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Ever since Eduard Bernstein wrote his pioneering study of the radical thought of the English Civil War and its aftermath, the figure of Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676) has loomed large in any treatment of that radical thought. To Bernstein, Winstanley's magnum opus The Law of Freedom was a "communistic utopia" and consequently, as a precursor of communism, Winstanley became a subject of interest to many other scholars with left-wing sympathies. Winstanley's substantial body of writings, largely preserved among the many contemporary tracts collected by the mid-seventeenth-century London bookseller George Thomason, have naturally led to a great emphasis on Winstanley and his works. Those works have been collected in authoritative scholarly editions, and perhaps more articles and books have been published on him and his thought than on any other radical thinker of that time.1
Consequently the figure of Winstanley and his literary legacy has largely overshadowed, if not obscured, the fact that he was part of the particular movement of the Diggers. He was its most outspoken and most prominent member, but hitherto very little was known about his associates. In his recent book, Brave Community, John Gurney has focused therefore on the Diggers as a group, and on the setting in which they primarily operated - the parishes of Cobham and Walton-on-Thames. Without Winstanley there would have been no Digger movement, as Gurney writes, and his study also sets out to reassess Winstanley's career and intellectual development. In this book too then, Winstanley is assigned the leading role, but this time the limelight regularly shifts to the other, lesser-known actors in the piece - heroes and villains alike.
In order to establish a clearer picture of who the Diggers and their adversaries were exactly Gurney has undertaken a thorough, and undoubtedly lengthy, study of the primary sources for this particular part of Surrey, and painstakingly reconstructed the local circumstances at the end of the 1640s and who actually lived there at that time. This must have been very time-consuming - indeed Gurney's first article on this subject dates from 1994 - though Gurney modestly refrains from alluding to what must have been an arduous task. The result is, however, a miniature social history of especially the parish of...