Selections from the Works of Gerrard Winstanley. Edited by Leonard
Hamilton. (Cresset Press. 7s. 6d.) GERRARD WINSTANLEY was the leader of the Digger movement between 1649-5o, a time when, as he himself put it, "'the old world is running up like parchment in the fire." The Diggers and Levellers were the left-wing of the victorious Puritan revolution, and they were stamped out like the left-wiqg of other successful revolu- tions from the Anabaptiits to Trotsky and Rohm. Not content with preaching agrarian communism, the Diggers practised it ; they formed an anti-clerical community where there was to be no buying and selling, and proceeded to dig and plant the waste lands 00 St. George's Hill, Cobham, until they were beaten up by order 4 the squires and parsons. Winstanley afterwards published 111‘, Law of Freedom, a modified version of his political views and addressed it to Cromwell, but it seems to have made little impres- sion on that harassed statesman. Many of his writings here have beauty or a simple truculence—" The earth was not made Or'
posely for you to be lords of it, and we to be your slaves, servants and beggars." Like other Anarchists, Winstanley preached the simple life ; he believed in the original goodness of children before Rousseau, and believed in the existence of a Golden Age before the Norman Conquest, when the land was a common livelihood to all.
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