The Diggers: England’s Seventeenth Century Communists?

In 1649, England was in the midst of the greatest political upheaval in its history. The King was dead, the monarchy had fallen, and all the old certainties lay in ruins. As the nascent Commonwealth tried to assert its authority, radical movements with new ways of imagining England’s future began to emerge upon the fringes of the Revolution. The most radical of these were the Diggers who, led by Gerrard Winstanley, proposed fundamental economic change. Two hundred years before Karl Marx, they could accurately be characterised as England’s first organised communist group. 

Winstanley was a former merchant who had, like many, fallen on hard times. Failed harvests had forced many into famine or destitution, and many had been pushed off their land by enclosure. His writings were nothing less than revolutionary. He argued that the rich owned England’s land but could not work it without the labour of the poor, and that England had "land enough to maintain all her children, and poverty came from the greed of the wealthy". He and his followers aimed to create a Christian form of agrarian communism, where wage labour, class divisions and private property were all things of the past. Winstanley saw the Norman Conquest as the moment inequality became rife in the land. William had torn up England’s common land, redistributing it to his soldiers, and the landowners of 1649 were the descendants of the invaders of 1066. The execution of the King represented the final end of the Conquest; its laws were abrogated, and the Commons must revert to the people. The abolition of private property would follow, changing the nature of man, and England would return to a time of grace not seen since Eden. 

His militancy was remarkable, and Winstanley and his followers sought to put it into practice. The Diggers, as they came to be known, settled upon a hill in Surrey and began to collectively tend to the land. Treatises were distributed from their settlement that spread Winstanley’s ideology, and the Diggers planned to establish agricultural colonies surrounding London. With the creation of a national movement of Diggers, their ideology would spread and grow, transforming society as more and more people left their private property and communally worked the land. Eventually, England would peacefully become the society that Winstanley envisioned. 

At first, the Digger movement spread fairly quickly. Large Digger colonies sprang up in Wellingborough and Iver, with smaller ones around London and in Kent, Dunstable, Bosworth and Nottinghamshire. However, local resistance was sometimes fierce, with Diggers attacked as outsiders. Parliament and the Council of State initially mocked the Diggers, but by the end of 1649, they began to see them as a threat. State harassment escalated, and in April 1650, the three primary Digger colonies were violently crushed, with many individuals arrested and the land and infrastructure burnt. The Diggers, for all their idealism, threatened the fundamental interests of the English state, and would never have been allowed to persist. Winstanley faded into obscurity and England’s radicals disappeared into memory. But what the Diggers represented was of far greater consequence than what they achieved. During England’s revolution, they provided an alternative vision of the future, and while their time had not yet come, their legacy can be seen in the politics of the last century. 

 Bibliography 

Brockway, Fenner, and Fenner Brockway, Britain’s First Socialists: The Levellers, Agitators and Diggers of the English Revolution, 1. publ (Quartet Books, 1980) 

Empson, Martin, ‘A Common Treasury for All: Gerrard Winstanley’s Vision of Utopia’, International Socialism, no. 154 (April 2017) <http://isj.org.uk/a-common-treasury-for-all/> [accessed 13 March 2026] 

Gurney, John, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution, Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester Univ. Press, 2012) 

——, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (Pluto Press, 2012) <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=3386694> [accessed 13 March 2026] 

Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, Repr (Penguin Books, 1980) 

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Tamás, Rebecca, ‘The Diggers’ Green Roots’, Tribune, 2021 <https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/the-diggers-green-roots>