Who is gerrard winstanley

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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Subjects: Philosophy. Reference entries Winstanley, Gerrard b. By the end of the week between 20 and 30 people were reportedly labouring the entire day at digging. It was said that they intended to plough up the soil and sow it with seed corn. Yet they also apparently threatened to pull down and level all park pales, thereby evoking fears of an anti-enclosure riot a familiar form of agrarian protest.

Everard seems to have been a Parliamentarian spy during the English Civil War, was implicated in a plot to kill Charles I, gaoled and subsequently cashiered from the army. Thereafter he was imprisoned by the bailiffs of Kingston in Surrey, accused of blasphemously denying God, Christ, the authenticity of the scriptures and the efficacy of prayer, and then charged with interrupting a church service in a threatening manner.

He also called himself a prophet and was portrayed as a mad man. His business, however, had been severely disrupted by wartime, reducing him to bankruptcy. Afterwards with his wife Susan he relocated to Cobham in Surrey, supporting himself as a grazier by pasturing cattle, harvesting winter fodder and digging peat on waste land — for which he and several others were fined by the local manorial court as inhabitants they lacked the customary rights of tenants to take fuel from the commons.

These obstacles proved insurmountable and after less than 21 weeks the Diggers reluctantly abandoned their efforts. A new colony established on the Little Heath in neighbouring Cobham sometime in late August endured for approximately 34 weeks until mid-April when the Diggers were forcibly evicted.

Indeed, not until the growth of bourgeois liberal-, socialist- and Marxist-inspired historical studies did they begin to merit extensive discussion — notably with the publication in of a book by Eduard Bernstein, a German journalist exiled in London, which traced the struggle for democracy and social reform together with the growth of atheistic and communistic tendencies in early modern England.

Since then the Diggers have been successively appropriated, first by campaigners for public ownership of land and Protestant Nonconformist believers in peaceful co-existence, subsequently in the service of new political doctrines that have sought legitimacy partly through emphasizing supposedly shared ideological antecedents.

Recently they have even been insensitively incorporated within a constructed Green heritage. All of which is a remarkable legacy for a defeated movement and Winstanley himself, whose extant writings were published several in more than one edition between and Prompted by the arrest of his friend William Everard for blasphemy, Winstanley questioned the authority of clergymen and academics to judge religious opinion.

He advanced the argument that everyone, however sinful, could be saved. Like George Fox , Winstanley asserted that direct communication with the indwelling spirit of God that is present in all creatures is a surer guide to spiritual truth than religious dogma.

Winstanley's early writings culminated in The New Law of Righteousness in which he envisioned a just and harmonious society guided by spiritual regeneration through Christ. He explained his belief that the miseries of the world result from men turning from God, whom he equates with Reason, to satisfy greed and the pursuit of power. Poverty and inequality stem from the selfish buying and selling of land and property, and could be eradicated by communal living and an acceptance of the risen Christ.

Four days later, the King was beheaded at Whitehall. England was declared a "Commonwealth and free state. O n 1 April , Winstanley, William Everard and a small group of local people began cultivating common land on St. George's Hill in the parish of Walton in Surrey. It stated the central True Leveller belief that God had created the Earth as a common treasury to be shared equally by everyone. The execution of the King and the abolition of the House of Lords was a sign that the rule of tyrants was coming to an end and that the English people could now throw off the "Norman yoke" that had enslaved them since the time of William the Conqueror.

The landless poor should be free to cultivate the commons and waste lands in order to support themselves. A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England , issued in June , was the first of a series of appeals that called upon MPs, the Army, the gentry and clergy to honour the promises implicit in Parliament's declaration of a free Commonwealth.

The activities of the Surrey Diggers soon provoked complaints to the Council of State and Sir Thomas Fairfax was ordered to investigate. Fairfax questioned Winstanley and Everard at Whitehall and later visited the community for himself.

He was reassured to find that the Diggers were peaceful and posed no threat to the Commonwealth. Local freeholders, however, were not so well disposed towards them. In June, four Diggers were beaten up by a gang of men dressed as women. In July, a group of Diggers, including Winstanley, was indicted for trespass at Kingston court and fined. Under continual harassment from the residents of Walton, the Diggers abandoned St George's Hill in August and relocated to Little Heath in the neighbouring parish of Cobham.

During the winter of , Winstanley made contact with other True Leveller communities around the country and tried to consolidate the movement.