Winstanley,
a freeman of the Merchant Taylor's Company in London during the 1630s, had been
forced by economic failure to seek work as a laborer in Surrey by 1643. He
published first radical religious tracts, from 1648, which have a strong
millenarian content; through the rising up of Christ, society would be
transformed. In April, 1649, Winstanley took steps to realize his vision of the
earth as "a common treasury" for all people by leading a group,
labeled "Diggers," onto the wasteland (uncultivated common land) of
St George's Hill, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in April, 1649. Other groups made
similar moves towards communal cultivation of land, and egalitarian
distribution of the products of that land, but such groups, including the original
band led by Winstanley, were frustrated and defeated by local landlords in
little more than a year. By 1651, Winstanley no longer expected Christ to
transform society, nor did he count on success through direct action from
individuals; instead, he turned to Oliver Cromwell, Commander in Chief of the
army which had defeated Charles I. He therefore addressed The Law of Freedom,
which lays out Winstanley's hopes and plans for a new and more just society in
1651, to Cromwell. Cromwell was not moved by the appeal, and Winstanley, with
help from his father-in-law, became a landlord himself for a time, and
eventually returned to London to engage in trade once more. Vestiges of his
radical religious and political career can be discerned in his affiliation with
the Quakers at the time of his death in 1676.