WINSTANLEY, GERRARD (1609-1676), commonly called the Digger, a writer whose place in the history of the Commonwealth is less secure than his place in its arguments. The land-reformers have reprinted his tracts at every considerable discussion of the Agrarian Laws (q.v.); the defenders of the existing arrangement have answered him often enough to preserve a reputation they seldom intended to enlarge. He belongs to the literature of the Commonwealth by this continued reading, though the settled Commonwealth has never quite known how to include him among its ancestors.
The difference between his language and that of Harrington (q.v.) is plain even where a hurried reader supposes their objects identical. Harrington examines the distribution of property as the condition of a durable constitution. Winstanley asks what warrants the exclusion by which property is enjoyed. A limitation upon the revenue of a great estate answers the first inquiry; it does not necessarily begin to answer the second. The convenience of classing both writers as friends of the Agrarian has consequently been greater than the exactness of the classification.
Winstanley's prose has the movement of spoken exhortation. The same question returns, with its terms altered only enough to take away an evasion; the words earth, bread, labour, and brother bear a repetition which more ornamental words would not survive. His strength is not the picturesque image, but the ordinary thing made troublesome by being named precisely. A reader who has agreed that the earth supports all men finds himself asked, a paragraph later, how one man's need became another man's permission. The passage is an argument, although its cadence frequently causes it to be remembered as a prophecy.
There are defects inseparable from this force. Institutions which others would distinguish are brought beneath a single accusation; difficulties of administration disappear in the confidence with which the right intention is stated. His opponents are therefore able to quote him as though he had mistaken a congregation for a polity. His followers, by omitting every passage which impedes their immediate purpose, have sometimes made him less reasonable still. The tracts deserve to be read in their sequence, where the labour of persuasion can be seen, rather than in the collections of triumphant sentences which opposite parties exchange across a controversy.
He died in 1676. His afterlife has been a succession of returns to print rather than a steady occupation of the schoolroom. The account of the book trade (q.v.) must accordingly reckon with a kind of demand which ordinary literary fashion does not explain: a neglected writer becomes suddenly necessary because a familiar public question has ceased to admit its familiar answer.
Winstanley is neither the draftsman of the Frame nor a harmless visionary at its margin. He supplies the question which its accomplishments do not dispose of. The republic honours the men who made its constitution practicable; it continues, with less ceremony, to purchase the pamphlets of the man who asks whether practicability was the whole of its promise. (H. M.)