Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T20:26:03.898Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Winstanley: A Case for the Man as He Said He Was

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Lotte Mulligan ,
John K. Graham  and
Judith Richards
Lotte Mulligan
Affiliation:
Lecturers in History, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
John K. Graham
Affiliation:
Lecturers in History, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
Judith Richards
Affiliation:
Lecturers in History, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The publication of Christopher Hill's Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings was an exciting event for students of mid-seventeenth-century England. It provides a readily available edition of Winstanley's most important writings. To these Hill offers a compelling introduction which has much to stimulate and interest, but in his interpretation of Winstanley there are also invitations to misunderstanding. Ultimately, Hill's interest in Winstanley arises from his perception of the seventeenth-century writer as ‘modern’ and, if another recent article is any guide, this continues to be the common factor for studies of Winstanley. It is the purpose of this article to argue that this ‘modern’ view of Winstanley misconstrues his intellectual sources and historical significance by minimising the part theology played in his theories of social and moral change. The result of such a view is to misrepresent Winstanley's meaning, and his relationship to his contemporary world.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 1977 , pp. 57 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 57 note 1 Penguin, 1973.

page 57 note 2 This article is the outcome of discussions with students at La Trobe University in a course on religious and political ideologies in mid-seventeenth century England, and we would like to thank them for their contributions to the debate on Winstanley.

page 57 note 3 Juretic, George, ‘Digger no Millenarian: the Revolutionizing of Gerrard Winstanley’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXVI (1975), 263–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dr. Juretic's article is drawn from his doctoral dissertation written prior to the publication of Hill's edition of Winstanley's works, which no doubt explains why that article contains no reference either to it or to Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, London 1972Google Scholar. But Juretic seems concerned to advance an even more pronounced version of the argument that Winstanley's interest lies in his ‘modernity’. It is, it almost seems, because he was so uncharacteristic of the seventeenth century that Winstanley should be studied today. Indeed, Juretic draws to the reader's attention that Winstanley ‘in his own way … perceived that the masses had nothing to lose but their chains’: ibid., 276. There are, Juretic argues, two Winstanleys. The first, the ‘pre-Digger’ Winstanley was a man of his age, ‘inspired to seek a communal ideal by a millenarian outlook’: ibid., 263. As with so many of his contemporaries, his perception of social reality is distorted by ‘millenarian whimsy’: ibid., 280. But there is a second Winstanley identifiable in The True Levellers' Standard Advanced and all subsequent works. This Winstanley was a new sort of radical, transformed by his experiences on St. George's Hill into a ‘first-rate secular thinker’: ibid., 274. Harsh experience liberated him from the contemporary bondage of ‘millenarian literalism’, and set him free from the other intellectual and religious blinkers of his age.

page 58 note 1 Bernstein, Edward, Cromwell and Communism, New York 1963, 113–114Google Scholar, first published in English 1895.

page 58 note 2 ibid., 120.

page 58 note 3 ibid., 107.

page 59 note 1 Berens, L. H., The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth, London 1906, 43Google Scholar.

page 59 note 2 ibid., 160.

page 59 note 3 Zagorin, P., A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, London 1954, 57Google Scholar.

page 59 note 4 ibid.,47.

page 59 note 5 James, Margaret, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution 1640–1660, London 1966, 99, first published 1930Google Scholar.

page 60 note 1 ibid., 26.

page 60 note 2 ibid., 102–3.

page 60 note 3 Petegorsky, David W., Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War, London 1940, 138Google Scholar.

page 60 note 4 ibid., 178.

page 60 note 5 ibid., 177.

page 60 note 6 ibid., 245.

page 61 note 1 Since this article was written, a refreshing change in Winstanley scholarship has occurred with the publication of Davis, J. C.'s ‘Gerrard Winstanley and the Restoration of True Magistracy’ in Past and Present, 70 (1976), 76–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although Hill is criticised for presenting Winstanley as a counter-cultural hero who moved from individualism to communism, Davis's Winstanley is heavily tinged with Hill's own secular, economic view of the theorist. Davis shifts the focus but keeps his sights trained on an entirely earth-bound Winstanley. This article deals almost entirely with Winstanley's programmatic social reforms. And again, there are two Winstanleys—the earlier a ‘theorist of the perfect moral commonwealth’ acting through existing institutions while the later becomes a Utopian relying on ‘a dynamic secular state’: ibid., 92. Virtually no reference is made to the religious framework of Winstanley's thought or to his consistent millenarian vision as the method for bringing about social change. Thus ‘the essence of the digging experiments was … the withdrawal of labour from employment on the estates of landlords’ (ibid., 82) and ‘the only freedom that mattered [to Winstanley] was freedom from economic necessity’ (ibid., 92). The present article contends that the driving force behind Winstanley's thought came from quite another direction. Winstanley believed mat moral reformation and freedom both would follow not from changing institutions but through the direct intervention of Christ's Second Coming.

page 61 note 2 Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, 69–71; Elmen, P., ‘The Theological Basis of Digger Communism’, Church History, 23 (1954), 207–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hudson, W. S., ‘Economic and Social Thought of Gerrard Winstanley—was he a seventeenth century Marxist?’, Journal of Modern History, 18 (1946), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 61 note 3 In The World turned Upside Down Hill gives high marks to Winstanley for being ‘absolutely right’ in seeing that cultivation of commons would make England an ‘equal community’. winstanley ‘arrived at the one possible democratic solution which was not merely backward looking’ (104).

page 62 note 1 Hill, Winstanley, 9.

page 62 note 2 ibid., 10.

page 62 note 3 Loc. cit.

page 63 note 1 Hill, Winstanley, 19.

page 63 note 2 ibid., 55.

page 63 note 3 ibid., 52.

page 63 note 4 Some historians apparently are prepared to do just this. Significant silences occupy an important place in Juretic's reading of The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. He hangs his whole case for Winstanley's becoming a ‘first-class secular thinker’ upon his reading of that document, but when the reader asks for evidence to sustain this insistently radical reinterpretation, Juretic gives this response: ‘It was only a matter of time for [Winstanley] to discard completely his mystical beliefs. The changes were often subtle; whatWinstanley failed to say was as crucial as what he included’: Juretic, art. cit., 276.

page 63 note 5 Hill, Winstanley, 35–42.

page 63 note 6 ibid., 35–42.

page 63 note 7 ibid., 18.

page 64 note 1 ibid., 15.

page 64 note 2 ibid., 19.

page 64 note 3 ibid., 19.

page 64 note 4 ibid., 24; see also The World Turned Upside Down, 235.

page 64 note 5 ibid., 25.

page 64 note 6 ibid., 35.

page 64 note 7 Juretic's solution is more radical—exclude it altogether. He vindicates this decision by referring to the uncertainty surrounding its date of composition. This, he implies, allows one to disregard the potential problem of its publication in 1650, after the transformation that Juretic claims Winstanley had undergone: Juretic, art. cit., 279.

page 64 note 8 Hill, Winstanley, 55.

page 65 note 1 Sabine, G. H., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, New York 1965, 99–148Google Scholar.

page 65 note 2 ibid., 104–5.

page 65 note 3 ibid., 112.

page 65 note 4 ibid., 102.

page 66 note 1 Sabine, 194.

page 66 note 2 Sabine, 315; Hill, Winstanley, 127.

page 66 note 3 Sabine, 257; Hill, Winstanley, 84.

page 66 note 4 Sabine, 261; Hill, Winstanley, 89.

page 66 note 5 Sabine, 262; Hill, Winstanley, 90.

page 67 note 1 Sabine, 264; Hill, Winstanley, 92.

page 67 note 2 At times Winstanley seems to attribute a visible quality to the voice of God, a common means of giving expression to the believer's assurance in the reality of ‘the Word’. So Habakkuk went to the watch-tower ‘to see what God will say’ (Habakkuk ii. 1). John of Patmos heard behind him ‘a loud voice like a trumpet’ and ‘turned to see the voice that was speaking’ (Revelation i. 12). Philo said: ‘It happens that the voice of men is to be heard, but the voice of God is to be seen, in deeds which the eye appreciated before the ear’. See W. J. Abbott et al. (eds.) The Bible Reader, New York 1969, xiii. It would seem that Winstanley came to his understanding of God's ‘light’ or ‘word’ by perceiving it, for in one passage cited below he explicitly denied having read it in any book, or having heard it from any man. It was a ‘free revelation’, a ‘word’, which while not written down was still an entity that he could literally ‘watch’. In fact, Winstanley can be seen attaching a status to ‘watch-word’ which enriches its customary meaning of secret word and rallying cry and which is only to be attained at the end of a markedly antinomian process. For Winstanley seems to be suggesting here that the ‘word’ had first to cast itself free from all humanly visible forms before it could be truly seen. Only then could he be certain that his understanding had come from ‘free revelation’. Only then was the Word a ‘watch-word’.

page 67 note 3 Sabine, 328–9; Hill, Winstanley, 140.

page 67 note 4 Hill, Winstanley, 24.

page 67 note 5 Sabine, 460; Hill, Winstanley, 229.

page 68 note 1 Sabine, 496; Hill, Winstanley, 271.

page 68 note 2 Sabine, 453; Hill, Winstanley, 221.

page 68 note 3 Sabine, 488; Hill, Winstanley, 262.

page 68 note 4 Sabine, 488; Hill, Winstanley, 262.

page 68 note 5 Sabine, 466; Hill, Winstanley, 237; Hudson, ‘Economic and Social Thought’, 8.

page 68 note 6 Sabine, 471; Hill, Winstanley, 242.

page 68 note 7 Sabine, 445; Hill, Winstanley, 213.

page 68 note 8 Hudson, op. cit., 9.

page 69 note 1 In Zerubbabels Encouragement to Finish the Temple (1642), a sermon preached to the Parliament in April 1642, the prominent Congregational divine Thomas Goodwin called for ‘spades’ to remove the ‘mountains’ that were ‘lying in the way of Gods proceedings’ (10, 11). Those proceedings were to be found by ‘searching into the Word’ (40), or by ‘digging’, a term that appears in one of Goodwin's later treatises entitled The Right Order of the Churches of Christ: ‘That in digging, we find such small medals as these, here and there, stamped by God's authority, and bearing die image of his wisdom and sovereignty, doth encourage us to dig, hoping to find that whole treasure that is hid in Christ, in whom we are complete for all treasures of Knowledge and wisdom’: Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, ed. John C. Miller, Edinburgh 1861, ii. 36. Goodwin's ‘digging’ takes place within the context of an ecclesiastical debate on what was called in the 1640s ‘Church Reformation’. And like the ‘spade’, ‘mountains’, ‘herbs’, ‘grasse’, ‘watering pots’, ‘dung’, ‘Hay and Stubble’ and ‘fertile soil’ that he mentions in his sermon, ‘digging’ also serves Goodwin as a ‘metaphor’, or in a more awkward rendering, as one of several ‘similitudinary examples’ (Zerubbabels Encouragement, 10, 53). The example of ‘digging’ was drawn from scripture: Goodwin's phraseology can be found in Job iii. 21. Clearly, in Winstanley's case ‘digging’ was more than a metaphor and functioned beyond the context of the ‘Church Reformation’ debate. Yet it is thought that the radical nature of the reformation attempted on St. George's Hill can be best established by inspecting Winstanley's use of familiar, and in the case of of ‘digging’, predominantly scriptural language.

page 69 note 2 Sabine, 260; Hill, Winstanley, 88.

page 69 note 3 Sabine, 256; Hill, Winstanley, 83.

page 70 note 1 The World Turned Upside Down, 112.

page 70 note 2 Hudson, ‘Economic and Social Thought’, 19.

page 70 note 3 Others who viewed Cromwell either as being or having the potential to be a millennarian instrument include Sir Henry Vane (see the postscript to his A Healing Question (1656), Andrew Marvell The First Anniversary (1656), John Spittlehouse, an old campaigner in the wars against the Stuarts, A Warning Piece Discharged (1653), the authors of the Declaration of the English Army in Scotland (1650), one of whom no doubt was Robert Lilburne, the commander-in-chief, who saw it to be the time for ‘the setting up of (the) Kingdom of Jesus Christ’ in England and at Cromwell's instigation). While contemporary opinion concerning the precise nature of Cromwell's role varied from Davidic king, biblical judge, providential hero to machiavel, all historians who have given attention to English political and religious thought in the 1650s agree that the millennium was still a familiar public theme and that the Protectorate and the Role of the Saints resuscitated hopes for a public adoption of apocalyptic visions. One such historian, William Lamont, states: ‘men with an apocalyptic vision, confident of ultimate truths, could swallow penultimate lies’: Godly Rule, Politics and Religion 1603–60, London 1969, 149.Google Scholar The prefatory dedication in The Law of Freedom shows Winstanley to be one of these men. See also Capp, B. S., The Fifth Monarchy Men: a study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism, London 1972Google Scholar; Mazzeo, Joseph, ‘Cromwell as Davidic King’, Reason and the Imagination, ed. Mazzeo, J., New York 1962, 29–55Google Scholar; Mazzeo, J., Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Studies, New York 1964Google Scholar; Wallace, John, Destiny His Choice, Cambridge 1968Google Scholar; Zwicker, Steven N., ‘Models of Governance in Marvell's “The First Anniversary”’, Criticism, a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, XVI (1974), 1–12Google Scholar.

page 70 note 4 Sabine, 534; Hill, Winstanley, 312–3.

page 70 note 5 Sabine, 502; Hill, Winstanley, 276.

page 70 note 6 Sabine, 252; Hill, Winstanley, 78.

page 71 note 1 Sabine, 567; Hill, Winstanley, 350.

page 71 note 2 Sabine, 567; Hill, Winstanley, 351.

page 71 note 3 Sabine, 568; Hill, Winstanley, 352.

page 71 note 4 Sabine, 569–70; Hill, Winstanley, 354.

page 71 note 5 Hill's discussion of Winstanley's conception of God (The World Turned Upside Down, 1–114) completely ignores his transcendendental view of God in this last pamphlet: ‘The philosophy which started as a vision seems to have ended as a kind of materialistic pantheism in which God or abstract Reason can be known only in man and nature’.

page 71 note 6 Sabine, 564; Hill, Winstanley, 347.

page 71 note 7 Hill, Winstanley, 68.

page 72 note 1 Sabine, 515; Hill, Winstanley, 291–2.

page 72 note 2 Hill, Winstanley, 54.

page 72 note 3 Sabine, 485; Hill, Winstanley, 259.

page 73 note 1 Sabine, 496; Hill, Winstanley, 271.

page 73 note 2 Sabine, 489; Hill, Winstanley, 263.

page 73 note 3 Sabine, 489; Hill, Winstanley, 264.

page 73 note 4 Sabine, 511; Hill, Winstanley, 286.

page 73 note 5 Sabine, 520; Hill, Winstanley, 296.

page 74 note 1 Sabine, 530; Hill, Winstanley, 308.

page 74 note 2 Sabine, 579; Hill, Winstanley, 364.

page 74 note 3 Sabine, 589; Hill, Winstanley, 377.

page 74 note 4 Hill, Winstanley, 9, 351.

page 75 note 1 ibid., 34.