The publishers and editors are to be congratulated on giving us the definitive edition of the writings of the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, in two handsomely produced volumes, justly dedicated to Christopher Hill's memory. There is a self-effacing brilliance in the editing. We do not know who was responsible for which section of the introduction, but the overall impression it gives is of a seamless whole. There is a biographical introduction, followed by a short account of the Digger movement and then sections on Winstanley's political and social thought, his religion, his relation to the Bible and an assessment of his literary achievement. Towards the end of the second volume we have the (very few) surviving manuscripts associated with Winstanley, one of which is a bad-tempered letter from him to the mystic prophet, Lady Eleanor Douglas. (When this present reviewer was holding this precious original in his hands in the Huntington Library, the temptation to swallow it was almost irresistible.) There is a very useful biographical appendix of personal names mentioned in his writings. Not least of the editorial services is the tracking down of all the scriptural references of this Bible-soaked author. Sometimes the misquotes are as telling as the quotes. The meek shall inherit the earth, but Winstanley tells us (once) that the inheritors are the poor and the meek, and (twice) that they are just the poor.

All that we have of Winstanley's writings is compressed into a four-year period between 1648 and 1651; that is to say, nothing for the first thirty-nine years of his life, and virtually nothing for the last twenty-five. The historian who points out these sombre facts, James Alsop, has done as much as anybody to redress these imbalances. As a result we know more than we did before about his county community through the researches in Surrey of John Gurney, whose undergraduate special subject became a doctoral dissertation and finally a book, Brave community (Manchester 2007). He was able to demonstrate how the very different reception of the Digger message in neighbouring Walton and Cobham had its roots in their respective histories. The editors acknowledge their debt to both scholars. What their volumes do is to present us for the first time with the opportunity to see Winstanley whole.

In their absence we often have had to make do with a bifurcated Winstanley, with the dispersal of the Diggers in April 1650 as the dividing line. There are two key supporting testimonies. One is from Winstanley himself, the other from an unforgiving enemy. First, from Winstanley. He pronounced his own nunc dimittis on his career in imperishable prose:

These were lines that were too good not to be used as the conclusion to Kevin Brownlow's fine 1975 film, Winstanley, but when did he write them? The answer is 1 January 1650, before the suppression of the commune and with other key writings to come. But another of them could be pressed into the argument that he had outlived his Digging days: The law of freedom in a platform, his last published work in 1651, with its sixty-two draconian laws and the appeal to Cromwell as the new Moses. As such it could read as the substantiation of Lawrence Clarkson's claim, in his Lost sheep found of 1660, that Winstanley had reneged on his earlier principles and become a man of property. Clarkson was no disinterested witness, however. Winstanley's identification of Reason with God was anathema to a committed Muggletonian, for whom Reason was the bad seed and Faith the good, and Clarkson was writing his defence of his faith years after his brush with the Diggers. Winstanley's later finances were complicated by litigation but were only in the end steadied by marrying a Quaker and becoming one himself. His widow's bequest in her will to the poor children of Southwark suggests at the very lowest some continuity of aspiration.

The Clarkson attack carried what charge it did only because it was the one direct piece about Winstanley which has survived, and is therefore impossible to discount out of hand. But there are problems in any case in seeing The law of freedom in a platform as his last testament, not least in his own admission that some of its contents date from 1649 or 1650. In his Englands spirit unfoulded (1650) he urged men to take the Engagement to the Commonwealth precisely because he saw it as the consummation of his Digger ideals, not their negation. What the editors of these volumes call Gurney's ‘enterprising research’ has established that Winstanley and two friends were respectively second, third and fourth of ninety-four enthusiastic subscribers to the Cobham Engagement on 16 March 1650. Richard Baxter was a divine who earlier declined the Engagement, but by the end of the decade had embraced a Cromwellian ‘holy commonwealth’ with the same millenarian hopes as Winstanley, and the same dread of antinomianism as was voiced by Winstanley in his anti-Ranter pamphlets. These are speculations which others might wish to follow up, secure in the knowledge that they need to look no further than these two wonderful volumes for some of the answers.