Levellers' Day 2009

The Levellers and Levellers' Day

On 17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.

During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.

In 1975, members of the WEA Oxford Industrial Branch went to Burford to reclaim a piece of history that seemed to be missing from the school books. They held a meeting in remembrance of the Leveller soldiers. The following year, Tony Benn came and read in the church and in each succeeding year, people have come to Burford on the Saturday nearest to 17 May, debated, held a procession, listened to music and remembered the Levellers and the importance of holding on to ideals of justice and democracy...





Winstanley, The Diggers
Excerpt from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
By Kenneth Rexroth

Surprisingly the seventeenth century with its almost continuous wars of religion was not a good time for the radical Reformation. Cujis regio, ejus religio — religion had become a matter of large-scale politics. Wars fought between nations and alliances of nations divided Europe into blocks of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Small groups of the elect were crushed out by the sheer weight of the contending monsters. Then, too, the Thirty Years War, which was fought to destroy the Holy Roman Empire as the dominant power in Europe, also crushed or profoundly distorted the culture of the various parts of the empire. Germany emerged fragmented and wasted and did not recover for generations. The radical Reformation had been a natural outgrowth of the culture of the late medieval middle of Europe and the Thirty Years War destroyed its roots. In the Netherlands, Switzerland, and amongst the Hutterites in their remote refuges, a process of fossilization had set in.

The English Civil War and commonwealth were essentially a product of class struggle, and the proliferation of sects in the latter days of the Civil War took place almost entirely in a lower middle class and upper working class context. In spite of their name, the Levellers were far from being unbridled democrats. They proposed to extend participation in power only to men of substance — small, middle-class substance — like themselves. The Fifth Monarchy men were such extreme chiliasts as to have no real social program.

The Ranters were only incidentally millenarians. Basically they were a revival of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, who believed that once divinized and absorbed into the Godhead the soul was incapable of evil. Like the Adamites who were expelled from Tabor they lived exalted in an amoral ecstasy. If they practiced community of goods, nudism, speaking with tongues, and sexual orgies it was all part of a frantic, hurried, and hunted life lived in a state of unrelieved excitement. Some Ranters were simply extreme Spiritualists, descendants of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics; and with the Restoration of Charles II they were absorbed into the Quakers. They really lay completely outside the development of English Puritanism.

The agitation of the Levellers lasted only three years. They were primarily a political party who wished to see the promises of the Rump Parliament — the recruiting propaganda for the second stage of the Civil War — fulfilled. Their leader, John Lilburne, had been an associate of Cromwell’s at the beginning and the Levellers were perfectly right when they accused him of selling out. Although the final form of their Agreement of the Free People of England, their political manifesto, proposes a broader democracy than would come to England until the end of the nineteenth century, they did not believe in universal franchise, but excluded servants, paupers, farm laborers, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Royalists, “heretics,” and, of course, women. Essentially they were left-wing Calvinist republicans. By the end of 1649 they had been completely suppressed...


The True Levellers Standard
A D V A N C E D :
O R,

The State of Community opened, and Presented to the
Sons of Men.

By
William Everard,
Iohn Palmer,
Iohn South,
Iohn Courton.
William Taylor,
Christopher Clifford,
Iohn Barker. Ferrard Winstanley,
Richard Goodgroome,
Thomas Starre,
William Hoggrill,
Robert Sawyer,
Thomas Eder,
Henry Bickerstaffe,
Iohn Taylor, &c.

Beginning to Plant and Manure the Waste land upon
George-Hill, in the Parish of Walton, in the
County of Surrey.
____________________________________
L O N D O N,
Printed in the Yeer, M D C X L I X.
____________________________________

To all my fellow Creatures that shall view these ensu-
ing Lines.

TH E God of this world blinding the eyes of the men of the world, have taken possession of them and their Lives, Rules and Raigns, and in a high measure opposeth the everlasting spirit, the King of Righteousness; both in them, and on the whole Creation, bending all its Wit and power to destroy this spirit, and the persons in whom it lives, rules and governs; making Lawes under specious pretences, yea and penalties too, that all Nations, Tongues and Languages, shall fall down and worship this god, become subject, yea in slavery to it, and to the men in whom it dwels: But the god of this world is Pride and Covetousness, the rootes of all Evil, from whence flowes all the Wickedness that is acted under the Sun, as Malice, Tyranny, Lording over, and despising their fellow Creatures, killing and destroying those that will not, or cannot become subject to their Tyranny, to uphold their Lordly Power, Pride and Covetousness. I have had some Conversation with the Authour of this ensuing Declaration, and the Persons Subscribing, and by experience find them sweetly acted and guided by the everlasting spirit, the Prince of Peace, to walk in the paths of Righteousness, not daring to venture upon any acts of injustice, but endeavouring to do unto all, as they would have done to them, having Peace and Joy in themselves, knit together and united in one Spirit of Glory and Truth, Love to their fellow Creatures, Contentation with Food and Rayment, shewing much Humility and Meekness of spirit; such as these shall be partakers of the Promise.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit the Earth...


San Francisco style: The diggers and the love revolution

By Alex Forman

[Anarchy 77 (Vol 7 No 7), July 1967]

When a small group of men began to plant and dig upon the Commons on St.
George's Hill in Surrey, in 1649, it marked the radical culmination of the new
forces of change resulting from the Reformation in Germany. For with the
breakdown of the total supremacy of the Roman Church, these new forces were to
go far beyond the moderate rebellion of Martin Luther. The destruction of the
rationale for the Church's omnipotence led suffering people to question the
power of other elements in the collapsing power structure. This can best be seen
in the peasants' revolt in Germany and in the English Civil War. For not only
was the Church questioned but also the institutions of the state and the system
of land ownership.

The Diggers, as the small group of men came to be known, questioned the existing
order in its totality. They had grievances against the clergy, the judges, the
lawyers, parliament, and the nobles. They requested that the common land, which
had belonged to the King who had been executed, be turned over to the people.
The people could run the commons collectively and set up a co-operative
commonwealth alongside the existing system. The Diggers believed that their
system would prove to be so peaceful and filled with reason and love that soon
the whole country would join them. They saw no need for violence and refused
even to defend themselves when attacked.

The Diggers had two distinct arguments for their cause, one religious and the
other political. The religious argument stated that God had not created the
earth to be enjoyed by certain men only, but rather as a common treasury for
all. The ownership of the land in England had been achieved, from William the
Conqueror on, by the use of the sword--indirectly when not directly. Thus land
ownership, based upon blood, was immoral. Diggers believed man to have two
opposing instincts in his spirit: self-preservation, which accounted for greed
and bloodshed, and common preservation, represented by sharing and love. To act
in a morally correct way meant living a life based on common preservation.
Diggers also believed that if men lived for a while in accordance with common
preservation, their bad instincts would disappear because of the supreme power
of universal love.

The Diggers' political argument was that, since the common land once belonged to
the King, it now belonged to all those who had fought to end the monarchy. Thus,
since masses of people had fought, the masses were entitled to former royal
holdings. It's important to note that Gerald Winstanley, the Diggers' leading
spokesman, showed an increasing tendency to base their cause on the more
concrete political arguments during the movement's brief history. The last
important document to come out of the Digger movement was a long appeal from
Winstanley to Oliver Cromwell calling for the creation of a co-operative
commonwealth in England. This included concrete proposals on how to organize the
economy, the schools, the state and judicial system. It favoured private
property within the home, family-based settlements, universal manhood suffrage,
common ownership of all Crown lands, and common storehouses for all products.

Although the original Diggers didn't succeed in their goal, their thoughts have
survived over three hundred years and appeared again in remarkably similar form.
Growing out of give-and-take between the New Left and the old beat generation, a
hippy culture blossomed in San Francisco in late 1965. Two new factors which
made the hippy culture a very distinct phenomenon were, first, a feeling of
community (emphasized by individuals frustrated in the New Left), and second,
the use of LSD. Cutting across the economic and social differences of many
alienated Americans, almost all quite young, a new tribal love culture took root
in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city. The new force unleashed by LSD
constituted the primary unifying factor in a grouping which ranged from the
sometimes violent Hell's Angels motorcycle club to meditating Zen Buddhists.
This new culture was at first amorphous but it soon took on the shape of a
bohemian community complete with its own merchant class: the hip merchants.

Haight-Ashbury's new love community acquired members primarily from the swollen
ranks of alienated young people who were also discovering the "love trip".
Conversations on streets in the Haight-Ashbury became filled with talk of love,
and then, suddenly appearing in the autumn of 1966, was a group calling itself
the Diggers. It began to distribute free food in the local park--food donated by
individuals and collected from the surpluses of local markets. The new group
also attempted to provide housing for the growing number of young people who had
become convinced that they should create a new, loving society.

The important point is that the new Diggers began similarly to the original
ones, by simply showing up on the scene and declaring that they acted in
accordance with the spirit of universal love. The fact that this love was found
partly through LSD--not derived from the Bible--isn't crucial. The original
Diggers were also said to be influenced by mystical ideas during their religious
gatherings...