality and hierarchy. Dating back to the Norman conquest, the laws of England had been written at least in part in non-native tongues. Under this system, normal citizens are systematically robbed of their agency and equality under the law: they are entirely dependent upon the expertise of the lawyers who are tasked with interpreting and enforcing these laws. Indeed, the original usurpation of Creation equality came when a group were “lifted up to be Teachers, Rulers, and Lawmakers over them that lifting them up; as if the earth were made peculiarly for them, and not for other weal.” Indeed, Winstanley directly traces the current wretched condition of the Commoners to the ‘Norman Yoke,’ or the unjustifiable and oppression political and legal regime enacted over the ancient British people in the wake of its conquest at the hands of the Normans in 1066. The new Norman regime had not only established “Manor Lords” over the Commons, Winstanley alleged, but also established a legal trade to ‘expound and interpret’ laws written in Norman and French, demanding that they receive a fee for the simple task of making the law legible to the common folk. Moreover, the legal community had ended the neighborhood judicial proceedings that had characterized Saxon England, instead placing great separation between the people and the execution of a (quite literally) foreign law.
Winstanley’s writings regularly refer to the “Law” in two senses: the fundamental “Law of Righteousness,” which Winstanley held to be based in the twin principles of “Reason and equity,” and the Norman “Law of Justice,” which had corrupted and corroded the former. The law of creation had given “to all Mankind, equall freedome, without respect of persons”—and under this law, each person had an equal claim to enjoy and live off the bounty of the earth in its fullness. And yet “the fall of Mankind from this righteous Law” ushered into a world of hierarchy and domination enforced by coercion, when “Mankind lives in division, contention, and covetousnesse; one part of Mankind hedging themselves into the earth by force and sword.” Not only does the fall of man herald the collapse of equality, but also the law of force, where “as experience shews, the strongest sword rules over the weakest.”
The Norman “Law of Justice” gives a veneer of legitimacy to this law of the sword. This “imaginary Judicature … indeed is but the declarative will of Conquerours, how they will have their subjects be ruled.” Indeed, Winstanley accused his enemies of hypocrisy in that they had given “freedom for the rich in the city … to the freeholders in the country and to priests and lawyers and lords of manors” while allowing “the poor no freedom.” Indeed, the legal system directly contradicted the law of freedom that had been no respecter of persons, in that “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.” And tyranny in every form was dependent upon the power of the law: the authority of the King was derived from the law; the law required the tithes that supported the ecclesiastical establishment; the law had provided the force to evict the common people from the Commons. Accordingly, Winstanley argues, any path towards freedom and equality must require a wholesale reform of the legal system. In the clearest summation of the Digger mission in The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced, Winstanley writes “The King’s old laws cannot govern a free commonwealth.” Indeed, “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.”
With this in mind, Winstanley’s appeal for justice was in large part an appeal for restoration of the law. While he blamed the Normans for the imposition of unjust and inequal laws on the English common law tradition, each successive regime had continued the same injustice: “Since William the Conqueror … all the kings that still succeeded did confirm the old laws, or else make new ones, to uphold that Norman conquest over us.” Even Parliament had violated its mandate (and the people’s trust) through their failure to overhaul the system at the conclusion of the Civil War. In a work directed to Parliament and the army, Winstanley begs them to, by the “power in your hands, reform the Law.” And, indeed, while the Digger encampment was found in violation of the codified laws of Winstanley’s time, he repeatedly emphasized that their reclamation and cultivation of the waste lands was in accordance with the earlier “Law of the Common-wealth of England likewise.” Yet while he was willing to entreat Parliament to this task of restoration, Winstanley had little faith that they could (or would) act decisively to restore the creation-equality of the people. Instead, Winstanley anticipated Christ’s second coming or parousia, in which Christ “rises up, and inlightens mankind” to see “the deceit and falsehood of this Beast, that hath deceived all the world.” In so doing, Christ would reveal the folly of hierarchical systems of landlordism, “kingly power,” ecclesiastical domination, and law—and cause people to see and adopt once more the equality that had belonged to them prior to the fall.
While Winstanley ultimately trusted in divine power to accomplish the much-needed restoration of egalitarian society, he continued to petition government with a series of proposals for legal reform. The most notable of these, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, presented a complete legal system for a utopian community.5 These proposals—dedicated to Oliver Cromwell himself—present a clear view of Winstanley’s vision for legal equality within the ideal community. The Law of Freedom contains 62 proposed laws; the first nine have to do with the legal system itself, outlining Winstanley’s broader philosophy of law. In stark contrast with the inscrutability of England’s own legal system, Winstanley’s proposed system is designed for near-maximal accessibility. Each law is short—some no more than a few words long. The entire system of laws were to be, by statute, read aloud to the citizenry assembled at least four times a year, ensuring that ordinary citizens were clearly appraised of what the law demanded of them. The law must, he asserts, by applied with a sort of strict textualism, as the words themselves without any interpretive coloring—to entirely preclude the need for corrupt lawyers or legal experts. In fact, Winstanley’s system is largely concerned with preventing and punishing corruption: aside from ordinary prescriptions like the right of the accused to face their accuser, the Law of Freedom strictly punishes false accusations (with the same punishment that the accused would have borne were they convicted). Similarly, magistrates who accept bribes or otherwise distort the plain meaning and fair application of the law are severely punished—even risking execution. And there would be no career politicians in Winstanley’s perfected regime, for “publique Offers [who] remain long in place of Judicature … will degenerate from the bounds of humility, honesty, and tender care of brethren.” Instead, public officials would face annual election, and new ‘overseers’ would immediately, upon taking office, audit the previous regime for fair and equal application of the law. Once again, overseers could be severely punished and removed from office for failing to obey the law. By such effort, Winstanley supposed, the commonwealth might avoid repeating the earlier “intolerable oppression either of bad laws, or of bad judges corrupting good laws.”
Conclusion
Despite Winstanley’s ambitions, the Digger movement soon fizzled out; initially driven from George Hill by angry locals, the colony reassembled at Little Heath in nearby Cobham. Within the year, the colony had failed, and its members had dispersed. Copycat movements emerged in a few other places—in Northhamptonshire and Iver, Buckinghamshire—and Winstanley published several more works (including the Law of Freedom in a Platform), before largely disappearing from the historical record. A man by the same name later appeared as a corn-merchant and a Quaker—perhaps it was the same Gerrard Winstanley, in search of a different type of egalitarian Christian mysticism. Yet Winstanley’s ideas continued to capture the attention of historians and activists in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. While many of these figures appreciated Winstanley for his apparent proto-marxist sensibilities, the real Winstanley presents a far more complicated set of ideas. John Lennon may have crooned “you may say I’m a dreamer,” yet Winstanley claimed to have received his marching orders in direct revelation from a “Spirit in Trance”; Lennon may have envisioned a world of perfect material equality, and yet Winstanley presented a careful and cogent analysis of how inequalities of all sorts were dependent upon inequality under the law. The power of landlords to evict the commoners from their ancestral rights, after all, was only possible through the cooperation of a corrupt legal profession. The tyranny over conscience exercised by the ecclesiastical establishment, likewise, derived its power from laws requiring tithes and attendance. And the entire system of law had been designed to further entrench the coercive power of the strong over the weak, or to lend a veneer of legitimate authority to the rule of the conquerors. For Winstanley, the entire system of legal power had been explicitly designed to serve the interests of the powerful, and had corrupted any semblance of fair administration through the incentives offered to the legal profession.
If there was to ever be freedom in England again, Winstanley knew, a true reformation was necessary: one that began in a spiritual transformation with Christ “rising” and ruling in the proper place in men’s hearts. Only then, he thought, could we install a system of laws based on the twin principles of “reason and equity,” and so work to restore the basic equality individuals had enjoyed in God’s creation, in which he had given “to all Mankind, equall freedom, without respect of persons.”
NOTES
- Winstanley, The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced. ↩︎
- Most notably, of course, that the Diggers were not filthy rich. ↩︎
- The True Levellers Standard Advanced. ↩︎
- Winstanley, An Humble Request to the Ministers of Both Universities. ↩︎
- There is some debate as to whether Winstanley was presenting a set of laws for a future perfected society, or a set of laws for a society-within-a-society, where some (significant) portion of Englishmen had chosen to voluntarily remove themselves from the broader system of buying, selling, and legal jockeying under the Norman yoke. ↩︎
Matthew H. Young is an Assistant Professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science & Policy Studies at Elon University. Follow him on X. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 