Rodney
Hilton was born in Middleton, Manchester,
on 17th November, 1916. He was brought up in a family of Unitarians
active in the Independent Labour Party.
Hilton
attended Manchester Grammar School
and Balliol College, Oxford,
where he met Christopher Hill and Denis
Healey. A Marxist, Hilton's PhD involved
a study of the rural economy of Leicestershire between the 13th and
15th centuries.
During
the Second World War Hilton joined the British
Army
and
served in North Africa, Syria,
Palestine and Italy.
On his return he began teaching at Birmingham University. He stayed
at the university for the next 36 years.
After
the war Hilton, a member of the Communist
Party, joined E.
P. Thompson,
Christopher Hill, Eric
Hobsbawn,
Raphael Samuel, George
Rudé, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor
Kiernan and Maurice Dobb in forming the Communist Party Historians'
Group. In 1950 Hilton with H. Fagan published the ground-breaking
book, The Revolt of 1381.
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.
Disillusioned
by the events in the Soviet Union and the
invasion of Hungary,
Hilton, like many Marxist historians, left
the Communist Party in 1956.
Hilton's
books included The English Peasantry in the
Later Middle Ages (1975), The
Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism (1976), Bond
Man Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of
1381 (1977), Class Conflict and
the Crisis of Capitalism (1985), English
and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study
(1995)
Rodney
Hilton died on 7th June, 2002.
(1)
Brian Manning, Socialist
Review
(July, 2002)
He (Rodney Hilton) accepted that the Marxist concept of the mode
of production was crucial to understanding the moving forces of history.
He held that it was essential to recognise feudalism as a mode of
production. This was the mode in which the ruling class of landowners/landlords
exploited a class of peasants. The latter possessed their own means
of subsistence but paid part of the fruits of their labour to their
landlord in labour services, or rent in kind in money.
He made an important contribution
in arguing that the peasants were a class, devoting the first chapter
of his book The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages to this:
(i) They possess, even if they do not own, the means of agricultural
production by which they subsist. (ii) They work their holdings essentially
as a family unit, primarily with family labour. (iii) They are normally
associated in larger units than the family, that is villages or hamlets,
with greater or lesser elements of common property and collective
rights according to the character of the economy. (iv) Ancillary workers,
such as agricultural labourers, artisans or building workers, are
derived from their own ranks and are therefore part of the peasantry.
(v) They support superimposed classes and institutions such as landlords,
church, state, towns, by producing more than is necessary for their
own subsistence and economic reproduction.'
(2)
Christopher Dyer, The
Guardian (10th June, 2002)
He took medieval peasants seriously, as people with ideas, who
were able to organise themselves in purposeful actions. His writing
about the peasant revolts at the beginning of his career included
a book on The Revolt Of 1381 (with H Fagan, 1950). In 1973, Bondmen
Made Free marked a return to these themes; it was a deservedly influential
book which surveyed peasant unrest over many centuries and countries,
and focused on the 1381 rising. Hilton saw in that rebellion, led
by John Ball and Wat Tyler, a coherent programme and lasting effects,
both of which were denied by historians who were less sympathetic
towards the rebels. Hilton had been encouraged to revive his interest
in revolts by the student rebellions of the 1960s, including the Birmingham
"sit-in" of 1968.
In the 1970s he was enthused
by developments in the social sciences, returning always to the founders
of social science, Marx and Weber. This bore fruit in The English
Peasantry In The Later Middle Ages (1975), the book of the Ford lectures
which he delivered at Oxford in 1973. It contains the most satisfying
discussion of the term "peasant" found in any recent historical
writing.
Hilton's work kept up with
new trends: he wrote about women in the 1970s, for example, and explored
literature, such as the ballads of Robin Hood, as an insight into
popular mentalities. He played an important role in developing the
history of towns, which had been neglected in the general enthusiasm
for peasants and agrarian studies in the previous decades. Just before
he retired in 1982, and in the next few years, he published a series
of innovative studies of medieval towns, placing them firmly in the
framework of feudal society, not as the beginnings of modernity.
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