Reddit reviews The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Penguin History)

The diggers didn't call themselves diggers, they called themselves the True Levellers, which helps us quite a bit in understanding their relationship with other ideas and groups of the late 1640s/early 1650s.

Levellers were a large and powerful faction within Parliament's army, they were associated with people of low birth and radical Protestant beliefs (e.g. Baptists, Independents, Anabaptists.) The Levellers organized soldiers to advocate for an end to political and religious hierarchies (especially against tithes) and demand manhood suffrage. Their basic idea was that since Parliament had asked the people to support it during the war, and the people had won the war for Parliament, that Lords and gentry could not go back to tyrannizing the common people. By this time the soldiers of the army thought of themselves as serving a higher purpose than their immediate orders.

From The Case of the Army Truly Stated

> that the Army took up arms in judgment and conscience for the people’s just rights and liberties, and not as mercenary soldiers, hired to serve an arbitrary power of the state, and that in the same manner it continued in arms at that time. And . . . it was declared that they proceeded upon the principles of right and freedom, and upon the law of nature and nations. But the strength of the endeavours of many hath been and are now spent to persuade the soldiers and Agitators that they stand as soldiers only to serve the state, and may not as free Commons claim their right and freedom as due to them, as those ends for which they have hazarded their lives, and that the ground of their refusing to disband was only the want of arrears and indemnity

So in this atmosphere of revolution there is a smaller movement, led by Gerard Winstanley, that takes it further still. Their religious beliefs are extremely radical-- indeed their theology is protomaterialist-- but they're on the spectrum of radical Protestant thought. The Diggers aim to bring waste and common lands under cultivation and end private landholding, they don't aim to do this by armed force but by example; they are one of many groups who see God's hand in England's recent events and expect God's kingdom to be shortly established on Earth. Diggers, like many other religious radicals, believe in equality and personal independence, that God speaks to all people, very similar to the contemporary Quaker concepts of 'Inner Light.' From The True Levellers Standard Advanced:

> And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.




As for texts, if you want a good primary source to start with you can read Gerard Winstanley's justification and call to action. For secondary sources I recommend Christopher Hill's book

"The World Turned Upside Down" by Christopher Hill is a fantastic Marxist analysis of the English revolution.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Revolution/dp/0140137327

Tell me you don't think Winstanley is awesome after reading this book.

If you want to learn more about the Diggers, I'd really really recommend checking out The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill, it's pretty incredible.

And also the great song The World Turned Upside Down by Billy Bragg, which was inspired by the book.

The Vote: How it Was Won, and How it Was Undermined - Paul Foot

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution - Christopher Hill

https://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Revolution/dp/0140137327