Woodland commons in particular were vital to the poor for fuel and building materials as well as game, for grazing geese, pigs and sheep, for collecting herbs and nuts and mushrooms and berries, and catching fish in brooks. In the Forest of Dean, thousands eked out a living from the woods and wastes, while earning a little more in coal and iron mines, or as day labourers, or with a bit of fishing and waterfowling, or quarrying for grindstones and millstones. In the fens there were many such people, living in turf huts, burning turf fires. Marshes also provided reeds, turf for fuel, rushes for basket-making, which might bring in a bit of cash; hemp and flax for spinning; alders and willows for more baskets. Birds provided feathers as well as meat. When their woods were enclosed or their fens drained, the best they could hope for was usually a small plot of one or two acres.
For these people, the Civil War represented not a chance to claim their rights at last, but an opportunity for outbreaks of lawless destruction of the fencing and drainage systems they hated while authority was looking elsewhere. They did not want a new world. They wanted their old world back. And sometimes it was taken from them by the war. During the siege of Lydney House, near the Forest of Dean, Princes Rupert and Maurice raided parishes, looting property and burning every building (mostly humble cottages) that could give shelter to their enemies. The people fled deep into the mines, but came back to find smoking ruins where their huts had been.
And if they were not interested in political radicals, the radicals were not interested in them; the Levellers did have a couple of sentences about reopening common land, but it was scarcely a central plank of their platform. Only the Diggers were concerned at all with the rural labouring poor, and they wanted to bring more land under the plough, not free use of unimproved land. In this they may have sounded to their would-be beneficiaries rather like the white settlers in Botany Bay did to the Aborigines. Repeatedly exhorted to farm, the Koori people kept asking why on earth they should, when they had always had abundant food without having to do more than a few hours’ work a day? The near-hunter-gatherer economy of the forest edges and fens was similarly autonomous and unruly; grazing pigs stuffed themselves with acorns from Michaelmas to Martinmas, and could then be deliciously barbecued. As with the indigenous peoples of Australia, this rough pastoral was jeopardized because it no longer fitted anyone’s idea of how people might live. Charles I diligently sold off royal forests to nobles, who then enthusiastically cut them down.
Paradoxically, the eighteenth century was to revive the idea of living wild in the greenwood as the quintessence of English liberty, but the gentlemen who dreamed of riding with Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, might have found it difficult to manage on the diet of the poor of the seventeenth century. But Robin and his forest pals Clym of the Clough and Adam Bell remained popular with the poor too. The True Table of Robin Hood of 1632 survives in Pepys’s collection:
Poor men might safely pass by him
And some that way would choose,
For well they knew that to help them
He evermore did use
But when he knew a Miser rich
That did the poor oppress,
To feel his coin his hands did itch
He’d have it, more or less.
Ballads of Robin Hood went on being produced throughout the Civil War and English Republic years, ten in 1656–7 alone; indeed, most of the surviving Robin Hood ballads are sixteenth- or seventeenth-century compositions. Like fairy stories, they described a lost world of abbots, vast forests and vaster feasts, crusading kings and lying nuns. Wicked men meet a thoroughly deserved downfall, while the good are rewarded. The wicked are always rich, and the innocent always poor through no fault of their own. Especially, the wicked are often rich churchmen: they are not only greedy, but oppressive, music to the ears of Presbyterians and Independents alike: ‘These bishops and these archbishops/ Ye shall them bite and bind.’ The death of Laud on the scaffold was foreshadowed not only by the beheading of Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Wat Tyler’s men; it was also a story men knew from Robin Hood’s fleecing of the corrupt clerks. And yet these stories are also conservative, like enclosure protests: Robin’s aim is never to unsettle the social order, and particularly not the class structure, but to restore it after some disruption has made it malfunction. This logic of fixing something broken also animated the Diggers, but with a difference: they lacked the insistent loyalism of Robin and his outlaws, or of other medieval rebels. The convention of rebellion on behalf of monarchs who only needed to free themselves from evil counsellors was entirely absent.
The Levellers’ temporary alliance with the king illustrated the separation of economic issues and Leveller claims for political rights. Said William Walwyn, ‘Who ever heard me speak either in behalf of butchers or cobblers as to places of government? I profess I know not where, or when.’ But the belly of the state could still ache with hunger, and its owner could find a voice as a result. There were elements of such traditions in apparently diverse rebellions that centred on food, from Anna Trapnel’s fasts to Gerrard Winstanley’s Digging. Yet the Diggers were inspired by Leveller ideas, as expressed eloquently at Putney and in pamphlets: ‘Therefore we are resolved to be cheated no longer, nor be held under the slavish fear of you no longer, seeing the earth was made for us as well as you … If we lie still and let you steal away our birthrights, we perish; if we petition we perish also, though we have paid taxes, given free quarter and ventured our lives as much as you.’ Or, ‘Stop not your ears against the secret mourning of the oppressed … lest the Lord see it and be offended and shut his ears against your cries, and work a deliverance for his waiting people some other way than by you.’
Or as Leveller William Walwyn put it:
Look about you and you will find … thousands of miserable, distressed, starved … Christians … see how pale and wan they look, how coldly, raggedly and unwholesomely they are clothed; live one week with them in their poor houses, lodge as they lodge, eat as they eat, and no oftener, and be at the same pass to get that wretched food for a sickly wife, and hunger-starved children (if you dare do this for fear of death and diseases).
The war made people hungrier. Food production broke down: fields were untilled, grain unmilled. Poor relief collapsed. The transportation of food was hit by the destruction of roads and bridges. Fields were trampled flat by many boots, neglected, weed-filled. When Hugh Wolcott was forced to give up his farm, he said it was because of the war: ‘men have almost been at their wit’s end, for no Turkish slavery can be worse than hath been inflicted over us. We have been robbed and stripped of all our goods, both within doors and without, and led away captive from house to harbour, and like to suffer death.’
Winstanley thought poverty no bar to enlightenment: ‘The poorest man, that sees his maker, and lives in the light, though he could never read a letter in the book, dares throw the glove to all the human learning in the world, and declare the deceit of it.’ This light was an inner vision of God:
As I was in a trance not long since, diverse matters were present to my sight, which must not be here related. Likewise I heard these words: work together. Eat bread together. Declare this all abroad. Likewise I heard these words: Whosoever it is that labours in the earth, for any person or persons, that lifts up themselves as lords and rulers over others, and that doth not look upon themselves equal to others in the creation, The hand of the Lord shall be upon that labourer; I the Lord have spake it and I will do it; Declare this all abroad.
For Winstanley the regaining of this vision was redemption, for this was the vision Adam had lost at the Fall, which was a fall into covetousness. The Beasts of Revelation were kingly power, ‘which … makes way to rule over others thereby, dividing the creation, one part from another; setting up the conquerer to rule, making the conquered a slave, giving the Earth to some, denying the earth to others’; other beasts were the power of ‘the selfish laws’, "hanging, pressing, burning’, the ‘thieving art of buying and sellin
g’, an art to which Winstanley had himself unsuccessfully aspired, and clergy-power. The people can be saved from these terrible powers through the spirit of Christ welling up inside them, bringing back within them the natural sense of justice which existed before the Fall.
The Bible was full of cheering accounts of the rich confounded by the poor. The Magnificat is firm that the Lord will cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalt the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty. Or as godly Digger Everard put it, ‘to make the barren ground fruitful … To renew the ancient community of the enjoying of the fruits of the earth and to distribute the benefit thereof to the poor and needy, and to feed the hungry, and to clothe the naked.’ The Psalms, so popular with the New Model Army, are full of similar reversals. In Biblical language, then, Winstanley could write that ‘some are lifted up into the chair of tyranny, and others trod under the footstool of misery, as if the earth was made for a few, not for all men’. He had more careful ideas, too: a local government electorate of all men aged twenty and upwards, not excluding servants and those receiving alms, as the Levellers did.
However, the Diggers intended synergy; God’s grace could only act redemptively if they began the process. ‘When the earth becomes a common treasury as it was in the beginning, and the King of righteousness comes to rule in every one’s heart, then he kills the first Adam: for covetousness thereby is killed.’ The idea was to seize a moment. But like many such visionary plans to reform human society radically, it broke down in the face of opposition and grinding practicalities.
The leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, came to national prominence and published all his work in a tiny span of four years, 1648–51; his was a brief if shining moment. He was baptized in Wigan, in Lancashire, and was the son of a mercer. Like many others, the parish was riven by religious differences. There was a local grammar, and Winstanley probably went there, since he did know some Latin. The schoolmaster was a notorious figure: John Lewis, who was described by his own patron as a haunter of alehouses, a gambler, a blasphemer and a fighter. On 25 March 1630, Gerrard Winstanley was apprenticed to a woman, Sarah Gater, in London, of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Sarah was a widow, devour and powerfully learned, with a small, carefully chosen library of her own on medicine and religion, including a thick receipt book. Her deceased husband had been a lecturer at St Andrew Undershaft. She was distantly connected with his family. Sarah managed to carry on in independent trade until her death in 1656. Gerrard shared the house with her, her infant son William, a journeyman called Henry Mason, and one or two female servants. There were two other apprentices, too. It sounds cosy, but Gerrard was the only apprentice to whom Sarah left nothing in her will. Maybe it was religion that divided them, for Sarah was a fan of Isaak Walton, biographer of Donne and writer of the first manual of angling in English, who had himself begun in the cloth trade. Sarah also favoured the Arminian writings of Henry Mason.
Whatever their differences, Gerrard stayed with her until 1638. He established himself as a shopkeeper in the parish of St Olave, Old Jewry. He was probably a cloth trader, rather than a weaver, buying up cloth for resale. In September 1640 he married Susan King, daughter of a barber-surgeon, resident in St Lawrence Jewry. They had a servant called Jane Williams, and an apprentice, and they also had a lodger, as the Miltons did, to help make ends meet.
The vicar at St Olave was Thomas Tuke, removed in 1643 because he was ‘superstitious in practising and pressing the late innovations’. And yet Winstanley was an active parishioner here, apparently never abandoning the established Church. He didn’t even show up to elect the lecturers his parish appointed. But he did take the Solemn League and Covenant on 8 October 1643. Unlike other wives, Susan Winstanley did not sign below Gerrard’s signature.
He never was much of a businessman. When he set up his shop in 1638/9, he was among the poorer members of his household, and from 1641 he was operating on credit. By early 1642, the business had serious difficulties with cash flow. Bad debts and undercapitalization were the causes; he had shipped cloth to Ireland, and now the 1641 rising made it impossible to collect payments. From early 1643, the little enterprise teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Later in 1643, there was nothing for it but to wind up the business, and on 30 November he divided his remaining stock among his creditors. By 20 December 1643, he had settled his affairs and moved to Cobham, near Susan’s family. London had beaten him. ‘Beaten’, he wrote, ‘out of both estate and trade, and forced to accept the goodwill of friends crediting of me, to live a country-life.’
His business failure may have taught him about the unreliability of trade. The whole clothing industry was in recession, with cloth workers hard hit; little people who had moved off their scrabbled livings on poor land to the even more uncertain rewards of waged labour. Like Gerrard’s, their hopes had crashed around them.
Gerrard was now living ‘a country-life’, and he became a cattle entrepreneur. He bought up cattle, fattened them, and sold them at market. He worked hard, and by 1646 he was a householder again. He at once began pressing for the right to dig peat and turf for fuel on the manorial estate. He lived in an area dominated by the middling sort, dominated by passing trade on the old Portsmouth Road rather than by manors.
Then he was hit by another wave of economic disasters, which crushed another fledgling business: the harvest of 1647 was poor and grain and hay prices rose; there was a drought and a dearth of livestock; the Parliamentarian army began eating Surrey out of house and home. It was at some point in this difficult period of economic floundering that Winstanley underwent the kind of religious transformation which had overtaken Cromwell and Anna Trapnel earlier. He became a Baptist, and then made friends with a man named John Fielder, a future Quaker, and a former army radical called William Everard, who had been blooded at Burford Church and knew just how menacing new ideas could seem. He also became acquainted with Lawrence Clarkson, and with Samuel Highland, a Leveller who led an Independent church in Southwark. This powerful mix of influences turned him into the man who inspired and led the Diggers.
The Diggers were men who wanted to perform something close to an act of Christian magic: on themselves and on the land. Their acts were both practical and symbolic. They were at St George’s Hill – a magical name, recalling holiness triumphant over evil – from April to August 1649. And they began on April Fools’ Day. Aubrey calls this ‘Fools holy day’, and ascribes it to German influence. It was a Robin Hood day in which the poor took from the rich, a day of tricksterdom, of ritual reversals, like the spectacle of enclosure protesters dressed as women. Their starting-date was a sign that they were trying for an almost magical transformation; had they been trying for legitimacy they could have chosen Plough Monday.
Their first step was to cut turf on the heath, a perfectly conventional exercise of commons rights. But then they did something astonishing. They treated common land as arable land. They dug, they manured, and they planted.
There were never more than fifty of them at most. But they were terrifying – to London newsbook writers, at any rate:
The new fangled people that began to dig on St George’s Hill in Surrey, say, they are like Adam, they expect a general restoration of the Earth to its first condition, that themselves were called to seek and begin this great work, which will shortly go on throughout the whole world: and therefore they begin to dig and dress the Earth: One of them getting up a great burden of thorns and briars: thrust them into the pulpit at the church at Walton, to stop out the Parson. They profess a great deal of mildness and would have the world believe, they have dreamt Dreams, seen visions, heard strange voices, and have dictates beyond man’s teaching. They profess they will not fight, knowing that not to be good for them. They would have none to work for hire, or be servants to other men, and say there is no need of money: yet they offer, that if any gentleman, & c, that hath not been brought up to labour, shall bring a stock, and put it into their hand, he shall have a part
with them; a pure contradiction of themselves. They allege, that the Prophesy in Ezek[iel] is to be made good at this time, where is promised so great a change, that the travellers which pass by, shall take notice, and say, This land which was barren and waste is now become fruitful and pleasant like the Garden of Eden.
Or as the Diggers put it:
Rich men receive all they have from the labourer’s hand, and what they give, they give away other men’s labours, not their own. Therefore they are not righteous actors on the earth.
The poor would go with cap in hand and bended knee to gentlemen or farmers, begging and entreating to work with them for 8d or 10d a day, which doth give them occasion to tyrannise over poor people.
Later, ‘labouring poor men who in times of scarcity pine and murmur for want of bread, cursing the rich behind his back and before his face, cap and knee and a whining countenance’. Once, the unrighteous had been the papists; then it was the turn of witches. Now the rich were those not blessed by God.
So the poor were to withdraw their labour. All labourers were called on to stop working for large farms. ‘What’, Winstanley asked, ‘would you do if you had not such labouring men to work for you?’ ‘For what is the reason that great gentlemen covet after so much land? Is it not because farmers and others creep to them in a slavish manner, proffering them great sums of money for such and such parcels of it, which does give them an occasion to tyrannise over their fellow creatures which they call their inferiors?’ wrote Robert Coster. Yet the goal was never to destroy hierarchy – and it was they who were persecuted. The local landlords and lesser freeholders were determined to be rid of them. The Diggers’ crops were trampled, their animals driven away, their houses pulled down, and their safety menaced.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 62