This is a valuable book about one of the best known, if fleeting, movements to emerge during the English Revolution. In April 1649 a group of people occupied St George's Hill in the parish of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Led by two former apprentices of the Merchant Taylors' Company, William Everard and Gerrard Winstanley, these ‘new Levellers’ or ‘diggers’ began to cultivate the barren land, sowing parsnips, carrots and beans in the hope of making the earth ‘a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons’. Everard justified the new communal experiment with a vision, while Winstanley declared that during a trance he had heard the words ‘Worke together. Eat bread together’. Complaints, however, were soon made to the authorities and fearing a royalist rendezvous gathered under cover of the commotion caused by such ‘ridiculous’ activities, the Council of State dispatched two cavalry troops to investigate. Brought before Lord General Thomas Fairfax at Whitehall, Everard allegedly asserted during questioning that he was of the race of the Jews and that the people's liberties had been lost since the Norman Conquest. Though the Diggers adhered to the Golden Rule to do to others as they would be done unto, intending to obey Gospel injunctions by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, Walton's inhabitants were predominantly hostile to their message. Opposition took various forms: the Diggers' plantation was trampled down, their wooden houses burned, cart sabotaged, a draught horse maimed and cattle driven away; clothing, linen and food was stolen; men and a boy were victims of physical violence; enemies filed suits for trespass against them in Kingston's court; several were imprisoned in Walton church and one in Kingston gaol. These obstacles proved insurmountable and after less than twenty-one weeks the Diggers reluctantly abandoned their efforts. A new colony established on the Little Heath in neighbouring Cobham (Surrey) endured for approximately thirty-four weeks. Other communities founded at Iver (Buckinghamshire), Wellingborough (Northamptonshire) and elsewhere were also short-lived. Since their rediscovery in the nineteenth century – first by Liberal, Socialist and Marxist historians and then by Protestant nonconformists – the Diggers have been successively appropriated, their image refashioned in the service of new political doctrines that have sought legitimacy partly through emphasising supposed ideological antecedents. Recently they have been insensitively incorporated within a constructed Green heritage, narratives which at their worst seem little more than exercises in legitimation. Gurney's work maintains an approach, primarily identified with the Left, which stresses the continuity of English radicalism. His concern, therefore, is to question the view that the Diggers were perceived as unwelcome outsiders intruding on the lives of the local community. Through superb archival research he reconstructs the topography of Cobham, economic pressures and social relations within the parish as well as assessing the deep impact of Civil War. Against a backdrop of ‘widespread rural unrest’ (p. 52), he introduces the figure of Winstanley – a remarkable thinker who articulately disseminated the Diggers' doctrines in a number of important publications. Gurney demonstrates that perhaps as many as a third of the seventy-four Surrey Diggers whose names are known were local inhabitants, persuasively tracing divergent responses to their activities in Walton (intense and unremitting opposition, especially from those resident near St George's Hill) and Cobham (less evident popular hostility as a consequence of conflicts and discontents within the parish, counterbalanced by determined opposition from local gentry, rich landowners and their tenants). Although this book's main theme is an exploration of local contexts as well as an unravelling of Winstanley's social network, lengthier discussion of the intellectual dimension – especially the Diggers' religious beliefs and the manner in which they appropriated and refashioned biblical, millenarian and hermetic texts – would have been welcome; so too an introduction for readers unfamiliar with the English Revolution and the historiography. All the same, this study will stand the test of time for it is unlikely that the research will be surpassed.