The Levellers and Diggers: Freedom Fighters or Pawns in a Larger Game?
By Immortal Al Published: [Date TBD]I. The Surface Story
England, 1640s. The Civil War just ended. The king lost his head. Parliament won. Power changed hands.
That’s the official version.
Two radical movements emerge during this period: the Levellers and the Diggers. Both push for rights that sound reasonable now but were considered revolutionary then.
The Levellers advocate for a written constitution. England still doesn’t have one. They also demand expanded voting rights, religious freedom, and equality before the law. Dangerous ideas for the time.
The Diggers go further. They’re proto-communists who occupy unused land and start farming it. Their core belief: natural resources shouldn’t be private property. They don’t just theorize about this. They actually dig and plant. Hence the name.
Both movements get crushed.
Cromwell’s army suppresses the Levellers. Local landowners destroy the Diggers’ communes. Order is restored.
History books tell us these movements “failed” but planted seeds for future reforms. It’s the standard narrative: brave radicals fighting tyranny, paving the way for progress, making the world better for generations to come.
An inspiring story about the march toward freedom.
Except that’s not what happened.II. Who They Were & What They Wanted
First thing you need to know: the Levellers and the Diggers were not the same movement. They get lumped together because they both emerged from the Civil War chaos and both got crushed around the same time. But their goals were fundamentally different. Understanding that difference matters.
The Levellers: Constitutional Radicals
The Levellers were tradesmen, soldiers, printers, and shopkeepers. Based in London, they used pamphlets like weapons. Before Twitter existed, they’d figured out how to bypass official channels and speak directly to people.
Their leader, John Lilburne, was a professional pain in the ass. The government arrested him multiple times. Every time, juries acquitted him. He became known as “Freeborn John” because he kept saying “I am a freeborn Englishman, and by the laws of England I am not to be used as a slave.”
The Star Chamber whipped him through the streets of London in 1638. He survived. Prison became his pulpit. He wrote pamphlets from his cell that circulated faster than the government could suppress them. Imagine being so annoying to the state that they arrest you repeatedly and you just keep winning in court. That’s a superpower.
What did the Levellers want?
They wrote it down in 1647 in a document called “An Agreement of the People.” Religious toleration. Stop killing people over doctrine. Equality before the law. Same rules for rich and poor. Extended suffrage. Not universal, but broader than just property owners. No conscription. You can’t force men to fight wars they didn’t agree to. Regular elections. Power should circulate, not calcify. Constitutional limits on government. Even Parliament needs boundaries.
For 1647, this was insane. The idea that a common man without property could have a say in government? That was like suggesting your dog should vote. The elites didn’t just disagree. They were genuinely confused.
Here’s what the Levellers did NOT want: they did not want to abolish private property. They wanted political equality, but they firmly rejected common ownership. They believed in individual rights, individual labor, individual property. They wanted fair rules, not equal outcomes.The Diggers: The Radical Edge
The Diggers, or “True Levellers” as they called themselves, went further. Way further.
Their leader was Gerrard Winstanley, a failed cloth merchant who had religious visions during a financial collapse. He wrote about hearing voices telling him to “work together, eat bread together.” His theology was a weird mix of Christian mysticism and proto-communism. He believed private property was the root of all oppression. That the earth was “a common treasury for all” before the Fall, and that enclosure (rich people fencing off common land) was the original sin being reenacted in England.
On April 1, 1649, Winstanley and about thirty to forty people showed up at St. George’s Hill in Surrey with shovels and started digging. They planted vegetables. Built shelters. Declared the land common. They said: “We’re not using force. We’re not stealing. We’re just working the land. By working it, we’ll make it ours.”
The symbolism was clear. The land had been common before enclosure. They were reclaiming it. Not through courts. Not through Parliament. Through labor.
What did the Diggers want?
Winstanley laid it out in “The True Levellers Standard Advanced” (1649). Earth belongs to all. No private ownership of land. Work and share together. Collective labor, collective property. No buying or selling of the earth. Land cannot be a commodity. Abolish the landlord system. The root of inequality.
This was proto-communism. Full stop. You can trace a direct line from Winstanley’s writings in 1649 to Karl Marx’s labor theory of value in 1867. Marx didn’t invent the idea that collective labor should produce collective property. Winstanley did. And then John Locke came along in 1690 and inverted it.
The Putney Debates: The Philosophical Battle
In October and November 1647, something extraordinary happened. The New Model Army (the army that had defeated the king) held debates in St. Mary’s Church in Putney. Soldiers and officers debating the constitution. Out loud. In public. About who gets to participate in government.
The most famous exchange was between Colonel Thomas Rainsborough (Leveller sympathizer) and Henry Ireton (Cromwell’s son-in-law, representing the property-owning class).
Rainsborough:“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”Ireton:
“No man hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom… that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.”
Translation:
– Rainsborough: You have rights because you were born.
– Ireton: You have rights because you own property.
Birthright versus property. Natural rights versus earned stake. It’s the same argument we’re having today about universal basic income, about voting rights, about who gets to participate in decision-making. The Levellers lost in 1647. But their argument survived.
The Diggers took it further and said: property itself is the problem. Winstanley argued that private ownership creates the hierarchy that makes tyranny possible. If no one owns the land, no one can lord it over anyone else.
That’s a seductive idea. It’s also deeply flawed. And we’re about to get into why.
III. The Property Rights Question
Gerrard Winstanley had a hypocrisy problem.
He wrote extensively about the evils of covetousness. In his pamphlets, he condemned “covetousness, pride, hypocrisy, envy” as the root of human bondage. He wrote: “The inward bondages of the mind, as covetousness, pride, hypocrisy… are all occasioned by the outward bondage.”
Then on April 1, 1649, he showed up at St. George’s Hill and started occupying land that belonged to his neighbors. He demanded that the land become “a common treasury for all.”
He literally coveted his neighbor’s field.
The Tenth Commandment is pretty specific: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, field, servants, ox, ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s.”
Winstanley preached against covetousness while violating the very principle he claimed to uphold. That’s the entire project.
Now, you could argue the landowners had stolen the common land through enclosure in the first place. That Winstanley was just reclaiming what had been taken. Fair point. Enclosure was theft. Rich landowners fenced off land that had been used communally for generations, pushed peasants off, consolidated power. Winstanley saw this and said: we’re undoing the theft.
But who decides what’s theft and what’s legitimate ownership? Winstanley? The mob with shovels? The government? God?
Property rights matter because without clear rules about ownership, you get chaos. And in chaos, the strong take from the weak. Every time.
The Levellers Saw This Coming
The Levellers understood that property rights and individual liberty are inseparable. They wanted political equality, but they firmly rejected the Diggers’ vision of common ownership. Historical records are clear: “The Levellers opposed common ownership” and “firmly rejected True Leveller notions of equality of wealth or the abolition of property rights.”
Why? Because they understood that if you abolish private property, you don’t get a common treasury. You get a power structure where someone decides who gets what. And that someone becomes the new tyrant.
John Locke’s Response
In 1690, forty-one years after Winstanley published his Digger manifesto, John Locke published *Two Treatises of Government*. He developed a theory of property that was a direct inversion of Winstanley’s communism.
Winstanley (1649): Collective labor → Collective property → Common treasury for all Locke (1690): Individual labor → Individual property → Natural rightsLocke wrote: “God gave the world to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsom and Contentious.”
He didn’t name Winstanley. Didn’t have to. The refutation was clear. Labor does create property. But it’s the labor of the individual that creates individual ownership. When you mix your labor with the land, you make it yours. Not ours. Yours.
Historical note: “The notion that labor is the foundation of property first appeared in Gerrard Winstanley’s writings in 1649 in the form of collective property as the fruit of collective labor, and was then transposed by Locke into private property originating in individual labor.”
Locke took Winstanley’s framework and flipped it. Same logic. Opposite conclusion. Locke’s version became the foundation of capitalist natural rights theory. The idea that you own yourself, you own your labor, and you own what your labor produces. That became the basis for the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the entire Enlightenment project.
Winstanley’s version went underground. It resurfaced in the 19th century as communism and socialism. Marx cited similar ideas. The Soviet Union tried to implement it. Millions died.
The Tension Remains
Winstanley and Locke were both responding to real injustices.
Winstanley saw enclosure destroying communities. Landlords getting rich while peasants starved. A system where birth determined everything and labor meant nothing. He wanted to tear it down.
Locke saw the tyranny that comes from collective ownership. When no one owns anything, someone has to decide who gets what. And that someone becomes a king. He wanted to prevent that.
The tension between these two visions has never been resolved. Every debate about socialism versus capitalism, about redistribution versus meritocracy, about collective good versus individual rights, is an echo of Winstanley and Locke.
And here’s where it gets interesting: there was a network operating in the background of both movements. A network that had its own agenda. To understand that, we need to talk about a printer named Giles Calvert.
IV. The Network Behind Them
If you want to understand how ideas spread in the 1640s, you need to understand the printing press. And if you want to understand radical publishing in the English Civil War, you need to understand Giles Calvert.
Calvert ran a bookshop at the sign of the Black Spread Eagle in London. Between 1645 and 1663, he published works by Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, and a network of intellectuals called the Hartlib Circle. His shop wasn’t just a business. It was a nexus. A physical location where different movements intersected, where ideas cross-pollinated, where the theoretical and the practical met.
Historian Mario Caricchio called Calvert’s bookshop “the community from which the Digger and ‘Ranter’ movements of the English Revolution emerged.”
Calvert published Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger manifestos. He published Leveller pamphlets. He published works by John Dury, Samuel Hartlib, and other members of what they called the “Invisible College.” And in 1653, he was considered for appointment as “official printer to the Council of State.”
So who was Giles Calvert? A radical publisher genuinely committed to free speech and dissent? Or a state-connected operator using radical movements for a larger agenda?
Probably both.
The Hartlib Circle: The “Invisible College”
Samuel Hartlib (1600-1662) was a Polish-born intellectual who fled Germany during the Thirty Years’ War and settled in England in 1628. He’s been described as a “famed Hermeticist with connections to the shadowy Rosicrucian Brotherhood.”
Rosicrucianism was a mystical Protestant movement that emerged in Germany in the early 1600s. It blended Christian theology with Hermeticism, alchemy, and Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism reinterpreted through a Christian lens). The Rosicrucians published manifestos in 1614-1616 calling for a “Second Reformation” to perfect Christianity. They operated in secret societies, calling themselves the “Invisible College.”
Hartlib brought that network to England.
He gathered a circle of intellectuals who called themselves by the same name: the Invisible College. The members included Samuel Hartlib (organizer, correspondent, Rosicrucian mystic), John Dury (ecumenist, trying to unify Protestant denominations), John Sadler (lawyer, Member of Parliament), and Hugh Peter (preacher, advocate for readmitting Jews to England).
And they had a publisher: Giles Calvert.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Samuel Hartlib received £300 per year from Oliver Cromwell. State funding. From the man who ran England after the king was executed.
Why would Cromwell fund a Rosicrucian mystic?
Because Hartlib and his circle were pushing a theological project that aligned with Cromwell’s millenarian vision. That project was called British Israelism.
British Israelism
British Israelism is the belief that the British people (and later, Anglo-Saxons in general) are descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The northern kingdom. Jews represent the tribe of Judah, the southern kingdom.
This wasn’t fringe conspiracy theory in the 1640s. This was mainstream Protestant theology.
Timeline: 1590, M. le Loyer publishes “The Ten Lost Tribes” arguing Anglo-Saxons descended from Israel. 1566-1625, King James I “believed he was the King of Israel.” 1620, Henry Spelman claimed Danes were the Tribe of Dan. 1649, John Sadler (Hartlib Circle member) publishes “Rights of the Kingdom” arguing for “Israelite genealogy for the British people.” Mid-1650s, “Proponents of British Israelism convinced Oliver Cromwell that the British, via the Anglo-Saxons, were the modern descendants of the northern ‘lost’ tribes of Israel and that the Jews represented the southern tribe of Judah.”
And what happened next? Cromwell readmitted Jews to England in 1655-1656. They had been expelled in 1290. For 366 years, no Jews were legally allowed in England. Then Cromwell let them back in.
Why? Theology, not tolerance.
The Hartlib Circle had convinced Cromwell that both “houses” of Israel (British and Jews) needed to be reunited for the Second Coming of Christ. British Israelism wasn’t anti-Jewish. It was millenarian. The British were the northern tribes. The Jews were the southern tribe. Both were necessary for apocalyptic prophecy to be fulfilled.
The Rosicrucian Method
What makes this Rosicrucian? The pattern. Rosicrucianism isn’t just Christian mysticism. It’s syncretic. It takes Christian theology and blends it with Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and alchemy. It treats Jewish esoteric knowledge as a key to unlocking Christian truth.
British Israelism follows the same method. It’s not just Christianity. It’s Christianity blended with Israelite genealogy and Jewish tribal theology. The British aren’t just faithful Christians. They’re literally descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. That’s syncretism. That’s the Rosicrucian approach applied to national identity.
Both are millenarian. Both focus on the Second Coming and apocalyptic fulfillment. Both require reuniting separated elements (for Rosicrucians: hidden wisdom scattered across traditions; for British Israelism: the two houses of Israel scattered across geography). Both operate through networks of intellectuals working behind the scenes.
When Hartlib (described as “famed Hermeticist with connections to the shadowy Rosicrucian Brotherhood”) brings this theological project to England, gets state funding from Cromwell, and successfully advocates for Jewish readmission based on reuniting the tribes of Israel, that’s the Rosicrucian method in action. Christian mysticism plus Jewish theology equals political outcome.
The Connection to the Movements
The Hartlib Circle advocated for Jewish readmission to England based on their British Israelism theology. This benefited Jewish communities who had been expelled for 366 years. The theology was Christian (reuniting both houses of Israel for the Second Coming), but the outcome was real: Jews could return to England after centuries of exile.
The Rosicrucian network operated with state funding, believed the British were Israelites, successfully advocated for Jewish readmission, and used Giles Calvert’s bookshop to publish both Hartlib Circle works and radical pamphlets.
Was Winstanley directly influenced by this network? We don’t have evidence of him meeting with Hartlib or Sadler. But the connection was through Calvert. Ideas don’t need direct meetings to spread. They spread through books, through conversations in a printer’s shop, through the air of a city in chaos.
Giles Calvert: Radical or Operator?
So was Calvert a genuine radical or a state-connected operator?
Evidence for genuine radical: He was arrested in 1661 (after the monarchy was restored) for publishing radical works. If he’d been a state informer, they probably wouldn’t have arrested him. His catalog shows consistent support for dissenting movements over decades.
Evidence for state connection: He published for both the Hartlib Circle (state-funded intellectuals) and the radical movements. He was considered for “official printer to the Council of State” in 1653. His bookshop served as the physical nexus connecting all these networks.
Calvert was probably a sincere radical who also had state connections. Power works through intermediaries. You fund the intellectuals (Hartlib). The intellectuals publish through a sympathetic printer (Calvert). The printer’s shop becomes a gathering place for radicals (Levellers, Diggers). Ideas mix. Movements emerge. Some get crushed. Some get adopted. The people at the top get what they wanted.
And what did they want?
V. The Crushing & The Dialectic
Both the Levellers and the Diggers got destroyed. And the man who destroyed them was the same man funding the network that published their ideas.
Oliver Cromwell.
The Levellers: Burford
In May 1649, Leveller-sympathizing soldiers in the New Model Army mutinied. They were done waiting for the reforms they’d been promised. They wanted the “Agreement of the People” implemented. They wanted a say in the government they’d fought to create.
Cromwell rode to Burford with loyal troops and crushed them. He had three of the leaders executed by firing squad in the churchyard. The rest were imprisoned or forced back into line.
John Lilburne, the charismatic leader who’d survived whippings and prison, was exiled. He returned, got arrested again, got acquitted again (juries loved him), then was imprisoned anyway without trial. He died in 1657, broken but never recanting.
The Leveller movement scattered. The pamphlets stopped. The dream of expanded suffrage died. For now.
The Diggers: St. George’s Hill
The Diggers lasted about a year. April 1649 to April 1650.
Local gentry attacked them. Crops trampled. Houses burned. Legal harassment. Winstanley and his followers tried to move to nearby Cobham. The attacks followed. By April 1650, the Digger commune was dispersed.
Winstanley wrote one final manifesto, “The Law of Freedom in a Platform” (1652), dedicated to Cromwell, begging him to implement a vision of common ownership. Cromwell ignored it. Winstanley disappeared into obscurity. He died in 1676, having accomplished nothing tangible.
Cromwell’s Take
Cromwell, reflecting on the Levellers, said:
“You have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you.”
And about the Diggers:
“You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces.”
So if Cromwell was funding the Hartlib Circle, and the Hartlib Circle was publishing the Levellers and Diggers, why would Cromwell crush them?
Because they weren’t controlled opposition in the literal sense. They were the antithesis in a dialectic.
The Hegelian Dialectic (Before Hegel)
The German philosopher Hegel wouldn’t formalize dialectical thinking until the early 1800s, but the pattern was already operating in 1640s England.
Thesis: Absolute monarchy (Charles I, Catholic-leaning, anti-Parliament, anti-Puritan) Antithesis: Radical egalitarianism (Diggers abolish all property, Levellers demand universal suffrage) Synthesis: Constitutional monarchy + parliamentary powerThe outcome? “The civil wars effectively set England and Scotland on course towards a parliamentary monarchy form of government.”
Even Hegel later noted that the British monarch had become “virtually a cipher.” Exactly what the Rosicrucian-influenced faction wanted.
The pattern: Create (or allow) radical movement (Diggers, abolish property). Create (or allow) moderate movement (Levellers, equality before law, keep property). Radical gets crushed (Cromwell suppresses both). Some moderate ideas get adopted (parliamentary power increases). Traditional power structures weakened (absolute monarchy ends). Net result: Parliamentary power increases, Rosicrucian-influenced faction wins.
The Levellers and Diggers didn’t need to succeed for the project to work. They just needed to exist. To shift the Overton window. To make parliamentary reform look moderate by comparison.
Why Charles I Had to Go
Charles I wasn’t just a bad king. From the Rosicrucian Protestant perspective, he was the enemy.
1625, he married Catholic princess Henrietta Maria of France (Puritans suspected Catholic sympathies immediately). 1633, he appointed Archbishop William Laud, who “devoted himself to combating the Puritans” and “attempted to reconcile the Church of England with the Roman Catholic Church.” 1637, Star Chamber trials of Puritan critics William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick, sentenced to public pillorying with ear cropping for “decrying Laudian innovations as popish.” 1629-1640, he ruled without Parliament (absolute monarchy, no checks).
Charles I was Catholic-sympathetic, anti-Puritan, anti-Parliament, and persecuted the very Protestants who would become Rosicrucian allies.
His execution makes perfect sense from a Rosicrucian Protestant perspective. He was the obstacle to reformation.
The Levellers and Diggers were tools in that process. Sincere tools. Genuine believers. But tools nonetheless.
VI. What This Means for Us
The easy answer is to pick a narrative.
Heroic narrative: The Levellers and Diggers were brave freedom fighters whose ideas survived and shaped later movements. Their courage matters. Their questions about birthright and property shaped the world. Conspiracy narrative: They were pawns in a Rosicrucian power play. State-funded intellectuals used radical movements to shift power from Catholic monarchy to Protestant parliamentary control. Everything was orchestrated. Dialectic narrative: Movements can be both sincere and useful to larger agendas. The Levellers and Diggers believed what they said. They fought for real change. And they also functioned as the antithesis in a power shift that benefited someone else.The third narrative is probably closest to the truth. History is messier than heroes versus villains.
Modern Parallels: Crypto and Sovereignty Movements
We’re in a similar moment right now. Old institutions are crumbling. Banks are shaky. Governments are printing money like it’s a timed event. Trust in every major institution is at historic lows.
And in that chaos, movements are emerging. Crypto. Decentralization. Self-custody. Parallel systems outside state control.
Are these movements organic? Yes. Are people genuinely committed? Absolutely. Could they also be serving a larger agenda? Maybe.
When you see venture capital pouring into “decentralized” platforms, ask: who benefits? When you see former government officials joining crypto companies, ask: what’s the play? When you see radical ideas being published and promoted, ask: who’s funding the printers?
That doesn’t mean the ideas are wrong. It means you have to think strategically.
The Property Question Still Matters
The Levellers versus Diggers debate about property hasn’t gone away. We’re still having it.
Every time someone proposes universal basic income, that’s an echo of Winstanley. Every time someone argues for individual ownership and meritocracy, that’s an echo of Locke. Every time we debate collective good versus individual rights, we’re replaying Putney.
Both sides have legitimate concerns. Winstanley was right that wealth inequality destroys communities and creates tyranny. Locke was right that collective ownership leads to someone deciding who gets what, and that someone becomes the new king.
The question isn’t which side is correct. The question is: how do we balance these competing values in a way that maximizes freedom and minimizes tyranny?
Nobody’s answered that yet. They didn’t in 1649. We haven’t in 2025.
The Network Question Remains Open
Was there a Rosicrucian network operating behind the scenes? Yes. The evidence is clear. Samuel Hartlib received state funding. The Hartlib Circle published through Giles Calvert. Calvert also published the Levellers and Diggers. British Israelism convinced Cromwell to readmit Jews. The outcome benefited the parliamentary faction.
Does that mean the movements were fake? No. Sincere people can be used by larger agendas without knowing it. Or while knowing it and not caring. Or while knowing it and thinking they can use the network right back.
Power is complicated.
What we can say for certain: Movements emerge in moments of chaos. Ideas spread through networks (publishers, funders, organizers). Outcomes often benefit people who weren’t visible in the movement. History gets written by the winners, and the losers get turned into heroes later.
The Levellers and Diggers lost. But their ideas won. Eventually. Partially. In forms they might not recognize.
VII. Conclusion
In 1649, regular people in England asked: “What rights does a person have simply by being born?”
Some said: the right to vote, to equality before the law, to live under a government you consented to. Those were the Levellers.
Some said: the right to the earth, to labor without landlords, to share the common treasury. Those were the Diggers.
The powerful crushed them both. But they couldn’t crush the questions.
Those questions crossed an ocean. They showed up in the Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal.” That’s Rainsborough at Putney. But “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? That’s interesting. Jefferson changed Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” to the more vague “pursuit of happiness.” The Founders debated it. They chose not to cement property rights in the founding document. That’s closer to Digger thinking than Leveller.
The Bill of Rights? That’s the “Agreement of the People” rewritten for a new world.
But there was another layer. A network operating in the background. State-funded intellectuals pushing a theological project about reuniting the tribes of Israel. A printer whose shop connected the radicals to the mystics. A dialectic that crushed both extremes and produced a synthesis that looked like progress but might have been the plan all along.
Does that make the Levellers and Diggers less important? No. It makes them more interesting.
Because the question we’re left with isn’t “Were they heroes or pawns?” The question is: Can sincere movements exist within power structures without being co-opted?I don’t know. But I know we’re asking the same questions they asked. About rights. About property. About who gets to decide. About what we owe each other simply by being born.
And I know we’re in another window. Another moment of chaos when the old order is weak and new ideas can take root.
The Levellers and Diggers planted seeds they never got to see grow. We’re living in the forest those seeds became.
Now it’s our turn to plant.
Build the parallel systems. Question the narratives. Understand the networks. And remember: sincerity and strategy aren’t opposites. You can believe in something deeply and still recognize you’re being used. The trick is using them right back.
The fight for freedom is never clean. It never has been. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting.
What do we owe each other simply by being born? That question hasn’t been answered. We’re still working on it.
SOURCES
This investigation draws on historical records, academic research, and the following key sources:
– Putney Debates transcript (Liberty Fund Online Library)
– Gerrard Winstanley, “The True Levellers Standard Advanced” (1649)
– Gerrard Winstanley, “The Law of Freedom in a Platform” (1652)
– John Locke, “Two Treatises of Government” (1690)
– British Israelism (Wikipedia)
– Hartlib Circle (Wikipedia)
– Giles Calvert (Wikipedia)
– Christian Kabbalah (Wikipedia)
– Mario Caricchio, “News from the New Jerusalem: Giles Calvert and the Radical Experience”
– Christopher Hill, “The World Turned Upside Down” (1972)
– Various academic sources on Protestant Hebraism and 17th-century English radicalism
Special acknowledgment to @Sugarface10 for the initial insight that led to this deeper investigation.
About Unearthed by Al
*Concrete facts for viewers to understand the nature of the world’s paradigms.*
If this investigation resonated with you, consider supporting the work. [Join the excavation.](https://ko-fi.com/unearthedbyal)
