"The Earth is a Common Treasure for All." Gerrard Winstanley and the Fight to Save Common Lands in England
Gerrard Winstanley and the Fight to Save Common Lands in England
By Cheryl Lo
On April 1, 1649, a small group of poor men walked onto St George’s Hill in Surrey carrying shovels and seeds. They began digging into land that local landowners had long claimed as private property, planting beans, parsnips, and carrots in the soil.
At first glance, the scene might have seemed unremarkable: a handful of men turning over the earth and sowing crops.
But their actions carried a far more radical message.
The group, later known as the Diggers and led by Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, believed that the earth should belong to everyone. Land, in their eyes, was never meant to be owned by a select few, but shared and worked in common.
At a time when England was emerging from civil war and political upheaval, this small act of digging challenged one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in society: that land itself could exist as private property at all.
For centuries before Winstanley’s time, much of England had operated under a vastly different system. Large portions of the countryside existed as common land, areas where villagers held shared rights to graze animals, gather firewood, and grow crops. Access to the commons meant access to food, fuel, and survival.
But over time, this system began to unravel.
Landowners increasingly fenced off common land through a process known as enclosure. Fields that had sustained rural communities for generations were converted into private estates used for commercial agriculture and livestock production.
Several major crises further intensified the transformation of England’s rural landscape. The Black Death devastated Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, pushing landowners to reorganize agriculture around more profitable industries like wool and livestock. Later, during the sixteenth century, the English Crown seized vast tracts of land from Catholic monasteries and redistributed it to nobles, who quickly enclosed it for private use.
By the seventeenth century, much of England’s countryside had been enclosed. Rural laborers lost access to the land that had once sustained them, forcing many into poverty or migration in
search of work.
At the same time, England was entering one of the most turbulent political periods in its history. The English Civil Wars shattered the authority of the monarchy and sparked new debates about political power and the rights of ordinary people.
When Parliament executed King Charles I in 1649, it destroyed the long-standing belief that monarchs ruled by divine right.
If a king could be overthrown, what other hierarchies might also be challenged?
For Gerrard Winstanley, the answer was clear: political reform alone meant little if land remained concentrated in the hands of a wealthy minority. True freedom, he believed, necessitated economic equality.
Determined to put these ideas into practice, Winstanley and a small group of laborers established a farming community on the common land of St George’s Hill. They called themselves the “True
Levellers,” though they would later become known as the Diggers.
Their goal was simple but revolutionary: reclaim unused land and cultivate it collectively so that food could be shared among the poor. By digging and planting on common land, they were
making a bold claim: that the earth should belong to those who worked it.
Winstanley articulated these ideas in a series of pamphlets published in 1649. In The New Law of Righteousness, he described the Earth as a “common treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and
Men,” arguing that the natural world existed to sustain everyone rather than enrich a privileged few.
To the landowning elite, such ideas struck at the foundations of their authority. If the Diggers’ experiment spread, it threatened the very system of property that concentrated wealth and power in their hands.
Local landowners quickly moved to crush the movement. Hired gangs destroyed crops, burned shelters, and harassed the settlers until the colony at St George’s Hill was driven from the land. Within a year, the Digger experiment had largely been stamped out across England.
For a long time, it seemed as if the Diggers had been forgotten.
But the ideas Winstanley left behind did not disappear.
In his writings, he outlined a society organized around a shared relationship to land, resources, and community. Long before the language of socialism or environmental justice existed, Winstanley was already questioning a system that treated the natural world as a commodity rather than a shared foundation of life.
Today, in a world marked by widening inequality and a growing environmental crisis, his ideas feel strikingly relevant. We have come to treat the privatization of land and natural resources as something natural– even inevitable. But Winstanley reminds us that this system did not simply appear. It was built through power, enforced by law, and preserved by those who benefit most from it.
Nearly four centuries ago, a small group of laborers stood on a hillside and began digging into
the earth.
And they left us with a question that still lingers today:
If the land, water, and air that sustain human life are the shared foundations of existence, why should they belong to anyone at all?
Bibliography
Winstanley, Gerrard. The New Law of Righteousness. 1649.
Hall, John. “A Common Treasury for All: Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers.” Culture Matters.
https://www.culturematters.
Hill, Christopher. “The Diggers and True Levellers.” Past & Present 23 (1962): 27–38.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/
Weeks, James. “The Diggers.” The Guardian, June 9, 2011.
https://www.theguardian.com/
Pluto Press. Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy.
https://www.plutobooks.com/
We Are Mud. “Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers.”
https://www.wearemud.org/blog/
Aeon. “Gerrard Winstanley: The Man Who Got the Diggers Digging.”
https://aeon.co/essays/
Prosper Australia. “Gerrard Winstanley.”
https://www.prosper.org.au/
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