What follows is a brief return to the past. It bears asking: Do the voices of our ancestors speak to ourselves? Are we just hard of hearing? Or slow to learn?

The year is 1649; summer approaches in the aftermath of a bitterly cold English winter. The place is wasteland in Surrey known as St George’s Hill. There is much dwelling upon the apocalypse; minds are exercised by the second coming of Christ, the downfall of the Antichrist and the convoking of the Day of Judgment. Civil war compounds the misery consequent upon a succession of poor harvests. And now, on St George’s Hill, a small group of hardy souls has established a commune. Cultivating the earth in order to make a subsistence living, these people are dealing in their own way with challenges of community, productivity and environment.

The wastelanders of St George’s Hill have passed into history as ‘the Diggers’, so named from the nature of their toil; they spoke of themselves as ‘the True Levellers’, for they espied the toppling of ancient privileges enjoyed by the wealthy and the powerful. They were the followers of a bankrupt tailor and freewheeling theologian, Gerrard Winstanley, who knew that cosmic liberation was in the offing. ‘Cruel task-masters’ had long held sway; ‘stout-hearted covetousness’ had lorded it over creation for centuries. ‘But now the time of deliverance is come’, Winstanley proclaimed; and the coming would be at once cosmic and adventist: ‘For now the King of righteousness is rising to rule in and over the earth.’

Winstanley had fallen into a trance in the winter of 1648/49. ‘A vision in dreams and out of dreams’ had identified St George’s Hill as the place where the digging was to be done, where we should ‘eat our bread together by righteous labour and the sweat of our brows’. The recklessness of the initiative was acknowledged: eyes of the flesh would see the earth as ‘very barren’. But fleshly perspectives were being superseded: ‘we should trust the spirit for a blessing’. And how were Winstanley and his colleagues to honour the blessing of the spirit? By unshackling the earth: ‘all the commons and waste ground in England and in the whole world shall be taken in by the people in righteousness, not owning any property; but taking the earth to be a common treasury, as it was first made for all’. Any person might then have ‘as much freedom in the fruit of the earth’ as any other. Bold words, were these, to preach to a profoundly deferential society.

If the earth is a common treasury, it is also a universal mother. Winstanley’s beholding of maternal nourishment vivifies a biblical refrain: ‘Let Israel go free.’ But how movingly did the Digger transpose this long-past imperative into an unrealised (unrealisable?) subjunctive, an incantation that sanctifies unachieved (unachievable?) tranquility. The poor, he chants, may yet ‘labour the wasteland and suck the breasts of their mother earth, that they starve not. And in so doing thou wilt keep the Sabbath day, which is a day of rest, sweetly enjoying the peace of the spirit of righteousness; and find peace, by living among a people that live in peace. This will be a day of peace which thou never knew yet.’

Will such a day ever be known? For Winstanley, the day would be heralded by the overthrow of immemorial patterns of societal self-maintenance. Thus, the ‘bond of particular property’ must be broken ‘in pieces quickly’; the ‘oppression and thievery of buying and selling of land’ must be disowned. Turn all the earth into St George’s Hill? Must it be thus?

It’s an unlikely scenario. Doubtless, Winstanley would despise our hypocrisy, but as we tend our fences and sell our wares, ought we not appreciate the commonality of the ground that sustains us all? We might not credit visions of the second coming, might not perceive the energies that pulse through our workaday lives as sacred shots of a holy spirit. Nor might we hang our liberation upon the peg of revolution. But why not ponder the possibility of cosmic spirituality, or at least come gratefully and respectfully to our natural world as would a child to its mother’s dripping breasts?

We need, perhaps, to re-evaluate the planet; that is, to revise our estimations of it, to esteem it anew. Think of the earth as a spirit: would we then dedicate our covetous, fleshly hearts to more elevated courses? Think of the earth as a common treasury: would we then appreciate the preciousness of its content? Think of the earth as a mother: would we then cease to ravage and plunder its unconditional giving? The result won’t be the ‘day of peace’ as Winstanley envisaged it, but we might reasonably embrace Winstanley’s ‘power of love’ while laying to one side the uncompromising ‘vengeance’ of his divine judge.

David Parnham is an Editor at WellmarkPerspexa by day, and a seventeenth-century enthusiast by night.

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