TSOTM Apr 2025: The Diggers

Our T-Shirt of the Month for April 2025, made of 100% organic cotton by a worker-owned co-operative, and supporting grassroots labour unions in South Asia.  It is dedicated to a movement which became known as “The Diggers”. On 1 April 1649 a farmer and writer called Gerrard Winstanley along with a small group of 30 to 40 men and women occupied St. George's Hill, Watton, Surrey, England and began tilling the land collectively. Over the coming months, numerous local people would join them and form the movement which became known as the Diggers. Winstanley was a Protestant who began to write pamphlets criticising the church which held that "god is in the heavens above the skies". Instead he argued that god was "the spirit within you". In a pamphlet published in January 1649 Winstanley wrote the following: "In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man