On the face of it, few events could be more of their time than the protests against the G20 meeting in London. The defining demonstration, the one the press and sundry bankers were worried enough about to ditch their suits, was not last Saturday's peaceable, fuzzily unobjectionable march for “jobs, justice and climate”, but Wednesday's “G20 Meltdown”, the sit-in-cum-carnival that converged on the City itself.

The protesters were Webbed, Facebooked and Twittered into position. They came to attack, some more directly than others, the symbols of globalised capitalism, of a world shrunk by computerisation, air travel, outsourcing and - least popular of all - of the parcelling out of vast sums of credit and debt ever farther from their origins in “real” jobs and lives. This was in so many ways a very 21st-century event. Blanket coverage across all media built up tension before the event, and kept it up as the protests went on. Journalists “tweeted” their impressions back to their newspapers and, in places, photographers and filmers outnumbered protesters.

Meltdown might have seemed rather un-British, or at least un-English. Other capitals with street-fighting pasts - Paris, Moscow, perhaps Berlin - appear to be more natural homes to goings-on like this. As well as inviting foreign leaders to ruminate on the global economic crisis, did our Prime Minister import an alien strain of rabble-rousing? There were certainly protest tourists at Meltdown. But they arrived in a country with a tradition of popular defiance at least as old as any that could be claimed for their homelands. An accident of timing points to a connection with English rebels of the past. April 1, 2009, the day of Meltdown, happened to be the 360th anniversary of a short-lived moment of English protest that has proved surprisingly indelible. On April 1, 1649, a small group of men and women led by a failed clothes merchant set up camp on common land at St George's Hill near Weybridge, and proclaimed their vision of Utopia. The Earth, they said, was a “common treasury for all, both rich and poor”. They planted parsnips, carrots and beans, and proposed to live off the land, “and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows”.

They took the name “True Levellers”, to distinguish themselves from the ordinary Levellers, who saw suffrage rather than manure as the way to salvation. But if they are remembered at all, it is as the Diggers. Their leader was Gerrard Winstanley. To those who thought that the meek should

be content to inherit the Earth in Heaven, Winstanley asked a simple question: “Why may people not have a comfortable maintenance here and Heaven hereafter too?”

Our present predicament is often presented as a time of unprecedented crisis, with a few optimists such as Barack Obama pitching it as one of potential opportunity. In 1649, by contrast, England wasn't just in crisis. It had witnessed catastrophe. A near- decade of civil war and revolution had resulted in a new world, terrifying to some but inspirational to others. In that year, Charles I had been arraigned before a parliamentary court, and on January 30 he had been executed. And the men who had carried out this act had replaced the King not with a convenient heir or distantly related cousin. They had abolished kingship altogether, and attempted a new form of government, one whose very name gave hope to men like Winstanley, who wanted the land's riches to be shared: the Commonwealth.

Although the Diggers' camp attracted a small following, it was soon thought expedient to move along, to Cobham Heath, about three miles to the south. There, the local landowners who used the common land to graze their flocks took strong enough objection to the Diggers' presence that the Government was forced to act. The camp was broken up, although there were reports that the soldiers sent to do the job showed more sympathy for the Diggers than the Nimbys who wanted rid of them. Although a few other camps sprang up over the next year, the movement faded, and England's (small “c”) communist experiment was dead.

Today the places where Winstanley and company camped are some of the most expensive pieces of land in the country. St George's Hill is the sort of private estate where bankers able to ride out the credit crunch can still be found, while Cobham is home to Premier League footballers.

As for the Diggers, they were forgotten, almost entirely until the 19th century, and then gradually rediscovered by historians and radicals, particularly in the 1960s. Winstanley and his movement achieved a left-leaning academic respectability, but “relevant”? Surely not. If any group had a long-term victory after the English revolutionary clock was stopped and the monarchy restored it was the Levellers, who thought that the “poorest he” should have “a voice to put himself under” any government that presumed to rule over him: ie, the vote. We may not have much say in what our rulers do, but at least we can vote for new ones. When it came to the “True Levellers”, for most of the past century the idea of the Earth as a “common treasury” has smacked too much of the collective farm. However small you make the “c” in communist, it has a habit of getting bigger, setting up different sorts of camps from the ones that Winstanley had in mind, and hastening Hell, not Heaven, on Earth.

Perhaps then we shouldn't be surprised that references to the coincidence of the Diggers' anniversary and Meltdown have been non-existent. But if the rage and sense of helplessness on show in the City on April 1 demonstrate anything, it is that having the vote no longer makes politically motivated people feel empowered. And in a world where environmental protest has begun to trump all others, perhaps Winstanley might provide some historical ballast to a movement that often looks in danger of drifting off into the blogosphere. What are the “climate campers” doing but following Winstanley's example: “As their forefathers lived in tents, so it would be suitable to their condition now to live in the same?” The Levellers weren't especially interested in global poverty, but the Diggers, like today's protesters, were. They addressed their manifesto not just to England, but to “all the powers of the world”, and declared: “Pleading for property and single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties ... We should have none live in beggary, poverty, or sorrow”.

Nobody is afraid that these sorts of sentiments will lead to state-sponsored Communism any more. Winstanley and his Diggers were able to move beyond the politics of envy. Unlike the Meltdown protesters, they made no attempt to attack anything - “we shall not do this by force of arms”, but by good example. It would be heartening to think that a few of this week's activists will read up on the words of their non-violent, environmentally friendly, making- poverty- history forebears: “For where money bears all the sway, there is no regard of that golden rule, Do as you would be done by.”

David Horspool is history editor of The Times Literary Supplement. His book, The English Rebel, will be published by Viking in August

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