ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to set the Diggers of 1649–50 in a meaningful historical context. Their ideas, as expressed in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, are shown to have been not merely radical but genuinely revolutionary, in the alternative which these offered to the society of their time and to its values and beliefs. The immediate economic situation in 1649 is shown to have been at least potentially revolutionary, but several reasons are advanced to show why the Digger movement did not develop into a full-scale popular revolution, and why in practice it could not have done so. These include repression by local property owners besides military action against them, but also political, legal and technical factors. Attention is paid to the work of several twentieth-century historians, in discussion of the historical context and in relation to Winstanley’s ideas and the controversial question of how far these changed between 1649 and 1651–52. Finally, the inevitability of their failure does not make the Diggers less interesting, or less deserving of study and of admiration.
