The “Common Treasury:” The Diggers in Seventeenth-Century England

This paper will look at an historical template of a practice that is already being resurrected.  Seattle has become home to Beacon Food Forest, a project that will remake part of one of its parks into a place where community members can grow their own food.  It is a modern, urban resurrection of the commons, in some ways similar to the recently announced Giants Garden at AT&T Park in San Francisco.  However, the idea of enclosing common land and turning it toward food production—food which would not be owned by its growers per se—is not new.  Indeed, over three centuries ago, a group of religious radicals, dubbed Diggers, enclosed the commons on St. George’s Hill in Surrey, England and began to cultivate it.  Their goal, as stated by their intellectual leader, Gerrard Winstanley, was to return the earth to a “common treasury.”  This paper will look at the origins of Diggers and their ideas, going back to the medieval philosopher Joachim of Fiore’s apocalyptic prophesies and similar movements in the Radical Reformation.  This paper will also consider the Diggers as products of their own time and their relationship with other radical groups that grew out of the English Civil War, most notably the Levellers and the Quakers.  In an age and place where Christianity has become inextricably combined with capitalist concepts, it is useful to consider the ways in which the religion as been used to argue for equality, communalism, and charity.