Emmett quickly became bored with the Mime Troupe and what he considered the "safety" of the stage. With his almost invisible companion, Billy Murcott, the one he called "the genius," Emmett began improvising activities on the streets which laid the groundwork for the Diggers, a group whose action-oriented philosophy and politics were based on autonomy, personal authenticity and freedom. The name itself was an homage to Gerard Winstanley, the millenarian heretic religious leader of seventeenth-century England who believed in the universal right of man to cultivate wastelands and common lands without paying tariffs to owners of the manors they adjoined. Winstanley's followers were nicknamed the Diggers because they dug and planted on these lands, only to be beaten and dispersed by vigilantes roused by local landowners.