SOURCE: "Sowing in Hope: The Relevance of Theology to Gerrard Winstanley's Political Programme," The Seventeeenth Century, Vol. VI, No. 2, Autumn, 1991, pp. 189-204.

In the following essay, Bradstock maintains that Winstanley's "radically unorthodox" theology contributed significantly to the development of the Digger communist platform—contrary, Bradstock contends, to what many modern critics allow.

Since Gerrard Winstanley's writings first became a subject for serious study at the end of the nineteenth century, one question which has regularly exercised his interpreters is how far his political philosophy is shaped by or grounded upon theological premises, and exactly what those premises are. The question is both an interesting and an important one, since it reaches right to the heart of the Diggers' whole project to cultivate the common land and restore a true commonwealth on English soil. We can state the question in the form of two propositions. Did Winstanley's religious beliefs...