ABSTRACT
One of the ongoing debates in Winstanley scholarship concerns the extent to which he may be understood as a ‘modern’ – a thinker whose ideas belong to a later age. Winstanley’s goal was a communist society in which the concept of private property would disappear and in which all would share equally the land and its fruits: with ownership, buying and selling outlawed, and true community restored, social and economic distinctions would be eliminated, and needs would be served by the common storehouse. In many ways Winstanley harked back, not just to the writings of Thomas More or the sermons of John Ball, but to the ‘golden age’ before the Fall, when all lived in a state of innocence and the earth was the ‘common treasury’, the Creator intended it to be.1 Yet his ideas are also echoed by later communist and revolutionary thinkers, most obviously Marx, and more than one commentator has noted the relevance of Digger ideas to more recent periods. For many modern readers of Winstanley, as David Mulder observes, he was essentially ‘a modern man trapped in the early-modern period’.2
