Diggers

Diggers members of a small English religio-economic movement (fl. 1649-50), so called because they attempted to dig (i.e., cultivate) the wastelands. They were an offshoot of the more important group of Puritan extremists known as the Levelers . Gerrard Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers and the exponent of their egalitarian and communistic philosophy in his New Law of Righteousness (1649). The little band planted the common land at St. George's Hill, Surrey, and at nearby Cobham, but their project was met with suspicion by their neighbors and resistance from the landowners on whose property they encroached. In the spring of 1650 their community was destroyed by mob violence, and the experiment was abandoned. Winstanley's Law of Freedom (1652) extended his thesis that English law and institutions should be modified immediately to bring social and economic equality to all men through common ownership of the land.

Diggers (17th cent.). A section of the Levellers. Believing that Christian principles required a communistic mode of life and the cultivation of crown property and common land, they began digging up waste land in various places in 1649. The movement was suppressed within a year.

Diggers. A radical expression of the mid-17th-cent. Leveller movement, whose adherents described themselves as ‘True Levellers’. Inspired by the leadership of Gerard Winstanley and William Everard, the Diggers formed communal settlements, dug and sowed common land in several English counties (1649–50), vigorously maintaining that the earth was a common treasury.