Christopher
Hill, the son of a solicitor, was born in York
on 6th February, 1912. His parents were Methodists
and he later claimed this had an important influence on his political
development. He attended St. Peter's School and his academic ability
was so obvious that he was recruited by Vivien Galbraith, a don at
Balliol College, at the age of sixteen.
Hill
became a Marxist while at Oxford
University. He later admitted that this was a result of attending
the Thursday Lunch Club organized by G. D. H.
Cole. Hill pointed out that at these meetings "I was forced
to ask questions about my own society which had previously not occurred
to me."
In
1935 Hill joined the Communist Party
and spent a year in the Soviet Union. On
his return he became an assistant lecturer at University College.
After two years in Cardiff he returned to Balliol as a tutor in modern
history. After long discussions with A. L.
Morton, Hill published his influential article, The
English Revolution 1640 (1940). He later recalled how he
wrote it "as a very angry man believing I was going to be killed
in the war."
In
1940 Hill joined joined
the British
Army.
He served as a lieutenant in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry before
becoming a major in the intelligence corps. In 1943 he was seconded
to the British Foreign Office where he remained for the rest of the
Second World War.
After
the war Hill joined E.
P. Thompson,
Eric
Hobsbawn,
Rodney Hilton, Raphael
Samuel, George Rudé, John Saville,
Dorothy Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb in
forming the Communist Party Historians' Group. In 1947 Hill published
Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
Two years later Hill and Edmund Dell published the path-breaking collection
of documents on the English
Civil War,
The Good Old Cause (1949).
In
1952 members of the Communist Party Historians' Group founded the
journal, Past and Present. Over
the next few years the journal pioneered the study of working-class
history.
Hill
published Economic Problems of the Church
in 1955. Disillusioned by the events in the Soviet
Union and the invasion of Hungary
in
1956, Hill, like many Marxist historians,
left the Communist Party during this
period.
Other
books by Hill included Puritanism and Revolution
(1958), The Century of Revolution
(1961), Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary
England (1964), Intellectual Origins
of the English Revolution (1965),
Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1967), God's
Englishman (1970), The World Turned
Upside Down (1972) and The English
Revolution (1977).
After
retiring as Master of Balliol he worked as a visiting professor at
the Open University. He also published Intellectual
Consequences of the English Revolution (1980), The
World of Muggletonians (1983), The
Experience of Defeat (1984), The
English Bible in 17th Century England (1993), Liberty
Against the Law (1996) and The
Changing Politics of Foreign Policy (2002).
Christopher
Hill died on 24th February, 2003.
(1)
Christopher Hill, writing in October 1971.
There are few activities more cooperative than the
writing of history.
The author puts his name brashly on the title-page and the reviewers
rightly attack him for his errors and misinterpretations; but none
knows better than he how much his whole enterprise depends on the
preceding labours of others.
(2)
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972)
There were, we may oversimplify,
two revolutions in mid-seventeenth-century England. The one which
succeeded established the sacred rights of property (abolition of
feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxation), gave political power to the
propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of
prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of
the ideology of the men of property - the protestant ethic. There
was, however, another revolution which never happened, though from
time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property,
a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have
disestablished the state church and rejected the Protestant ethic.
The object of the present
book is to look at this revolt within the Revolution and the fascinating
flood of radical ideas which it threw up. History has to be rewritten
in every generation, because although the past does not change the
present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and
finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the
experiences of its predecessors. The Levellers were better understood
as political democracy established itself in late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century England; the Diggers have something to say to twentieth-century
socialists. Now that the Protestant ethic itself, the greatest achievement
of European bourgeois society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
is at last being questioned after a rule of three or four centuries,
we can study with a new sympathy the Diggers, the Ranters, and the
many other daring thinkers who in the seventeenth century refused
to bow down and worship it.
(3)
Brian Manning, Socialist
Review (March, 2003)
The undoubted dominance of Christopher Hill in the
history of the English Revolution may be attributed to his prolific
record of books and articles, and his continuous engagement in debate
with other historians; to the breadth of his learning, embracing the
history of literature, the law, science, as well as religion and economics;
to the fact that his work set the agenda and the standard to which
all historians of the period had to address themselves, whether in
support of or opposition to his methods and interpretations; but above
all to the inspiration he drew from Marxism. The English Revolution
took place in a culture dominated by religious ideas and religious
language, and Christopher Hill recognised that he had to uncover the
social context of religion in order to find the key to understanding
the English Revolution, and as a Marxist to ascertain the interrelationships
between the intellectual and social aspects of the period.
Christopher Hill spent
his life seeking to persuade people that the English Revolution was
a decisive event or, as he titled his last book, England's Turning
Point (1998), and he succeeded.
A brilliant, often sardonic
wit, an incisive mind, and a deeply compassionate person, he was the
finest product of the British radical tradition, and he did more than
anybody to establish Marxism as central to that tradition. It is hard
to accept that there will no longer, year by year, be a new book by
Christopher Hill, enlightening, stimulating new thoughts, and no doubt
something to quarrel with.
(4)
Martin Kettle, The
Guardian (26th February, 2003)
It would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that
Hill created the way in which the people of late 20th-century Britain
- and the left in particular - looked at the history of 17th-century
England. As he never tired of pointing out, some of the themes he
illuminated so richly had already been explored by left-wing scholars
in the 1930s. But from 1940, when he published his tercentenary essay,
The English Revolution 1640, his own voluminously expanding
and unfailingly literate work became the starting point of most subsequent
interpretation, even for those who rejected his method and conclusions.
No historian of recent
times was so synonymous with his period of study; he is the reason
why most of us know anything about the 17th century at all. He was,
EP Thompson once said, the dean and paragon of English historians.
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