Diggers

representatives of the extreme left wing of revolutionary democracy in the English Civil War, expressing the interests of the village and urban poor, especially of peasants owning little or no land who were ruined in the agrarian upheaval and who were being exploited by both feudal lords and capitalists.

The designation Diggers first appeared during the peasant uprising of 1607 in central England, but as an ideological and sociopolitical movement the Diggers emerged during the bourgeois-democratic stage of the Civil War (1647-49), when they split off from the Leveler movement, in distinction from whom the Diggers began calling themselves “true Levelers.” Through their ideologist G. Winstanley, the Diggers proclaimed the ideals of a “free republic” where the exploitation of man by man would be unknown and of the collective ownership of property and performance of labor. Their program envisaged the abolition of copyhold and the land rights of the manorial lords and the return of common land to public use. Realization of this program would have entailed the complete abolition of feudal landownership and, in the final analysis, of all private ownership of land. Because of the extreme stratification of the English peasantry, the Diggers’ demands could not serve as the basis for a mass movement in the village. In 1649 the Diggers attempted the collective cultivation of public wasteland near Cobham, Surrey, and elsewhere. In the end, however, legal persecution and out-right repression by the authorities undermined the Diggers movement (1650).