Gerrard Winstanley

Gerrard Winstanley (19 October 1609 – 10 September 1676) was an English Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher, and activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers for their beliefs, and for their actions. The group occupied public lands that had been privatised by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops. True Levellers was the name they used to describe themselves, whereas the term Diggers was coined by contemporaries.

Gerrard Winstanley was born on 19 October 1609 and was baptised in the parish of Wigan, then part of the West Derby hundred of Lancashire. He was the son of an Edward Winstanley, mercer. His mother's identity remains unknown and he could have been born anywhere in the parish of Wigan. The parish of Wigan contained the townships of Abram, Aspull, Billinge-and-Winstanley, Dalton, Haigh, Hindley, Ince-in-Makerfield, Orrell, Pemberton, and Upholland, as well as Wigan itself.

He moved in 1630 to London, where he became an apprentice and ultimately, in 1638, a freeman of the Merchant Tailors' Company or guild. He married Susan King, the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639. The English Civil War, however, disrupted his business, and in 1643 he was made bankrupt. His father-in-law helped Winstanley move to Cobham, Surrey, where he initially worked as a cowherd.

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