Gerrard Winstanley

Gerrard Winstanley (baptised 19 October 1609 – 10 September 1676)[1] was an English Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher, and activist during the period of the Commonwealth of England.

The group occupied formerly common land that had been privatised by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops.

Winstanley argued that In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.

It went back at least to the days of the Peasants' Revolt (1381) led by Wat Tyler, because that is when a verse of the Lollard priest John Ball was circulated: On 1 April 1649, Winstanley and his followers took over vacant or common lands on St George's Hill in Surrey.

After the failure of the Digger experiment in Surrey in 1650 Winstanley temporarily fled to Pirton, Hertfordshire, where he took up employment as an estate steward for the aristocratic mystic Lady Eleanor Davies.

In 1652 he published another pamphlet called The Law of Freedom in a Platform, in which he argued that the Christian basis for society is where property and wages are abolished.

In keeping with Winstanley's adherence to biblical models, the tract envisages a communistic society structured on non-hierarchical lines, though one likely to have voluntary patriarchs.

Winstanley believed in Christian Universalism, the doctrine that everyone, however sinful, will eventually be reconciled to God; he wrote that "in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour."

[12][13] The Soviet-era Alexander Garden Obelisk in Moscow, Russia, in 1918 included his name among a list of outstanding thinkers and personalities of the struggle for the liberation of workers.

[15] The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited jointly by Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, were published by the Oxford University Press in December 2009 at £229 (ISBN 978-0-19-957606-7).

Winstanley was loosely based on a 1961 novel by David Caute entitled Comrade Jacob[17] and was produced in a quasi-documentary style, with great attention to period detail – even to the point of only using breeds of animals which were known to exist at the time, and actual Civil War armour and weapons borrowed from the Tower of London museum.

The song, "The World Turned Upside Down", by English folksinger Leon Rosselson, weaves many of Winstanley's own words into the lyrics.

you poor blind earth-moles, you strive to take away my livelihood and the liberty of this poor weak frame my body of flesh, which is my house I dwell in for a time; but I strive to cast down your kingdom of darkness, and to open hell gates, and to break the devil's bonds asunder wherewith you are tied, and that you my enemies may live in peace; and that is all the harm I would have you to have.