Socialist History Society talk on Christopher Hill yesterday evening

 

I watched this on-line discussion of Hill's corpus of works from the late-1930s until the 1990s last night with some discomfort. In a personal sense I ought to say that I always got on perfectly well with Christopher Hill although I disagreed with his work, approach and methods.

      First of all, Hill's influence reached its apogee in 1972 with the publication of his book, The World Turned Upside Down. This was mainly true outside Oxford University but not within it where other figures - Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Keith Thomas and Donald Pennington - were significant. It was already clear from the work being done by John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and Blair Worden in the university that an entirely new approach was being formulated to the events of the early to middle Stuart period. Hill (like Lawrence Stone) appeared to me to have been completely oblivious to this developing shift in focus let alone to the work of Conrad Russell in London. (Hill privately described Russell as "a fraud".) If one looks at Hill's subsequent publications it is clear that he never changed his basic view of the seventeenth century in England as one of 'revolution'. 

     Secondly, the rise of 'revisionism' clearly antedated by some years the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party to office in government. The two developments should not be conflated. Christopher Hill's influence had diminished well before 1979. James Holstun found when he attended a conference at Edge Hill in the early-1980s that Hill's influence and that of Marxism on the interpretation of the 'English Revolution' had largely dissipated and was confined to W.E.A. tutors by then.

      Richard Cobb's serious criticisms of Hill's methods of managing the affairs of Balliol College between 1965 and the late-1970s need to be discussed. 

      I find it difficult to understand how Hill was able to live and work in Oxford without ever using the magnificent collections of documents held in the Bodleian Library on the Civil War period in particular and the seventeenth century in general. As I discovered, he knew virtually nothing about the manuscript sources available in the British Museum, in the Public Record Office and in county record offices. He appeared to me then and appears to me now to have been highly insensitive to the economic and social history of the period. These were and are very serious weaknesses that need to be taken into account.