Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution

251 Pages·2007·1.443 MB·English

by  John Gurney

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Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger
Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
Brave community
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Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain
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This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the inter-
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literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute
to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain.
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rP Stuart London PETERLAKE
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© Communities in early modern England: networks, place, rhetoric
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iryp Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 NICHOLASTYACKE
oC Charitable hatred: tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700 ALEXANDRAWALSHAM
Crowds and popular politics in early modern England JOHNWALTER
Political passions: gender, the family and political argument in England, 1680–1714 RACHELWEIL
Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
Brave community
The Digger movement in
the English Revolution
JOHN GURNEY
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00 University Press
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distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
Copyright © John Gurney 2007
The right of John Gurney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published byManchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
andRoom 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed exclusively in the USA by
Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in Canada by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 0 7190 6102 8 hardback
EISBN 978 1 8477 9143 6
First published 2007
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Printed in Great Britain by CPI, Bath
Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
‘For then we shall see
Brave Community,
When Vallies lye levell with Mountaines’.
Robert Coster, A Mite Cast into the Common Treasury(1649), p. 6.
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Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
For my parents,
Joyce and Dick Gurney
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Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:53:55.
Contents
PREFACE—viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS—x
LISTOFABBREVIATIONS—xii
1 Parish, community and social relations in Cobham 1
2 The parish of Cobham and the Civil War 31
3 Gerrard Winstanley 62
4 Winstanley: the early writings 90
5 The Diggers on St George’s Hill 121
6 The Diggers and the local community 153
7 Aftermath 210
INDEX—229
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vii
Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:54:10.
Preface
John Coulton, a yeoman living in the parish of Cobham in Surrey, drew up his will on
15 June 1652. The will contained no lengthy preamble or dedicatory clause, and
Coulton expressed only his desire to settle his ‘estate for the peace and quiett of my
children and friends after my decease’. Jane, his wife, was made sole executrix, and
bequests ranging from 20sto £30, and amounting in total to £117, were made to seven
of his children and one grandchild.1Coulton’s family had long been settled in Cobham,
and he was an established member of his local community. He had inherited a customary
holding of approximately thirty acres in the Cobham tithing of Downside, and had for
many years played a major role in manorial and parochial affairs. He was a long-standing
member of the Cobham manorial homage, and during the Civil War he had helped to
assess and collect wartime taxes and to compile accounts of the costs incurred by
Cobham’s parishioners in their contributions to the parliamentary war effort.2Coulton’s
career is at first sight unremarkable, and many of the activities in which he engaged
were typical of those of respected members of the ‘middling sorts’ in parishes across
southern England. What is unusual about his will, however, is the reference in it to ‘my
friend Jerrard Winstanly’, whom he named as one of the overseers appointed to assist
in its execution. Winstanley was also one of the three witnesses to the will, which was
proved on 14 September following.3
It was just three years before the signing of this will that Gerrard Winstanley had
achieved widespread fame as leading figure in the Digger movement, a movement that
.d had set out to declare the earth a common treasury and to call for an end to all private
e
vre property and buying and selling. Winstanley and his companions had attempted to put
ser sthg tSht eGire ovirsgieo’ns Hinitlol ianc ttihoen n ieni gAhpbroiul r1i6n4g9 p abryi sdhi gogf iWnga latonnd- opnla-Tnhtianmg etsh,e a nwda sbtey alasnsedrst ionng
ir llA the right of all poor people to work the land in common. The Diggers’ programme
.sse represented a deliberate challenge to existing and familiar patterns of property holding,
rP ytisre andI tt hheaisr aocfttievnit ibeese pnr othvookuegdh ft utrhiaotu tsh oep Dpoigsgiteiorsn .were outsiders to the communities in
vinU which they sought to operate, their disruptive activities leading to their swift ejection
retse from the commons by angry locals. The reality is however more complex. John Coulton
hcn – a yeoman farmer and solid member of his local community – was one of those who
aM joined Winstanley on St George’s Hill in 1649, and he remained with the Diggers until
.70 they finally abandoned their work in April 1650. Coulton was, moreover, by no means
0
2
© alone among Cobham inhabitants in joining or sympathising with the Diggers. Although
thg many Diggers would have had few local connections, it is apparent that throughout the
irypo digging episode some of Winstanley’s most active supporters were from Cobham.
C
Popular opposition to the Diggers in Walton-on-Thames was intense and unremitting,
and from the start the Diggers were treated there as outsiders. Their experiences in
Cobham, where they transferred their activities in August 1649 and where they remained
viii
Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:54:18.
Preface
until April 1650, were rather different, and feelings towards them in that parish were
much more mixed than had been the case in Walton.
For Cobham’s inhabitants, the Digger episode did not represent an imposition from
the outside, or sudden incursion into an unsuspecting rural community by radicals with
no local ties. It was, rather, an episode rooted in local experience, and one that reflected
tensions and conflicts that had long affected the community. A major aim of this book
is, therefore, to explore the local background to the Digger movement and to assess the
very different reactions to the Diggers’ activities in Walton and Cobham. Chapter 1 will
therefore seek to provide a detailed account of social relations and social change in
Cobham in the decades preceding the Diggers’ occupation of the commons, and in the
following chapter the impact of civil war in the local community will be examined.
The Digger movement has attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years, not
least as a result of Christopher Hill’s pioneering work on radical ideas in the English
Revolution in his 1972 book The World Turned Upside Down.4Yet with the exception of
brief but important studies by Sir Keith Thomas and Brian Manning,5most recent work
on the movement has focused on the thought of Gerrard Winstanley, rather than on those
who joined him in digging and planting the common lands.6The focus on Winstanley is
understandable, given his extraordinary interest as writer and thinker. It is also the case
that without Winstanley there would have been no Digger movement. The Diggers were
very different from the Levellers or early Quakers, among whom there were several figures
who could be seen to have played a leading role. In the case of the Diggers, however, it
was Winstanley whose vision led them to St George’s Hill and who promoted and
defended the Diggers’ cause in print. Gerrard Winstanley remains an enigmatic figure,
and the subject of much controversy. While the main focus of this book is on the Digger
movement as a whole, a subsidiary aim is therefore to reassess Winstanley’s career and
intellectual development in the light of new evidence, and to call into question many of
the assumptions currently held about his background, connections and ideas.
.de NOTES
vre
ser sthg 12 TBheleo Nw,a tpipo.n 2a,l 6A–rc7h, 3iv2e,s 3 (9h,e 4r3e,a 1ft3e2r, T17N3A. ), PROB11/224, fol. 307v.
ir llA 3 TNA, PROB11/224 fol. 307v.
.sse 4 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English
rP ytisre 5 RKeevitohl uTthioonm(aLso, n‘Adnonot, h1e9r7 D2)i.gger broadside’, P&P, 42 (1969), pp. 57–68; Brian Manning,
vin 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution(London, 1992), pp. 109–32.
U
re 6 David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: A Study of the
tseh Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley(London, 1940); Olivier Lutaud, Winstanley:
cna Socialisme et Christianisme sous Cromwell (Paris, 1976); T. Wilson Hayes, Winstanley
M
.7 the Digger: a Literary Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English revolution(Cambridge,
0
02 Massachusetts, 1979); Timothy Kenyon, Utopian Communism and Political Thought in
©
th Early Modern England(London, 1989); George Shulman, Radicalism and Reverence: the
g
iryp Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley(Berkeley, 1989); Andrew Bradstock, Faith in
oC the Revolution: the Political Theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley(London, 1997);
David Boulton, Gerrard Winstanley and the Republic of Heaven(Dent, 1999). See also
the important chapter on Winstanley and the Diggers in James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger:
Class Struggle in the English Revolution(London, 2000), pp. 367–433.
ix
Gurney, John Richard. <i>Brave Community : The Digger Movement in the English Revolution</i>, Manchester
University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=1069485.
Created from adelaide on 2019-10-24 04:54:18.