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The Diggers
2009.03.16
A commemorative plaque on a wall in Cobham, Surrey England. The Diggers made their protest at St George's Hill nearby.
On 1 April 1649 a small group of about thirty or forty people began to dig and plant the common land on St George's Hill in Surrey. They were mainly labouring men and their families, and they confidently hoped that five thousand others would join them. Their leaders were William Everard, a soldier who had been cashiered from the New Model army on account of his radicalism, and Gerrard Winstanley, a small cloth merchant from London who had been ruined by the economic depression of the early 1640s and who was then living at nearby Cobham. The intention was to cultivate the land communally, to make the earth (in Winstanley's favourite phrase) 'a common treasury', which God had intended it to be.
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A commemorative plaque on a wall in Cobham, Surrey England. The Diggers made their protest at St George's Hill nearby.
On 1 April 1649 a small group of about thirty or forty people began to dig and plant the common land on St George's Hill in Surrey. They were mainly labouring men and their families, and they confidently hoped that five thousand others would join them. Their leaders were William Everard, a soldier who had been cashiered from the New Model army on account of his radicalism, and Gerrard Winstanley, a small cloth merchant from London who had been ruined by the economic depression of the early 1640s and who was then living at nearby Cobham. The intention was to cultivate the land communally, to make the earth (in Winstanley's favourite phrase) 'a common treasury', which God had intended it to be.
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Dick Gaugham recorded a song about the Diggers here sung by someone else http://www.nme.com/video/id/WNSFEzJuoPc/search/gaughan
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Dick Gaugham recorded a song about the Diggers here sung by someone else http://www.nme.com/video/id/WNSFEzJuoPc/search/gaughan
Nice shots. It is a real irony that St. Georges Hill is now one of the most expensive bits of real estate in the country, with security gates at all entrances to keep the common man out.
