Winstanley
The work we are going about is this, to dig up George Hill and the waste ground thereabouts and to sow corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows… that we may work in righteousness, and lay the foundation of making the earth a common treasury for all, both rich and poor (Gerrard Winstanley, ‘The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced’)
A truly stunning and hauntingly beautiful film, telling the little-known story of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, a short-lived radical movement that emerged during the British Civil Wars/Revolution in the late 1640s. It is an example of a remarkable integration of form and content: an independent film, made on the tiniest of budgets with an almost entirely amateur cast (and yet sticking to rigorous standards of authenticity), its makers’ philosophy and methods resonantly match the story they tell - as does their subsequent obscurity despite critical acclaim. Of course, it is a film of its time (but what film isn’t?). The release date is probably slightly misleading on that score: it took the best part of a decade to make, and is in fact a child of the late 1960s, of student revolution, socialist idealism and activism. The collaboration between Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo had already produced one film, It Happened Here (1966), which historians now would describe as ‘counterfactual’; it imagined a world where the Nazis had successfully invaded Britain in the 1940s. Included in a recent BFI video/DVD release of the film is a documentary about its making (It Happened Here Again, Eric Mival, 1976), a glimpse of the passions driving the making of Winstanley, the near-obsessive attention to detail and accuracy and, equally, the principles of collaboration and shared effort, making use of anything and everything, and the intense idealism of the venture.
The story: in April 1649 (just months after the execution of Charles I) Winstanley led a band of Diggers (aka ‘True Levellers’) in cultivating unused common land on Saint George’s Hill in Cobham, Surrey according to the principles of his own writing: all should be equal in status and labour, all property to be shared according to needs. They aroused crushing hostility: physical attacks, law-suits, prosecutions; the tiny community lasted only a year, although it did not perish without planting other seeds around the country. But none of the Digger communities survived for long, and they were forgotten until the twentieth century.
The film opens (as it continues) with an object lesson in making something out of very little, conjuring the chaos and scale of battle with just a handful of re-enactors and some wonderful camera work: to those in the know, the film’s political perspective is signalled right here in the influence of early Soviet filmmakers on the photography and the accompanying soundtrack of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. The opening scenes are quite different from the rest of the film in terms of pace, but the filmmakers’ movingly beautiful use of the human face and body is first established here, as is the juxtaposition of tiny detail and larger picture. For this film records in equal measure individuals, groups and their environment. It is a very English film, but this is no green and pleasant land: here is the English landscape and climate at its harshest and most overwhelming. It is at once historically accurate (the late 1640s were marked by bad weather and harvest failures, phenomena that alongside the social and political turmoil of the decade could be seen as part of the context for the Digger movement) and symbolic of the social situation that the Diggers tried to change. Early in the film, Winstanley and his adversary Parson Platt meet at a crossroads (stark white on the hillside, an unforgettable image); they try to communicate, their voices almost drowned out by the howling wind; they part. How could anyone overcome such a force?
Yet they were not, perhaps, quite defeated. The Diggers have come to life once again in the imaginations and actions of later socialists and communists, hippies and (most recently) direct action groups such as The Land is Ours, seeing in them the first statements of recognisably modern political radicalism. For The Land is Ours, Winstanley is nothing less than a prophet. Highlighting the link to the recent past, a group of 1960s Diggers make their appearance, as Ranters, in some rare light moments in the film. Yet the film does not simply treat Winstanley and the Diggers as seventeenth-century Communists (or even hippies). Their religious faith and sense of their own upright morality is crucial (whatever the more conventional make of them); indeed, they are shocked at the outrageous, disorderly behaviour and blasphemies of the Ranters. Nor is this to be a tale of victorious progress towards modernity: the Diggers are crushed, their homes destroyed and with them, the dreams of Gerrard Winstanley. The modern connection is one made only in the mind, but, like the film, it is testimony to the power of the historical imagination.
And here I end, having put my arm as far as my strength will go to advance righteousness: I have writ, I have acted, I have peace: and now I must wait to see the spirit do his own work in the hearts of others, and whether England shall be the first land, or some others, wherein truth shall sit down in triumph. (Gerrard Winstanley, ‘A New-year’s Gift for the Parliament and Army’)
………..
Reading
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972)
Andrew Bradstock (ed), Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649-1999 (2000)
David Caute, Comrade Jacob, is the novel on which, in combination with Winstanley’s own writings, the film was based
The Ideas
Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and other Writings, ed. by Christopher Hill (1973)
G H Sabine (ed), The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (1941)
The True
Levellers’ Standard Advanced at The World Turned Upside Down (among other documents at this site, see URL below)
Land and Freedom Pages (Tony Gosling)
The Putney Debates (D Koeller)
Online Resources
Historical background
The World Turned Upside Down site on the English Revolution, very much the perspective from ‘below’; plenty of links, bibliography. Stimulating and engaging on the various
radical movements and their twentieth-century descendants (NB: this site to date has moved around fairly frequently; if the link is broken, try searching Google before assuming that it’s dead…)
The Land is Ours: Diggers350 as the Diggers’ return to St George’s Hill (nowadays home to some of the richest people in the country), 350 years
on
The English Diggers 1649-50 and Gerrard Winstanley at The Digger Archive (of the 1960s SF Diggers)
The English Revolution (Modern History Sourcebook) good selection of resources and texts
Oliver Cromwell (Cromwell Association/Cromwell Museum Huntingdon) commemorating the 400th anniversary of Cromwell’s birth in 1999: includes biography, bibliography, on-line exhibition, ‘history’s verdict’, etc
British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate (David Plant) timelines, biographies, links, draws attention to the British (not merely ‘English’) dimensions of the wars/revolution
English Civil War (E L Skip-Knox) a narrative overview of events, from a taught course
A slightly different perspective: The Sealed Knot Civil Wars re-enactment society
The Film
Kevin Brownlow camps out on St George’s Hill (John Tibbetts)
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