Gerrard Winstanley was a failed cloth merchant reduced to herding cattle in Surrey when, in 1649, he reported a vision instructing him to work the common land. In April that year a small group began digging on St George's Hill at Walton-on-Thames, planting corn and beans and inviting the poor to join them. They called themselves True Levellers, because the Levellers, for all their radicalism, defended property. The colony was harassed, prosecuted, and broken up by local landowners within a year, and others met the same fate.
The writings are the reason he matters. Winstanley argues that in the beginning the earth was made a common treasury for all, that no one was given dominion over another, and that the fall of man is not a private moral event but the historical moment at which some men enclosed the land and made others work it for wages. Buying and selling land is the original theft; the law exists to defend it; the clergy sanctify it by promising the poor a heaven later in exchange for accepting hell now. He calls the whole system the Norman Yoke, imposed by conquest in 1066 and never lifted.
The remedy is not redistribution but the abolition of the market in land: the commons and wastes are to be worked collectively, and by demonstrating that it works the Diggers expected the labourers of England to abandon wage work of their own accord. The Law of Freedom in a Platform, addressed to Cromwell in 1652, sets out a full commonwealth with no buying or selling, no lawyers, no clergy, universal education including practical trades for all, and officers elected annually.
His theology is inseparable from the politics and dissolves into it: the Christ he speaks of is a rising up of reason within humanity rather than a person, heaven and hell are conditions of this life, and the true resurrection is a social one. He was writing three centuries before any organised socialism and was recovered by it — by Bernstein in the 1890s, by the British left thereafter — as the earliest English statement of the case that the abolition of private property in land is the condition of every other freedom.