“As his Excellency the Lord General came from Gilford to London, he went to view the Diggers at St. George’s Hill in Surrey, with his Officers and Attendants.  They found about twelve of them hard at work, and amongst them one Winstanley was the chief speaker.  Several questions were propounded by the Officers, and the Lord General made a short speech by way of admonition to them, and this Winstanley returned sober answers, though they gave little satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their action.  It was urged that the Commons were as justly due to the Lords as any other lands.  They answered that these were Crown Lands where they digged, and the King who possessed them by the Norman Conquest being dead, they were returned again to the Common People of England, who might improve them if they would take the pains; that for those who would come dig with them, they should have the benefit equal with them, and eat of their bread; but they would not force any, applying to all the golden rule, to do to others as we would be done unto.  Some Officers wished they had no further plot in what they did, and that no more was intended than what they did pretend.

“As to the barrenness of the ground, which was objected as a discouragement, the Diggers answered they would use their endeavours, and leave the success to God, who had promised to make the barren ground fruitful.  They carry themselves civilly and fairly in the country, and have the report of sober, honest men.  Some barley is already come up, and other fruits formerly; but was pulled up by some of the envious inhabitants thereabouts, who are not so far convinced as to promise not to injure them for the future.  The ground will probably in a short time yield them some fruit of their labour, how contemptible soever they do yet appear to be.”

Before following the further adventures of the Diggers, as revealed in the numerous pamphlets they left us, from which alone they can now be gathered, we deem it best to lay before our readers what we have been able to ascertain of Gerrard Winstanley’s previous life’s history and writings.  Behind every movement that has ever influenced the thoughts of mankind, there is always some master-mind, a Lautze, a Gautama, a Jesus of Nazareth, a Wiclif, a John Wesley, a Darwin, a Tolstoy, or a Henry George; and it is in the comparatively unknown Gerrard Winstanley that we shall find the master-mind, the inspirer and director, of the Digger Movement.  As Gardiner well says, “It is not only by the immediate accomplishment of its aim that the value of honest endeavour is to be tested.”  And the reader’s interest in our work may be quickened if we so far forestall the pages that are to follow as to indicate that not only were Winstanley’s earlier theological writings the source whence the early Quakers, or the Children of Light, as they at first called themselves, drew many of their most characteristic tenets and doctrines,