Editing Diggers (section)

{{Short description|Group of Protestant agrarian socialists in 17th-century England}}
{{other uses}}
{{EngvarB|date=June 2017}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=June 2017}}
{{Infobox political party
| name             = True Levellers
| leader           = [[Gerrard Winstanley]]
| logo             = Levellers declaration and standard.gif
| caption          = Woodcut from a Levellers document by [[William Everard (Digger)|William Everard]]
| colorcode        = red
| founded          = 1649
| dissolved        = 1651
| split            = [[Levellers]]
| ideology         = [[Agrarianism]]<br/>[[Utopian socialism]]<br/>[[Classical radicalism|Radicalism]]<br/>[[Republicanism]]<br/>[[Universal suffrage]]<br/>[[Populism]]
| position         = [[Left-wing politics|Left-wing]]<ref>{{cite web |last=Milner |first=Graham |date=2009-10-30 |title=The Levellers and the 1640s English Revolution |url=https://links.org.au/levellers-and-1640s-english-revolution |website=links.org |publisher=Links |access-date=2025-03-01}}</ref>
| religion         = [[English Dissenters|Dissenter]] [[Protestantism]]
| country          = England
}}
{{socialism sidebar}}
The '''Diggers''' were a group of religious and political dissidents in England, associated with a political ideology and programme resembling what would later be called [[agrarian socialism]].<ref name="Collected citations 1">{{harvp|Campbell|2009|p=129}}; {{harvp|Winstanley|Jones|2002}}; {{harvp|Stearns|Fairchilds|Lindenmeyr|Maynes|2001|p=290}}; {{harvp|Johnson|2013}}</ref> [[Gerrard Winstanley]] and [[William Everard (Digger)|William Everard]], amongst many others, were known as '''True Levellers''' in 1649, in reference to their split from the [[Levellers]], and later became known as ''Diggers'' because of their attempts to farm on [[common land]]. Due to this and to their beliefs, the Diggers were driven from one county after another by the authorities.

The Diggers tried (by "levelling" [[land (economics)|land]]) to reform the existing [[social order]] with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small, [[egalitarian]] rural communities.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Feigenbaum |first=Anna |date=2024-06-05 |title=The Long History of Protest Camps |url=https://commonslibrary.org/the-long-history-of-protest-camps/ |access-date=2025-03-05 |website=The Commons Social Change Library |language=en-AU}}</ref>  They were one of a number of [[Nonconformist (Protestantism)|nonconformist]] [[English Dissenters|dissenting groups]] that emerged around this time. Their belief in economic equality was drawn from {{Bibleverse|Acts of the Apostles|4:32}}, which describes a community of believers that "had all things in common" instead of having personal property.