Christopher Hill at the Open University

I also read yesterday Donald Pennington's obituary tribute to Christopher Hill in the Proceedings of the British Academy for 2005. His admiration for Hill was apparent throughout. But I was struck by his account of the period between 1978 and 1980 when Christopher Hill was at the Open University. He was then involved in designing a course entitled 'A203. Seventeenth-Century England: A Changing Culture, 1618-1689'. Anne Laurence, who had been a postgraduate at the University of Oxford and was just beginning a distinguished career at the Open University, had apparently supplied Pennington with a paper describing Hill's role at the O.U. and his part in designing the A203 course. I was very puzzled to read Pennington's assessment of the course, which I later taught for the O.U. until its demise in 1990. It was, in my view, vintage Christopher Hill from the mid to late-1960s. Its view of the period was old-fashioned and out-of-date when it began to be offered. Tutors like me had to explain that the historiography had moved on a long way by 1980 and that it was not as informative as they might have supposed.