Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 224

This book has four principal aims: to explore the local background to the Digger movement; to study the Digger movement as a whole, providing a corrective to the normal fixation on Gerrard Winstanley; to offer a reassessment of Winstanley’s background, connections and ideas; and to assess the very different reactions the Diggers provoked in Walton and Cobham. Supported by evidence drawn from extensive archival research, Gurney’s study demonstrates how stimulating and valuable local history can be. While not devoid of weaknesses, the book is sure to become a key reference point for all future studies of the Diggers.

One of the key questions running throughout the book is ‘who exactly were the Diggers?’ Here, Gurney suggests that they were a disparate group with similarly disparate motivations. Among their ranks one finds local bricklayers, blacksmiths, maltsters, drapers, shoemakers and glaziers as well as radical sectaries drawn from further afield. The level of detail provided by Gurney makes for fascinating reading, and what we have in this book is the most comprehensive profile of Digger membership to date. I did find it slightly odd, however, that Gurney chose to give unexpected prominence to one particular Digger, John Coulter.

Coulter is introduced to us in the book’s Preface, and what we learn of him there serves as a narrative frame for the study as a whole. Coulter was both a Digger stalwart – present from beginning to end – and a local yeoman farmer who had inherited a thirty-acre estate, a major player in manorial affairs and a respected member of the ‘middling sorts’. What is slightly odd about this is that Coulter later turns out to be an anomaly, the only Digger ever to have played a prominent role in local affairs, and, indeed, his status and position appear to have been overplayed somewhat in the Preface. The other local Diggers were parish residents lacking the security of tenure and united by their marginal, vulnerable and economically precarious position on the fringes of society. The emphasis throughout the book – and Gurney’s choice to foreground Coulter is illustrative of this – is placed on the Diggers as a movement of the respectable ‘middling sorts’. The evidence cited, however, seems more consistent with a position never explicitly advanced, namely, that the Diggers were a movement of the poor and the poorer elements of the ‘middling sorts’.

Gurney is at his best in situating the Diggers within their local context. In addition to discussions of familiar themes such as the spread of religious radicalism and the costs of free quarter, there are excellent sections dealing with rural popular protest in Surrey during the 1640s and the history of bitter landlord-tenant conflicts in Cobham. The latter partly explains why the Diggers encountered less local opposition once they relocated from St. George’s Hill in Walton to Little Heath, Cobham. Given popular hostility toward landowners in Cobham, people were reluctant to engage in a campaign against the Diggers orchestrated by a manorial lord, John Platt, whose aim was to protect his own interests. Whereas opposition in Walton had come from the poor and ‘middling sorts’ as well as the agents of kingly power, it seems that in Cobham Platt had to rely on hiring men from outside the parish to do the dirty work of destroying crops and houses.

There was a more basic reason why the Diggers were better received in Cobham than in Walton. As Gurney argues throughout the book, many of the Diggers were residents of Cobham, linked to non-Diggers by complex kinship and neighbourhood ties. The different reactions the Diggers provoked is thus explained by the simple fact that in Walton they were outsiders, while in Cobham they were locals. As ever, though, Gurney enlivens even the most prosaic of arguments with plentiful concrete detail. One is thus presented with two Walton neighbours, Henry Bickerstaffe and William Starr, the former a Digger, the latter one of their leading persecutors. While Starr was motivated primarily by the perceived threat the Diggers posed to his own claim to the commons, Gurney suggests that personal score-settling may also have played a part, because Starr sought revenge for a violent and public humiliation that his own father had suffered at the hands of Bickerstaffe. It is this level of tangible human detail that makes Gurney’s study both original and engaging.

Although Gurney seeks to shift the focus away from Winstanley as an individual and on to the Diggers as a movement, he does offer an analysis of Winstanley’s ideas. There is much of value here. The final chapter, for example, contains an interesting discussion of Winstanley’s strategic reassessments, i.e., the subtle changes in emphasis and argument used to legitimate and secure support for the Diggers. Nonetheless, the treatment of Winstanley’s ideas is the least original aspect of the book. Gurney follows many others in suggesting that religion and politics were fused in Winstanley’s thought, that he propounded a powerful practical Christianity, and that his ideas were influenced by, but went beyond, those of contemporary social reformers. Of course, Gurney’s primary concern is not the political thought of Gerrard Winstanley. In keeping with the book as a whole, Gurney’s contribution to the study of Winstanley lies in the results of his archival research.

Following the invaluable work of James Alsop, it is now widely accepted that Winstanley was neither one of the labouring poor nor a member of the pseudo-gentry, but that he came instead from an artisanal family of modest means. Although Gurney is quick to point out that conclusive evidence is in short supply, his own research recasts Winstanley as the member of ‘an influential community of interest encompassing major gentry families, politicians, mercantile leaders and prominent religious figures’ (p.66). This is sure to provoke debate and reaction. It is also one of the reasons, among many, why the book is destined to become a key text in Digger studies.