The armed men reach the top of the hill and look down. Beyond a heath lies the river, grey and putrid, and the city it flows through. This is the end of their journey. Here, they would receive justice, or the powers-that-be would cease to be. What had begun as resistance against the latest tax had escalated into an insurrection that threatened to blow the entire social and economic system apart. Many lives had been lost already. The armed men descend to the heath to make camp. The reckoning will begin tomorrow.

On another hill, 24 miles away, another group traces out the waste ground before them. They are armed with spades and hoes. This land is unclaimed and they wish to demonstrate what a community of plain labourers can achieve in a common effort of common ownership. The times are turbulent. Revolutions are erupting everywhere. Yet they know that their simple act of farming will be seen, and responded to, as perhaps the most revolutionary and threatening of all.

Twenty-seven miles from the second group, but just eight from the first, figures armed with torches march through the night, their faces lit by the flames they have already ignited. They must move quickly if they are to disappear again into the darkness before being discovered. Years of frustration have brought them to this. If they cannot own the land on which they are expected to work, perhaps no one should. With nods to one another, torches aloft, they move towards a barn.

These groups never met. They are, in fact, separated across time. The first event happened at Blackheath in 1381. The Peasants’ Revolt would be brutally crushed by the boy-King in whom they still had faith and to whom they had come to appeal: Richard II (Dunn, 2002). The second describes the actions of Britain's revolution within a revolution within a revolution. The Diggers occupied St George's Hill in 1649. They would be evicted several months later (Hill, 1991, pp 112-19). The third event happened near Orpington in 1830. The Swing Riots, infamous for the destruction of machinery, started with arson. Those flames would cast the 1830s into a shadow that has never entirely faded, inspiring the architects of the 1834 Poor Law to define as wage-labourers all those who had formally owned the land they worked (Hobsbawm and Rudé, 1969).