Fairfax evidently decided that the movement was not so alarming as the Council of State had represented, for Winstanley and his Diggers resumed their work, and at the end of May, Fairfax, with the officers of the army, paid a visit to St. George’s Hill. Winstanley returned “sober answers” to the inquiries of Fairfax, “though they gave little satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their action.” Winstanley’s argument, often enlarged in his pamphlets, was that the people were dispossessed of their lands by the crown at the Norman Conquest, and that “the king who possessed them by the Norman Conquest being dead, they were returned again, being Crown Lands, to the Common People of England.” This was not conclusive to their visitors, and “some officers wished they had no further plot in what they did, and that no more was intended than what they did pretend.” To the objection that the ground was too poor to repay cultivation, “the Diggers answered they would use their endeavours and leave the success to God, who had promised to make the barren ground fruitful.” Public opinion gave out that the Diggers were “sober, honest men,” and that “the ground will probably in a short time yield them some fruit of their labour, how contemptible soever they do yet appear to be.” Encouraged by Fairfax’s “kindness and moderation,” Winstanley appeals to him in June against the interference of the local landowners, and getting no response (for Fairfax had said that the Diggers were to be left to “the Gentlemen of the County and the Law of the Land”), publishes an appeal to the House of Commons against his arrest for trespass by the Lords of Manors in Surrey. The House of Commons, occupied with State matters, turned an indifferent ear to Winstanley’s complaint, and the leader of the Diggers sent a “Watchword to the City of London and the Army,” telling the wrongs the Diggers suffered at the hands of the law for “digging upon the barren common”--how they were mulcted in damages at £10 a man, with costs at twenty-nine shillings and a penny, and taken in execution, and how their cows were seized by the bailiffs. At the end of November the very huts they had built were pulled down, and it was a hard winter for the little colony still left on St. George’s Hill. Winstanley does not merely relate his injuries in these publications, he is all the time urging that his plan for setting people upon the common lands is the needful thing in England, that a common ownership of land is God’s will, and that the crown lands taken by the Normans must revert to the people on the execution of the king.