Several decades after the first publication of Utopia, as the growing rural population was faced with a scarcity of land and paid labour, increasingly intense waves of anti-enclosure riots swept across rural England. Commoners uprooted hedges, levelled ditches, destroyed gates and rioted in the streets. There was also violence, though the gentry was responsible for the majority of this.

This civil unrest, which was partly fuelled by popular resistance to the Henrician Reformation, culminated upon the death of Henry VIII in what is sometimes known as the ‘Mid-Tudor Crisis’. At the height of this crisis was a period known as the ‘commotion time’, when significant rebellions erupted in counties throughout England. The best known of these was Kett's Rebellion, during which thousands of rebels from all over Norfolk and Suffolk set up camp at Mousehold Heath outside Norwich – a camp that has been described as ‘the greatest practical utopian project of Tudor England and the greatest anticapitalist rising in English history’.

Significantly for this chapter, this rebel camp was the beginning of a largely new approach to popular resistance against enclosure; an approach under which demands for communal property rights and economic justice came to be pursued through the establishment of concrete utopias. Fleeting though they may have been, these utopias – including the rebel camp at Mousehold Heath, the Diggers colony on St George's Hill and the Paris Commune – all moved beyond theory into the physical world in order to manifest working models of an alternative social order or, less prosaically, to create liminal spaces of possibility.

This chapter starts with an examination of the commotion time, including Kett's Rebellion and the reverberations that followed. We then move forward almost a century to the English Civil Wars and the establishment of the Diggers commune on St George's Hill. In this section, we consider the historical context in which the Diggers colony was established, as well as the political and religious manifestos of its leader, Gerrard Winstanley. Like Kett's Rebellion, the concrete utopia established by Winstanley and the Diggers was temporary in nature, but its impact lingered in the form of Winstanley's writing and in the ideals that were brought to life.

The third section of this chapter crosses the Channel to briefly explore the Paris Commune and the socialist utopia that was established in 1871.