Acts of Letting and of Creation

32 1. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1975); David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (Lon­ don: Left Book Club); David C. Taylor, Gerrard Winstanley in Elmbridge (Cobham: Appleton Publications, 2000). See also the film Winstanley (1975), directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. 2. See Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007) for a contemporary version of this, where the occupation and shaping of space act is carried out by political means that are variously obfuscated and deniable, direct and indirect. 3. Gerrard Winstanley, ‘The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced’ (20 33 April 1649), in Leonard Hamilton, ed., Selections from the Works of Gerrard Winstanley (London: The Cresset Press, 1940), 40. 4. In ‘The Rest of Now’, Matthew Fuller’s Digger Barley presents a small distribution of barley seeds harvested from George Hill, which visitors may take away. Acts of Letting and of Creation Matthew Fuller Beginning in 1649 and continuing into the following year, a number of land occupations were made in England by homeless, poor, hungry or pissed-off people. They became known as ‘Diggers’ because they organized together to farm underused common land, to build rough settlements and plant food crops. This period of time, after the decapitation of King Charles and before the Commonwealth collapsed into a dictatorship, witnessed great enthusiasm and experimentation. The Diggers saw three broad kinds of land: wild nature, which was the woods, marshes, rivers, and other parts of land that were not used for farming; proprietary or enclosed land, sur­ rounded by hedges and walls for the use of landowners, handed down by the law of the eldest son and ultimately deriving from conquest; and a third category—common land, areas of land which had complex systems of traditional rights of use attached to them. Such rights were always partial, but might include, depending on the location: the right to pasture animals; gather fallen firewood; harvest rushes, willow branches, or other materials for building; or gather fruits, berries and nuts. In other words, rights to the commons were always specific. What the Diggers proposed was to maximize the use of the commons. They proposed that such land be given over as a common treasury for all people—to be improved, to be farmed and to accommodate storehouses for food and raiments open to all labouring people. Much of the existing commentary on the Diggers, and on the other movements looking for a reconstitution of society during and following the English Revolution, focuses on reassem­ bling their political thoughts and marking their actions and consequences.1 Alongside these aspects of the movement, however, it is also possible to consider a certain ‘style’ of speech and silence, of action and inaction that underlies their behaviour and the behaviour of those who responded to them. It is interesting to note how struggles over food and land (and over the very meaning of those terms, since they were at least temporarily freed from ‘kingly law’) and the creation of a new form of politics were partly carried out through various processes of ‘letting’. Letting was a means of bringing something into play through virtue of its powers, through the allowance of its action. Causation was deferred or rendered unnecessary, ends were achieved or achieved themselves without any necessary intervention. Acts of letting were kinds of inaction, the knowing allowance of something without direct responsibility. As well as the clear use of reason, argument, and direct action in the classic anarchist sense, in the episodes and events of the Digger movement there were a number of ways in which indirect action occured through various processes of letting. Letting should be seen not simply as an identifier of those who were good.2 It was a domain of active inaction that was essentially beyond good and evil, but the different modalities by which it was set in play implied certain relations to power, and an understanding of the dynam­ ics by which the world constituted itself. Letting occured in the events around the Digger movement in ways that we would now register as richly Machiavellian, but that also that imply a certain vision of ecology. Crucially, certain kinds of letting aligned these two registers by means of a reading and reinvention of power, and a setting into play of previously unaligned capacities of people, seeds, tools, manure and rethought land. Local landlords used various means for the destruction of the Digger’s efforts. There were several direct violent assaults on encampments, involving the breaking up and stealing of clothes, shacks, tools and animals. An important weapon was the courts, which resolved to fine the Diggers ten pounds each, thus making their few cattle and any other property subject to seizure for the payment of this unattainable sum, and forcing the Diggers to move to a new site in Cobham. But in addition to such direct intervention, the landlords also acted by establishing the means by which something might arise ‘by chance’. Thus the residues of inaction—of letting something occur—were mobilized as action. Such indirect approaches in­ cluded the deliberate loosing of cattle onto the Digger’s eleven acres of barley, which was naturally ruined. It was an ‘accident’, a residue of inaction. On another occasion, villagers were given quantities of tobacco and wine and were incited by the church into another form of inaction—to boycott the trade of the Digger settlement. In such cases, letting functioned to allow those in power to achieve their ends whilst absolving them of responsibility. For the Diggers, letting involved the interplay of two registers. The first was at the level of politics, and the organization of property. In a text called ‘The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced’ they called upon their contemporaries, to ‘Take notice that England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour in the commons, and so live as comfortably as the landlords that live in their enclosures’ (emphasis mine).3 The crucial problem they were trying to tackle was how to find forms of freedom that would ‘let’ people eat and thrive after the formal declaration of a much-contested commonwealth. They were trying to find a modern form to the traditional rights to the commons that would maintain their power of ‘letting’ whilst reflecting the exigencies of their times. Instead, following the return to kingly law, the commons were subject to a different form of moderniza­ tion: that of enclosure. More importantly for the Diggers, a further form of letting—letting as it occurs at the scale of, or despite, human intention—was implied in their vision of the world. The growth of plants, the earth’s feeding of the people, was part of Creation: something that could not be owned because it was a force of nature, a manifestation of the spirit, that spirit which they saw also as reason. Creation was not a one-off event but rather a present power active in all things. Cre­ ation was what was alive and released in the dispersal of seeds. By taking up spades and ma­ nuring and planting the land Diggers were simply letting further creation come to pass. The seeds of barley (and those of wheat, rye, parsnips, turnips and beans that were also planted in the settlements) with their fructiferous capacity, their affordance of food, nourishment and further planting were allies to, and embodiments of, these acts of creation. As confirmation of the power of this idea of letting, Digger barley can still be harvested on George Hill in Surrey, the first of the Digger sites.4