Billy Bragg's song goes further than stating 'they were dispersed' but ends dramatically with, '"We come in peace." The orders came to cut them down.'
No massacre took place.
That doesn't mean that the powers-that-were didn't use violence against dissenters. Witness the executions of several Levellers at Burford and elsewhere by the Parliamentarian army.
Bragg's song wouldn't have sounded so dramatic if it ended:
'They lost a court case, not allowed to speak, and left before the army came to move them on.'
Incidentally, I have a well-played DVD of Kevin Brownlow's and Andrew Mollo's 1975 film Winstanley with its grainy black and white evocation of the period, non-professional actors and lashings of quotes from Winstanley's writings.
It has its longeurs but it's well worth watching.
Spoiler alert: the film ends with the Digger community being dispersed and some ridden down.
Leon Rosselson wrote The World Turned Upside Down (and first recorded it with Roy Bailey), but it has been recorded by a number of people, including Billy Bragg (and performed by Tony Benn, apparently).
As you point out, there is dramatic licence. But I take the penultimate verse to address the fate of the Diggers, while the last verse serves as an encouragement to those who would walk in their footsteps, and a final warning.
I don't see many communitarian experiments - although 'house shares' in London and other expensive cities may have an echo of that to some extent.
Would the theistic Diggers see contemporary atheists and agnostics as fellow travellers?
Don't get me wrong, I do see a link between the radical groups of the 17th century and later social reforms, but we have to be careful not to 'anachronise' these things.
That applies as much to those on the right who look back misty-eyed on 'Christian England' as it does to those on the left who mythologise or appropriate these things also, often completely out of context.
We can't avoid 'reading back' our own values or ideologies into our understanding of history- and as long as we are aware that we are doing that then that's fair enough - as long as we don't imagine we are necessarily on the same page.
Comments
Billy Bragg's song goes further than stating 'they were dispersed' but ends dramatically with, '"We come in peace." The orders came to cut them down.'
No massacre took place.
That doesn't mean that the powers-that-were didn't use violence against dissenters. Witness the executions of several Levellers at Burford and elsewhere by the Parliamentarian army.
Bragg's song wouldn't have sounded so dramatic if it ended:
'They lost a court case, not allowed to speak, and left before the army came to move them on.'
Incidentally, I have a well-played DVD of Kevin Brownlow's and Andrew Mollo's 1975 film Winstanley with its grainy black and white evocation of the period, non-professional actors and lashings of quotes from Winstanley's writings.
It has its longeurs but it's well worth watching.
Spoiler alert: the film ends with the Digger community being dispersed and some ridden down.
As you point out, there is dramatic licence. But I take the penultimate verse to address the fate of the Diggers, while the last verse serves as an encouragement to those who would walk in their footsteps, and a final warning.
I don't see many communitarian experiments - although 'house shares' in London and other expensive cities may have an echo of that to some extent.
Would the theistic Diggers see contemporary atheists and agnostics as fellow travellers?
Don't get me wrong, I do see a link between the radical groups of the 17th century and later social reforms, but we have to be careful not to 'anachronise' these things.
That applies as much to those on the right who look back misty-eyed on 'Christian England' as it does to those on the left who mythologise or appropriate these things also, often completely out of context.
We can't avoid 'reading back' our own values or ideologies into our understanding of history- and as long as we are aware that we are doing that then that's fair enough - as long as we don't imagine we are necessarily on the same page.