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Winstanley's “Righteous Actors”: Performance, Affect, and Extraordinary Politics in the Seventeenth Century

On the first day of April 1649, on the predominantly rural manor of Walton, Surrey, the sight of people preparing land for the plow was unremarkable. To see men up at dawn, dressed for the field in broad-brimmed hats, homespun waistcoats, and short breeches, loosening or breaking up clods with their spades, stooping to toss aside root and rock, was typical. What did raise eyebrows, however, was the sight of such busyness on a Sunday, the Sabbath, and on no less remarkable ground than George Hill, with its “very barren,” sandy soil. When questioned, Gerrard Winstanley reframed this performative break with religious, social, and agricultural norms as he did in his soon to be published manifesto, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. To work this land was to “declare . . . by action,” as well as by word, that Winstanley, the self-described “prophet” William Everard, and a small number of others had been sent by the Creator to begin their mission of transforming “the Earth [into] a common Treasury for all, both Rich and Poor.” Rural, religious, and resource poor, the Digger collective has not received substantial attention from performance studies scholars. Even some historians of the seventeenth century have questioned the significance of this small, nonviolent agrarian group in the intensely “charged political atmosphere of the 1640s,” but as a collective whose theatrical social performances raised them from obscurity to national visibility, Diggers are in some ways the epitome of this era.