Rebels and traitors

Chapter Sixty-One — Cobham: 1649-50

Anne Jukes made her expedition into country living just before the worst winter anyone had ever known. To her husband's dismay, even this did not bring her running home.

'I would rather' — Lambert did not change his tune — 'she had run away with an Anabaptist hat-maker.'

'And took all your money,' Gideon added, to make the misery as bad as possible. In fact, Anne had taken few possessions and very little money — though she had left a note about her dowry that made Lambert sit up.

'She wants to distribute my investments among the world's beggars and idlers. I am screwed and wrung!'

'You are a gloomy ghoul around the house. I am not surprised she went.' Domestically, they were struggling like two bachelors. The maid had refused to live in and a cook whose name Anne had left them on the back of a linen list proved a grim disappointment. They were used to skilful English boiling and baking. The cook, on the other hand, was used to masters who ate her half-cooked puddings and burnt roasts; although she noticed that sometimes they did so in pinched silence, she put that down to people thinking about religion.

'I cannot understand it…'

Gideon sighed. Lambert ought to understand, because his brother had explained it often enough. Gideon had even produced a copy of The True Levellers Standard Advanced, the manifesto of the movement Anne had joined. The new group called themselves True Levellers to distinguish them from the originals. As soon as they set up their first establishment, at St George's Hill, near Weybridge in Surrey, the new community became known as the Diggers.

By April there were reputedly fifty. Their most vocal leader was Gerard Winstanley, a former mercer whose business had been ruined in the civil wars. Forced to work as a cattle herdsman, he lived with his wife's relations at Walton-on-Thames.

'Bankrupt — and having to endure your in-laws' pity? — enough to make anybody have a vision of a better life!' chortled Gideon.

Winstanley claimed his inspiration for communal cultivation of the land arrived in a message he received while in a trance: 'Work together, Eat bread together'. Nobody could object to that, but he was asking for trouble with his wider opinions: 'Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land — or was it made to preserve all her children?'

Winstanley's writings envisaged an ideal relationship between humans and nature. Like many radicals of the period, he promulgated the theory that a golden age had existed in England before the Norman Conquest, after which the common people had been robbed of their birthrights and exploited by a foreign ruling class.

With a view to overturning this centuries-old social injustice, Winstanley joined a community founded by a neighbouring idealist, William Everard, a former soldier and lay preacher. The Diggers occupied St George's Hill in April 1649, at a time when war, floods and bad harvests had pushed food prices to an all-time high. It seemed the right moment for a new democratic society established for the common man, instead of the existing pattern which was based on privilege and wealth. Winstanley deplored the plight of the people at the lowest levels of society, whose dismal existence was bemoaned and yet overlooked by most of the protagonists in the civil war — the poor, sick, hungry, and destitute. Some of them would join the Diggers. Other members, like Anne, were drawn there through having a conscience about their own good fortune.

The Diggers immediately aroused suspicion in the authorities. Lord Fairfax was instructed by the Council of State to remove this threat to public order. He sent a captain to inspect what they were up to, who said that they had invited 'all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes'. Captain Sanders reported darkly to Fairfax, 'It is feared they have some design in hand!'

At the behest of furious local landowners, the lord general eventually arrived in person. Initially, Everard made himself the official spokesman. He described a vision telling him to plough the earth as an attempt to 'restore the Creation to its former condition'. However, it was now claimed that the Diggers did not intend to knock down enclosures or touch other men's property; they would simply till the common land until all men joined them. During the interview Winstanley and Everard refused to remove their hats, because to them, Lord Fairfax was 'but their fellow creature'.

As they were questioned there, Everard — who had been summed up by Fairfax's captain as a madman — decided that the Diggers were in serious trouble and evaporated away. Actually Fairfax viewed the Diggers as harmless, called this a civil dispute and advised the local landowners to use the courts for remedy. Gerard Winstanley stuck by his convictions, remained with the group and complained about the treatment they received.

Anne Jukes arrived at St George's Hill two months after the colony started. She could not have had a worse welcome, for the community was attacked by thugs hired by the local lord of the manor, the incongruously named Francis Drake. Scenes of chaos greeted her. In the systematic mistreatment and bullying meted out by the landowner, Diggers had been carried off as prisoners to Walton Church. Others were beaten up by local people, with the sheriff disdainfully looking on, then five were carried to the White Lion Prison for weeks. Goods were stolen from them. A young boy was attacked and had his clothes taken.

In this notorious attack, four Diggers had been battered by William Starr and John Taylor, with other men, who were all disguised as women. Anne heard from excited community members how Starr and Taylor set about their victims with long staves, leaving three badly beaten, a fourth in danger of death, so badly wounded he had to be brought home in a cart. As their wounds were tended, the bloodied survivors told how they had asked to be brought properly before the law, a suggestion ignored by the thugs. Afterwards, they were not vengeful, but issued a statement: 'Let the world take notice that we that do justify this cause of digging have obeyed the Lord, in setting forward this work of endeavouring to bring the earth into a Community, and we have peace and purposes to go on.'

It was a frightening reception for Anne Jukes, who had gone there alone and who in any case was unused to the bone-hard grind of country life. She had, however, helped dig London's fortifications, the Lines of Communication. She could endure hard labour in biting wind if she had to.

Molestation continued. Digger houses were pulled down. Their tools were destroyed — spades and hoes cut to pieces or wrenched from them by force and never seen again. Cartwheels were damaged. Vegetables were uprooted. Growing corn was spoiled. They accepted these trials philosophically and, as they had promised, continued.

The landowners tried legal measures. Members of the community were arrested and charged with trespassing. Following a court case, in which the Diggers were forbidden to speak in their own defence, they were found guilty of being Ranters, an eccentric sect associated with free love. In fact Gerard Winstanley had reprimanded the Ranters' leader for his sexual practices.

'If, as I have heard, the Ranters run out into the streets naked to proclaim their visions, then to call us Ranters is madness,' Anne joked to her new comrades. 'Nobody would stand in the middle of a frozen field tending parsnips without clothes!'

This was not received with the humour she had enjoyed among the Jukes family. Her first pang of homesickness struck.

Once they lost the court case, the army could have been used to evict them, so the Diggers abandoned St George's Hill in August and set up again nearby at Cobham. There they repeated their efforts: tilling, planting and building shelters. Their reception was no better. In October, the local authorities tried to have them removed. In November, soldiers were dispatched to assist the local justices of peace. Members clung on, but their situation was worrying.

Despite this, Anne lived at Cobham for over six months, in one of the communal houses. Most of the other members were couples or families, although some were very elderly. Anne felt out of place. Forty years of age was a bad time to take up farming. Some male members naturally assumed that women members would be held in common — these were men who would have attempted liberties whatever society they lived in, Anne reckoned. Meanwhile, female members were suspicious of the motives of an unaccompanied woman. Married female members were certain Anne Jukes was after their husbands. Saying what she really thought of those husbands would only have caused friction.

There were disadvantages to communal life. Bursting with people, the houses were noisy. Occupants stayed up late, banging about while others were longing for rest after hard work in the fields. Idealistic principles made little impression on human nature. Food and belongings were shared, but bitterness sometimes festered over perceived hoarding, with dark suspicions about exactly how equal the sharing-out was.

Division of labour was fraught too. Some people were so overwhelmed and exhausted by their need to expound ecstatic visions, they left all the hard work to others. There had never in the world been a rota for wood-chopping that satisfied everyone named on it. Ideas varied widely on how full a fetched water-bucket should be. Born organisers do have to comment frankly on the deficiencies of lesser mortals, whereas, having taken courageous decisions on their way of life, some mortals are resistant to listening. Who, thought Anne Jukes irritably, having thrown off the Norman yoke of tyranny, then wants to be given instructions about chicken-feathers by a prissy confectioner who has clearly never plucked a fowl or stitched up a seam in linen in her life? A woman who does not even know the difference between a pillow-and a bolster-case?

Human endurance has limits. The Diggers were testing them.

That winter was bitter. Water froze in the pail. None the less, with the spring their crops flourished on Cobham Heath. Their hard-working community had eleven acres under cultivation and had built six or seven shelters. But local pressure against them continued relentlessly, and their situation became desperate. There was encouraging news that other Digger communities had developed and were doing well elsewhere, but they needed funds. A letter was sent out from Surrey requesting financial assistance from the other Diggers. Winstanley then discovered that impostors were going about soliciting donations with a forged letter which purportedly bore his signature.

The movement declined in early 1650. In March remnants were driven off St George's Hill. The government was becoming increasingly concerned. Throughout the spring the Diggers continued their work, despite harassment. Then, in April, the movement collapsed. The lord of the manor at Cobham was a Parson Platt. With several others he destroyed the Diggers' houses, burned their furniture and scattered their belongings. Platt threatened the Diggers with death if they continued their activity and hired guards to prevent their return.

With legal actions pending and dwindling financial resources, the Surrey Diggers quietly disbanded their community. Some were now in such reduced circumstances, they left their children to be cared for by parish welfare, which attracted much righteous criticism. By July, everything was over. It had been a brave experiment, but it had failed.

Anne Jukes had to find somewhere else to go. After three-quarters of a year away, she acknowledged to herself just how reluctant she was to slink back humbly to her no-doubt crowing husband.