Common Treasury?

Politics and economics are inevitably intertwined. If people feel worse off, they will more often than not blame the government and vote (if voting is permitted and fair) to remove it. If, therefore, you change the political landscape, there is surely scope, if not desire, to change the economic one.

The execution of King Charles I in 1649 is a case in point. The monarchy, as it was conceived in, say, 1639, had been dismantled, not only literally but legally. Despite the efforts, some of which were honest, on both sides, the distrust and intransigence engendered by years of plotting and warfare led to the demolition of the political and social hierarchy as it had been known. The question was: what happens next?

Perhaps the most radical reform propositions put forward were those of the ‘Diggers’, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the ‘True Levellers’. The Levellers themselves were a more radical organisation, proposing to extend the franchise but maintain property rights. The Diggers objected that the poorest people would not benefit from this. The rich parcelled off land for themselves, while the poor had to beg or scratch a living from land rented at a high price or beg for bread for their families.

The Digger solution was to restructure landholding. The people should be restored to their land, each with sufficient land to grow their own food. The workers on the land of others for ‘small wages’ barely enough to keep themselves and their children should be able to work for themselves. All people, rich and poor alike, will act more righteously towards each other when Christ comes again and that event was expected soon.

The Diggers, of course, acted as they wrote. In 1649 twenty or so Diggers set themselves up on St George's Hill in Surrey and proceeded to build shacks and plant the land. The land was, they informed the authorities, crown land, but as the king was no more, and the crown claimed the land by right of the Norman Conquest, the had been returned to the original owners, the common people of England.

The local landowners, of course, regarded the Diggers as a threat. Eventually, so did the authorities. The Diggers were harassed, their plantings and home destroyed and many were arrested. Their threat to landowners was perceived as considerable, although their writings denounced the use of violence. Persuasion was the key: landowners would voluntarily give up their land to the poor when they saw the rightness of the cause of the poor. This is based, of course, on a particular reading of Scripture, particularly the texts relating to the Garden of Eden and also relating to the second coming of Christ.

The Church, of course, was intimately related to the landowning class, the clergy being mainly drawn from the strata of society and churches being major landowners themselves. In common with a lot of the other sects, the Diggers had no time for the established church or its clergy. Indeed, some of the early resistance to their commune was organised by a Parson. They accused the clergy of making God and Christ distant from the ordinary people, and so reliant for salvation on the clergy themselves. With the addition of heaven for obedience or Hell for the opposite, the power of the clergy over the minds of the ordinary people was, in the Digger view, established, and alienated people from God.

Winstanley, the key author for the Diggers, stressed the immanence of God, God could be known by all. Here, of course, we see the influence of the translated Bible. If all can read Scripture, then all can interpret Scripture. All can, themselves, know God without the intervention of clergy (or, indeed, anyone else). Here Digger arguments perhaps start to shade into Quaker theology: all carry the light of Christ in themselves, and none should oppress that.

While the Diggers were ejected, suppressed, and fined, the ideas they put forward did not totally expire. In 1999 some land rights activists reenacted the first Digger encampment and were similarly ejected. The Diggers are often described as England’s first communists, which is sort of true, but that description is often given by the more Marxist historians of the English Civil Wars and their aftermath, which ignores the very strong theological strands in Winstanley’s thinking.

There are resonances between the Diggers’ views and those of some contemporary theologians. This is not so true in the liberal Western tradition, where, after all, the welfare state, at least in theory, prevents people from being really, really, poor, but in other parts of the developing world, the liberation theology has inspired social action and political views aimed at overcoming oppression and promoting social justice. The reading of Scripture by the people themselves, the oppressed, can lead to a liberation of their views, including on the church and its collusion with the authorities, and then action to remedy the injustice.

Partly, then, the questions of the Diggers and the latter-day liberationists turn on the right and authority to interpret Scripture. If it is from the established authorities, the church in collusion with oppressive regimes, then ‘pie in the sky when you die’ is the religion that is promulgated and accepted by many. But the Bible is full of scenes of liberation and salvation. A key theme, I believe, in liberation theology is the Exodus, with the refrain ‘set my people free’. Similarly, the movement for cancelling debt draws its inspiration from the Biblical principle of ‘jubilee’. The Bible can be a potent political weapon.

The weapon of the Bible can cut both ways. The problem with the powerful is that they prefer to keep hold of their power and privileged. The Digger encampments were scattered and destroyed. Third World land rights activists are assaulted and murdered. We should not overstate the Diggers and their influence, of course – there was a period of at least two centuries when no one had heard of them – but the issues they raised are still live ones today.