“COUNCIL OF STATE to Mr. PENTLOW, Justice of Peace for County
Northampton.

“We approve your proceedings with the Levellers in those parts, and doubt not you are sensible of the mischief those designs tend to, and of the necessity to proceed effectually against them.  If the laws in force against those who intrude upon other men’s properties, and that forbid and direct the punishing of all riotous assemblies and seditious and tumultuous meetings, be put in execution, there will not want means to preserve the public peace against the attempts of this sort of people.  Let those men be effectually proceeded against at the next Sessions, and if any that ought to be instrumental to bring them to punishment fail in their duty, signify the same to us, that we may require of them an account of their neglect; but till we find the ordinary means unable to preserve the peace, we would not have recourse to any other.”

The sentence we have italicised seems to show that even amongst the Justices of the Peace and Officers of the Land the doctrines of the Diggers had found sympathisers, who were unwilling that they should be proceeded against.  Nor can we be surprised at this when we bear in mind the terrible state of the rural population of the “meaner sort” at the time.  Some idea of same may be gathered in the Declaration from Wellinborrow, which is more than fully confirmed in the pages of Whitelocke, from which we take the following brief entries: 

     (P. 398.) Under date April 30th, 1649: 

     “Letters from Lancashire of their want of bread, so that many
     families were starved.”

     (P. 399.) Under date May 1649: 

“Letters from Newcastle that many in Cumberland and Westmoreland died in the Highways for want of bread, and divers left their habitations, travelling with their wives and children to other parts to get Relief, but could have none.  That the Committees and Justices of the Peace of Cumberland signed a certificate, that there were Thirty Thousand Families that had neither seed nor bread corn, nor money to buy either, and they desired a collection for them, which was made, but much too little to relieve so great a multitude.”

     (P. 404.) Under date May 1649: 

“Letters from Lancashire of great scarcity of corn, and that the famine was sore among them, after which the plague overspread itself in many parts of the country, taking away whole families together, and few escaped where any house was visited, and that the Levellers got into arms, but were suppressed speedily by the Governor.”

     (P. 421.) Under date August 1649: