The Diggers tried (by "levelling" land) to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small, egalitarian rural communities.

Their belief in economic equality was drawn from Acts of the Apostles 4:32, which describes a community of believers that "had all things in common" instead of having personal property.

[3] Once they put their idea into practice and started to cultivate common land, both opponents and supporters began to call them "Diggers".

[6][3] They rejected the perceived immorality and sexual liberalism of another sect known as the Ranters, with Gerrard Winstanley denoting them as "a general lack of moral values or restraint in worldly pleasures".

[7][8][9] The Council of State received a letter in April 1649 reporting that several individuals had begun to plant vegetables in common land on St George's Hill, Weybridge near Cobham, Surrey[5] at a time when harvests were bad and food prices high.

[15][16] If they had not left the land after losing the court case then the army could have been used to enforce the law and evict them; so they abandoned Saint George's Hill in August 1649, much to the relief of the local freeholders.

After initially expressing some sympathy for them, the local lord of the manor of Cobham, Parson John Platt, became their chief enemy.

According to the newspaper A Perfect Diurnall the emissaries had travelled a circuit through the counties of Surrey, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire before being apprehended.

[17] On 15 April 1650 the Council of State ordered Mr Pentlow, a justice of the peace for Northamptonshire, to proceed against "the Levellers in those parts" and to have them tried at the next Quarter Session.