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"Winstanley"; or, Kevin Brownlow Camps Out on St. George's Hill
Literature Film Quarterly, 2003 by Tibbetts, John C
Winstanley was Kevin Brownlow's second feature-length historical drama.1 It was released in 1975, almost a decade after the completion of his first feature, It Happened Here.2 Woodfall Films financed the script, and the British Film Institute Production Board, under the sympathetic eye of Mamoun Hassan, invested £17,000, under the condition that the lion's share of the work be given to crew members just breaking into the business. Since 35mm color was deemed too expensive, and 16mm color judged unsatisfactory, Brownlow and his codirector, Andrew Mollo, decided to shoot the picture in black and white-16mm for the battle scenes and 35mm for the rest. The bulk of the final shooting schedule lasted almost a year, from the late summer of 1974 to the winter of 1975, with the majority of filming transpiring on weekends.
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For many viewers the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who led a small band of farmers and ex-soldiers called "Diggers" in a failed attempt to establish a collective on common ground might seem a mere footnote in history. Yet, Gerrard Winstanley played a crucial role in a popular revolt in the middle decades of the seventeenth century that saw seven years of civil war-a period of the greatest social, political, and religious upheaval in the course of English history. The eminent British historian and authority on Winstanley, Christopher Hill, has described the period as one of "glorious flux and excitement," of "a great overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England" (24). The struggle pitted the propertied classes of town and country against the established power of the Monarchy. There was religious contention, too, as Parliament pushed for a more thorough reformation of the Church. In the resulting conflict, the New Model Army, under Oliver Cromwell, ousted Charles I in 1646. Two years later, in a second Civil War, Cromwell defeated an insurrection led by the King (who was beheaded in 1649) and dealt harshly with other "troublemakers" like the Levellers, an activist group that had tried to secure equal voting rights for all (save servants and beggars). In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley, formerly a bankrupted London cloth merchant, turned polemicist and pamphleteer and inspired with his writings a group of "True Levellers" ("Diggers," as they were also called) whose politics were even more radical than the Levellers-to defy the laws of Cromwell's England and establish communes to till the soil of the "common" grounds.
An original and passionate thinker and visionary, Winstanley asserted that the real split in English life lay not between King and Parliament, but between classes of men-between those who worked the land and those who owned it. Being part of the nation, he asserted, the common people should have equal rights to ownership with the gentry and the clergy. In his The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652), Winstanley envisioned the constitution of a communistic society in which all land was held in common, all buying and selling was abolished, all citizens were educated by the state, and all people were eligible for the rotating offices of magistracy. He promised his followers: "And for all such as will come in and work with them, they shall have meat, drink, and clothes, which is all that is necessary to the life of man."3 Thus, his collectivist theories and practices strikingly anticipate nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. His commune at St. George's Hill, although dispersed in 1649 by neighboring landlords and the soldiers of General Fairfax, was a first step in a reclamation by common people of English lands.
Winstanley's story, as historian Thomas Prasch has demonstrated, was virtually forgotten until the late nineteenth century. It was only in the 1890s, Prasch writes, "in the context of the proliferation of socialist groups and writings that characterized the last decades of the nineteenth century, and with the need of English socialists to find domestic progenitors for their movement, that Winstanley's works were dug up again."4 Later, in the 1940s, a complete edition of Winstanley's writings, edited by George Sabine, was published for the first time. More recently, in the 1960s and 1970s, on the heels of the New Left, hippie communes in Berkeley and Paris, emerging Third World nations, and the elevation of counterculture radicals to cult status; historians, novelists, and filmmakers like Christopher Hill, David Caute, and Kevin Brownlow, respectively, have portrayed him not so much as a proto-Marxist, but a radical, Christian communist fighting for the rights of the underdog.5
For Brownlow, the experience was a crash course in the history of the English Civil Wars. "Knowing nothing about the seventeenth century," Brownlow admits, "I didn't really respond at first to the story." However, after further reading and reflection, he became more and more fascinated with this "extraordinarily forgotten episode of English history."6 Moreover, it is clear that Brownlow came to admire greatly the ideas and example of Winstanley. Like many historians, dating back to Eduard Bernstein, who had stressed Winstanley's materialism and liberal politics (and de-emphasized his rather mystical theology), Brownlow saw him as a precursor to modern secular radicalism and scientific socialist ideas. Accordingly, his script foregrounds Winstanley's personal, day-to-day struggles in keeping his Diggers together, his fight with the Establishment for individual rights, and, in the end, his disillusionment and defeat. As will be seen at the end of this paper, Brownlow perhaps also saw in his Diggers an inspiration and example for the kind of collective enterprise he himself was endeavoring to undertake as a filmmaker.
