Winstanley (film)

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Winstanley is the title of a film made in 1975 in the UK by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, based on the 1962 David Caute novel Comrade Jacob (ASIN: B0007E2A6Q). This deals with some of the life story of the 17th Century social reformer and writer Gerard Winstanley, who, along with a small band of followers known as The Diggers tried to establish a self-sufficient farming community on common land at St. George's Hill near Cobham in Surrey. This was one of the world's first socialistic living experiments which was copied elsewhere in England during the time of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, but was quickly suppressed and in the end left only a legacy of ideas to inspire later generations of socialist theorists.