Leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, whose colony was forced to disband in 1651, Gerrard Winstanley stands out from a century remarkable for its development in political thought as one of the most fecund and original of political writers. An acute and penetrating social critic with a passionate sense of justice, he worked out a collectivist theory which strikingly anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. Although other writers had proposed the reconstruction of the whole social order on rational principles, Winstanley was the first to put forward such a programme in the vernacular and to call upon the oppressed to translate it into action. Christopher Hill's selection of his many published pamphlets demonstrates the coherence and social relevance of Winstanley's philosophy while it reveals his mastery of colloquial prose and superb use of imagery.

Very little is known about Gerrard Winstanley. He was probably born in Wigan in 1609. His father was a mercer, and the family had several Puritan connections. Gerrard went to London in 1630 as an apprentice in the cloth trade and became a freeman of the Merchant Taylors' Company seven years later. In September 1640 he married Susan King but found it very difficult to make a living in the City. In 1643 they moved to Surrey and settled at Walton-on-Thames near Cobham where Gerrard herded cows as a hired labourer. These years were full of hardship, but in them his ideas developed rapidly from religious mysticism to materialistic pantheism. In April 1649 a group of Diggers led by Winstanley took over a patch of waste land near Cobham and established a communist colony there. Despite local opposition the colony survived until 1650, winning much support in southern and central England. Winstanley published a number of pamphlets on its behalf; in 1652 he summarized his ideas in The Law of Freedom in a Platform, dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was living in Cobham in 1660, but then disappears into obscurity.