Gerrard Winstanley (1609 - September 10, 1676) was an English Protestant religious reformer and political activist during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell who was aligned with the group that was known as the True Levellers, or Diggers.
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Winstanley was the son of a grocer; he was born in Wigan, Lancashire. He moved to London as a youth and became an apprentice, and ultimately a member of the tailors' guild. The English Civil Wars, however, disrupted his business, and Winstanley was compelled to move back to his native district.
There, Winstanley published a tract called The New Law of Righteousness, advocating a sort of Christian communism, and arguing that "in the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another." Winstanley took as his basic texts the Biblical sacred history, with its affirmation that all men were descended from a common stock; the scepticism about the rulership of kings voiced in the Books of Samuel, and the New Testament's affirmations that God was no respecter of persons, and there were no masters nor slaves, Jews or Gentiles, male nor female under the New Covenant; from these and similar texts he reinterpreted Christian teaching as calling for what would later be called communism, and the abolition of property and aristocracy.
"Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake," wrote Winstanley.
This touched a nerve in certain circles in England, where religious enthusiasms and political proposals unthinkable in more settled times were already in circulation, among them the ideas put forth by John Lilburne and the Levellers. The theme was very old, though, in English radical thought; the theme went back at least to the days of Wat Tyler's rebellion, when John Ball's verse circulated:
Life and major works
Aligning himself with a group of similarly disaffected veterans from the New Model Army, in 1649 Winstanley and his followers took over vacant or common lands in Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Northamptonshire, and began cultivating the land and distributing the crops without charge to their followers. After local landowners took fright from the Diggers' activities, in 1650 Cromwell ordered that the Diggers be beaten and that their crops and tools be destroyed. The Digger experiment ended when these orders were carried out.
Winstanley continued to advocate the redistribution of land; and in 1652 published another tract called The New Law of Freedom, arguing from a Christian basis for a society where property and wages were abolished.
In 1660, Winstanley moved to Cobham and joined the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. He later worked as a cloth merchant in London.
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