Diggers and Levellers

The Levellers originally came from the ranks of the New Model Army, a military unit organized by Parliament in opposition to King Charles I. Their chief demands included universal suffrage, religious tolerance and democratic representation. Initially allied with parliamentary army leader Oliver Cromwell, the Levellers eventually lost his support as their ideas and tactics became increasingly extreme, and their influence waned by the end of the 1640s.

The Diggers, by contrast, engaged in acts of civil disobedience in the fight for land reform. In 1649, an assemblage of merchants and craftsmen occupied St. George’s Hill in the county of Surrey with the aim of growing crops on the land. Their opponents pejoratively labeled them the Diggers; the occupiers, wanting to distinguish themselves from their counterparts in the New Model Army, referred to themselves as the “True Levellers.”

The group’s organizer, London tailor Gerrard Winstanley, wrote and distributed “The True Levellers Standard Advanced,” a pamphlet outlining their beliefs. Later known as the “First Diggers Manifesto,” the treatise denounces property ownership as an act of violent appropriation perpetrated by a ruling elite against the general population. In words drawn directly from the Bible, Winstanley asserts that, in cultivating the land on St. George’s Hill, his group aims to “lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor.” With its distinctly anti-capitalist ideology, the “First Diggers Manifesto” anticipates the writings of Karl Marx by more than two centuries. 

Other Digger collectives, each with their own declaration of rights, arose across England following the occupation of St. George’s Hill. The spread of these communes soon sparked a violent public reaction, however, and within a year the Digger settlements ceased to exist. 

Although the era of the Diggers and the Levellers was short-lived, their socioeconomic messages continue to resonate. The reforms advanced by the Levellers became the foundation of British democracy, while the Diggers provided the template for future nonviolent activism. By banding together to promote economic equality in the face of civic unrest, the Diggers and the Levellers remain important forerunners of the modern social justice movement.

Contributors: Maha Tazi, Stephen Meyer