The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  After they were forced out, they moved to Little Heath, probably in late summer of 1649; not an ideal moment to move a community dependent on what it grew. There they stayed for eight months, until a local minister set some parishioners on to set fire to their houses and burn, too, their clothes and household stuff, ‘up and down the Common’, wrote Winstanley, ‘not pitying the cries of many little children and their frighted Mothers’. In the meantime, other Digger groups had mushroomed, at Iver in Buckinghamshire, Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, elsewhere too. They were mere scrapings, easily erased as if they had never been.

  The Diggers’ opponents portrayed them as harmless lunatics at best, ‘feeble souls and empty bellies’. ‘Their actions hitherto have been only ridiculous’, said the Council of State. The first army officer sent to investigate said it was ‘not worth the writing nor yet taking notice of’. Only Henry Saunders, a paid informer who may have been hoping for more cash in exchange for more important information, thought the Diggers were a menace, and pointed out that numbers were continuing to rise while the Diggers were also firing the heath, thus threatening the town.

  Less liked by eager left-of-centre history than the Diggers, the locals at Walton were equally representative of the poor. They didn’t like a mob of strange people moving onto their common land and wanted to ship them out. They were used to having to do so, and they were good at it. On 11 June, the new traditionalism of the Diggers clashed head-on with an older kind of rural protest against the misappropriation of common land when four Diggers were badly beaten by a group of men dressed in women’s clothes. It was meant to mock and shame. The Diggers’ foes were not big landlords; one was a carpenter, and another a sheep farmer, though one was a freeholder whose lands near St George’s Hill were perhaps most directly affected, and who had been attacked in the past by one of the Diggers in front of his ten-year-old son.

  In Cobham it was no better. In 1646 Winstanley himself had been fined for digging peat on waste ground. But at least the Diggers had some friends there. Other Diggers in Northamptonshire had some local support, while Winstanley’s more moderate stance on private property must have been reassuring. People might even have hoped that the Diggers’ methods would really relieve the poor.

  But somehow it all went sour. Winstanley thought the gentry were to blame, and as a result his own views became more extreme, which aroused his opponents to further efforts. It was also far from reassuring for the regime that Winstanley was arguing for civilians’ rights; soldiers, he said, should not have all common land at the expense of the people whose taxes and produce had sustained the army. Magpie-like, as ever, Winstanley had picked up another bright glitter of popular protest with which to bedizen his own ideas, and was now channelling the Clubmen.

  All the time he was at the Digger colony, he maintained a separate residence. He had grazing land still, on which he kept his own cattle and pastured others for a fee. He contracted with a local landlord to purchase and reap the harvest from several local fields. Though he described himself as a labourer in 1649, all the Diggers were thus described.

  What were women to do among the Diggers? Girls were to be taught to read. Boys were to learn skills through apprenticeships, though Winstanley added, perhaps tellingly, that if a boy proved to have different skills from the ones in which he was being trained, then ‘the spirit of knowledge may have his full growth in man, to find out the secret in every art’. Girls were simply consigned to ‘easy neat works’ like needlework and spinning. And what did the Diggers actually do all day, when not fighting off their irate neighbours? They refer to ploughing, but may not have had any ploughs. Their land was unproductive because their goal was to farm areas that were waste or common. Scratching at unyielding soil with primitive tools, they were returning to the Iron Age, not a golden age.

  The leadership was caught up in what they hoped were higher channels. Winstanley and William Everard met Fairfax in London on 20 April 1649, but refused to remove their hats. Fairfax, they said firmly, was but their fellow-creature. Besides, they said, they brought their hats to wear on their heads, not to hold in their hands. A newspaper reported that ‘they were asked the meaning of the phrase “Give honour where honour is due”, they seemed to be offended, and said, that their mouths should be stopped who gave them that offence’. These menacing words alarmed everyone, although Fairfax paid the Diggers a personal visit in Surrey, and seems to have found them harmless and mad.

  Whatever the Diggers did, it proved fundamentally unattractive to most people. They were not joined by the labouring poor because the majority didn’t know Winstanley was there, or because they thought that the authorities would probably shut it all down, and thought themselves better off in their own villages. A fourth reason might be that emigration offered a better alternative. Winstanley’s belief that the state would uphold him and his followers against the landlords was manifestly millenarian rather than pragmatic. The landowners soon called in the army, and Winstanley was in no position to criticize them, since by the end he too had come to believe state power might be needed to support and control his ideal society.

  Winstanley imagined a world where a hardworking labour force created abundant food that could be given out free from huge communal warehouses, given to anyone who came as long as they worked: ‘for those that come in and work, they shall have meat, drink, and clothes, which is all that is necessary for the life of man; and that for money, there was not any need of it, nor of any clothes more than to cover their nakedness’. It was to be like the pleasant land of Cockaigne, a dreamland of sausage houses and bacon trees, but different, too, because that was a fantasy of endless, abundant meat. Winstanley didn’t like the idea of eating huge quantities of meat; he linked it with the wastefulness of the diet of the rich. Having worked with cows, he thought of them as rational beings. They were, as Winstanley explained to Fairfax, to provide only milk and cheese; they were not to be killed for meat. This showed, Winstanley thought, that he was different from the army, who, he felt sure, would have eaten the cows, cashed them in, consumed them rather than making them produce.

  Winstanley hated waste. His loathing extended even to what he called ‘seed-spilling’, something he associated with too much commerce with women: too much sex, in other words, which he links with the Biblical sin of Onan; such seed-spilling ‘produces weakness and much infirmness through immoderate heat’, and hence spawns ‘sickly weakly’ children. Seed, Winstanley felt, should be carefully husbanded. He was only voicing the common belief of his day that too much sex was a menace to men’s health and fertility, but it chimed ideally with his dislike of commerce and throwaway commodity culture, his loathing of waste. Because of his transformation of the struggle between good and evil from a war between men to a war within men, Winstanley saw the Devil as an interior force, King Flesh, ruling within man, and creating a corrupt social order. ‘Gaffer dragon’, as Winstanley called him, was both inside men and outside them. ‘That everlasting covetous kingly power, is corrupt blood, that runs in every man, more or less, till reason the spirit of burning cast it out.’

  Winstanley had identified the problem; now he provided an answer:

  And the common people, consisting of soldiers, and such as paid taxes and free-quarter, ought to have the freedom of all waste and common land, and crown-land equally among them; the soldiery ought not in equity to have all, nor the other people that paid them to have all, but the spoil ought to be divided between them that stayed at home, and them that went to war; for the victory is for the whole nation.

  In The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced, the land is a mother who cannot provide milk because she is shut away from her baby: ‘Thy Mother, which is the earth, that brought us all forth: That as a true Mother, loves all her children. Therefore do not thou hinder the mother Earth, from giving all her children suck, by thy enclosing it into particular hands, and holding up that cursed bondage of enclosure by thy power.’

  At a time when nobles were const
antly splattering the greenwood with the blood of expertly gralloched deer, when gifts of game implied aristocratic status, Winstanley’s moderation was a criticism of the bloodiness and bloodthirstiness of the upper classes.

  The tiny community was bedevilled by what Winstanley called the ‘snapsack boys’, soldiers, hungry plunderers who hoped to carry food away in their snapsacks without working for it, and by ‘ammunition drabs’, army camp-followers, also hungry. For Winstanley did not welcome everyone, it seems. His ideal community was about locality, especially ironic since he was himself an incomer to Cobham.

  But Winstanley wasn’t a farmer, and he wasn’t a woodsman. Like so many who were desperate, he was a small tradesman, a cloth trader, urban rather than rural. When he thought about ploughs and their dignity he did so as a townie. He knew about grazing, perhaps, but he may not have known anything about how to grow food. However, he knew the romance of the greenwood, the waste land as a place that could be home to those who were outsiders. When he wrote about oppressive landlords, he thought of them in Robin Hoodish terms, as Normans: ‘now if they get their foot fast in the stirrup, they will lift themselves again into the Norman saddle’. The Army, too, was ‘Norman’. When Winstanley and Everard met with Fairfax, Everard expressed the whole story clearly and fully, straight from John Foxe and The Gest of Robin Hood:

  Everard said, All the liberties of the people were lost by the coming in of William the Conquerer, and that ever since, the people of God had lived under tyranny and oppression worse than that of our forefathers under the Egyptians. But now the time of deliverance was at hand, and God would bring his people out of this slavery, and restore them to their freedom, in enjoying the fruits and benefits of the earth. And that there had lately appeared to him a vision, which bade him arise, and dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof, that their intent is, to restore the creation to its former condition.

  He thought of the new English republic as a new kind of enclosure, cutting people off from the land. By contrast, he thought of himself and the Diggers as returning to an Edenic state of oneness with the land. In Winstanley, the search for a New Jerusalem collides headlong with the fleeing figure of Robin Hood. His work is the ultimate expression of woodland food protest, conservative and theatrical. It seems remarkable to us only because the voices that speak through it are usually inaudible above the roar of history. But there were many of them, people who lived the life and people who only dreamed of it.

  Winstanley was above all a writer, an early modern Upton Sinclair, an Orwell with a powerful sense of the pain and misery of the poor. Like Orwell, he had experienced those miseries, that sense of failure that gnawed at the heart every time hunger gnawed the belly. He knew. What he made was like what Defoe would make later on; a new world inhabited imaginatively, through words. And like Defoe, he was grappling with how to be godly in an age of trade, and like him his answer was to make a paradise inside himself where everything could be lit up and resolved. For centuries, people have felt they knew the Diggers, knew their ideals. Winstanley is the author of himself, himself as Robin Crusoe, bridging the Middle Ages and the coming of the modern capitalism he so hated.

  Then they came privately by day to Gerrard Winstanley’s house, and drove away four cows, I not knowing of it; and some of the lord’s tenants rode to the next town shouting the diggers were conquered, the diggers were conquered. Truly it is an easy thing to beat a man and cry conquest over him, after his hands are tied as they tied ours. But if their cause be so good, why will they not suffer us to speak?

  I feel myself now like a man in a storm, standing under shelter upon a hill in peace, waiting till the storm be over to see the end of it.

  Winstanley’s co-leader William Everard described himself, oddly, as ‘of the race of the Jews’. He didn’t mean he was, literally, Jewish; he meant that he was like the Chosen People, enslaved, persecuted, about to be redeemed. The new and powerful image of Jewishness was on the political agenda for the fledgling English republic. The Jews had of course been excluded from England by Edward I in 1290. A few crept in unacknowledged, after the Sephardim had been expelled from Iberia by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492; one Jewish family, the Bassanos, were noted court musicians from Venice, and their daughter Aemilia Lanyer became a published poet. None of these Jews practised their religion openly, and many may really have been Christians.

  And yet there was an enthusiastic philo-Semitic element in English godliness that kept Jewishness on the agenda. Humanists had eagerly studied Hebrew to try to understand the Old Testament better. But above all, the godly expected the millennium soon, very soon, and believed it would be preceded by the Jews’ conversion. Some people wanted to readmit the Jews to England for the precise purpose of converting them and bringing about the Second Coming. The Baptists Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright petitioned Fairfax for the readmission of the Jews as early as 1648/9. Richard Overton was another who favoured the cause of toleration; in The Arraignment of Mr Persecution, he wrote passionately: ‘How then can we complain of the vengeance that is at this time upon us and our children, that have been so cruel, so hateful, so bloody-minded to them and their children? We have given them the cup of trembling, surely we must taste of the dregs: Hearken therefore no longer to those which teach this bloody doctrine of persecution.’

  In the autumn of 1650, Gerrard found employment for himself and some of the other ‘poor brethren’ on the estate of Lady Eleanor Davies at Pirton in Hertfordshire, apparently serving as her estate steward. She was a woman with a powerful reputation. The daughter of Baron Audeley, later the Earl of Castlehaven, she spent hours every day studying the Bible. Any man who tried to silence her by the weight of his authority was, she thought, doomed. By the time she hired Winstanley she was famous for her accurate prophecies. These, interpreted variously as brilliance or madness by her contemporaries, were a way of recounting a terrible story which explained and justified the life and death of a little boy who couldn’t speak. Eleanor had a son, Jack, who was an anxiety – he was mute. ‘It is certain he understands everything that is spoken to him, without making any signs, so the defect must be in his tongue.’ Jack drowned in an accident when he was still a child. Eleanor never wrote about her feelings when Jack died, but one can catch a glimpse of them in her warm response to her daughter Lucy’s loss of a child. Eleanor had a vivid dream, of a child’s severed head, crying inconsolably. Shortly after Jack died, Eleanor found a boy of thirteen called George Carr, and she took him into her home in the spring of 1625. He was dumb, as Jack had been. In George, Eleanor had rediscovered her lost son, and thus found a way to begin her life again. But George also made claims to mystical knowledge. People tested him; they opened the Bible and asked him to act out its contents, they made loud noises to check if he could hear. He was asked to guess the number of items in a sealed box or bag. And then there was another miracle, the one for which Eleanor had probably hoped years ago, with another small speechless boy. George began to talk.

  And somehow that unlocked Eleanor too; she too began to speak, to prophesy. It was as if her identity had merged with George’s. Her pleasure in George was shortlived, though. He grew terrified, ‘and provoked to speak, lost the wonderful gift [of prophecy] for that time and after went beyond sea’. Eleanor herself soon became even more famous than George had been. On 25 July 1625 she had her first vision, in the early morning. She was awakened by a voice, which said, ‘there is nineteen years and a half to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek virgin’. (Eleanor had a fine aristocratic disdain for laws of grammar and syntax.) The voice belonged to the prophet Daniel. She was at Englefield, which she called Angelfield, the Berkshire manor she felt was especially blessed. (When she did leave home, Eleanor always chose to stay at inns called The Angel.) Later, it would be engulfed by the war; already there was a field nearby which Eleanor called Hell, where the old, the blind, the lame would gather to beg. And later still, Eleanor would re-imagine the name as ‘England’s bloody f
ield’; the second Battle of Newbury was fought very close to her house. As the meek virgin, Eleanor was also the Virgin Mary, pregnant with the Word. Her prophecies replaced her lost children; they filled her empty arms. All those dead sons … It was as if Eleanor could only tell her own story over and over and over, a story of the death of a dumb son, a story of a dumb son who learned to speak and so was saved.

  In May of 1609 she was married to the thirty-six-year-old Sir John Davies. He was clever, but also difficult to like. It was a quarrelsome marriage. At one point she told him that he would be dead in three years; to bear out her words, she began wearing mourning dress for him. Eleanor kept it up with the perseverance of an angry toddler. They were dining with friends some months after this quarrel, in early December 1626. Suddenly, Eleanor began crying loudly. Trying to carry off the awkward situation, John said, jokily, ‘I pray weep not while I am alive, and I will give you leave to laugh while I am dead.’ Three days later, on 7 December, he did die. Eleanor married again after just three months, this time choosing Sir Archibald Douglas, whom she saw as the true heir to the throne, since he was James I’s bastard son. Soon people were consulting her. Lady Berkshire invited Eleanor to her son’s christening, and Eleanor declined. Lady Berkshire was worried, and pressed for an explanation. Finally, Eleanor told her that the baby would die. He did. Henrietta Maria, like many another insecure wife to a member of England’s royal family, was anxious and keen to get advice from those who knew of the beyond. Eleanor met her one day coming from Mass. It was 1627, and Henrietta asked Eleanor when she would be with child, and also ‘what success the Duke would have’. Eleanor reassured the queen; she predicted the death of the glittering, sinuous, unpopular favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham before the end of August 1628. When he did die – and in August – her reputation was confirmed. By the time the Diggers were active, Eleanor had been confined in the Gatehouse and in Bedlam on the orders of the Privy Council. Between May 1641 and January 1645, she produced twelve tracts, seven in 1644 alone.