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.'

With the death of Rodney Hilton, at the age of 85, we have lost one of the most outstanding medieval historians of the 20th century, and a leading figure in Marxist history. His great achievement was to reveal new dimensions of the lives of medieval peasants and townspeople, and to outline the dynamic forces behind economic and social change.

He was born in Middleton, Lancashire, and brought up in a family with Unitarian and Independent Labour party traditions. He went to Manchester grammar school, and then to Balliol college, Oxford. He encountered at Balliol such medievalists as VH Galbraith and Richard Southern, and the Marxist historian of the 17th century, Christopher Hill.

Hilton practised leftwing politics in the Labour club and the Communist party, in the company of such activists as Denis Healey. In the turbulent late 1930s he still found time to work hard on his thesis, which he completed well within the three years now regarded as virtuous. He applied a Marxist analysis to the rural economy of Leicestershire between the 13th and 15th centuries, focusing on the emergence of agrarian capitalism. He left the Communist party in 1956, but then supported the New Left, and remained a steadfast advocate of the British Marxist tradition throughout his life.

He was reluctant later in life to say a great deal about his four years in the army during the second world war, but his experiences had a profound effect. In active service in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Italy he saw terrible things, but there were lighter moments, such as inventing a cocktail by mixing gin and Owbridge's Lung Tonic in some remote middle eastern officers' mess. His politics gave him contacts with local people which were denied to most officers. As an historian, he was able to observe peasants at first hand, and he kept up an interest in the medieval near east after the war.

At the end of his military service in 1946, he was appointed to a lectureship at Birmingham university, after a no-doubt searching interview in the bar of the Mitre Hotel, Oxford, and he remained at Birmingham until his retirement in 1982. He was appointed to a personal chair in medieval social history there in 1963, and served for some years as head of the school of history in the late 1960s, a post which he gratefully relinquished to concentrate on research.

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.

Hilton's work was deeply rooted in impeccably researched details from the archives, especially in the west midlands. His third book was an exploration of the west midlands region, circa 1300, in the manner of the regional studies then popular in France.

The development of archaeology as a source of historical information was helped by his organisation of an excavation of a deserted medieval village, with Philip Rahtz as the director. Hilton then boldly persuaded the university to appoint a lecturer in medieval archaeology in the school of history.

Telling examples and colourful episodes from the archives are found throughout his work, like the disorderly conduct of the turbulent and quarrelsome people of the small town of Halesowen in Worcestershire, whose behaviour demonstrated the social disruption caused by the growth of a new town.

He encouraged students to "do research", and the result was a steady stream of postgraduates who went on to produce work under his influence, and who are sometimes called "the Birmingham school". A typical example of the intellectual and social style that he encouraged was the "Friday night seminar", organised by postgraduates, in which a group met in a house or flat, each armed with a bottle of wine. Visitors wondered at the quality of discussion as the drink flowed.

Hilton's influence helped to change historical thinking in the second half of the 20th century. As a leading figure in the Communist party's historians' group his contribution might seem to have been confined to a small circle, yet one of the fruits of those discussions, a collective study of The Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism was eventually published in book form in 1976, when Marxist history was no longer regarded with such hostility. Out of the historians' group came the journal Past And Present, which sought to build bridges between Marxist historians and open-minded non-Marxists. After shaky beginnings in the 1950s, the journal grew into the leading historical forum for airing new ideas.

He spread his message about the importance of ideas in historical discourse throughout the world, partly through Past And Present, and partly through his wide range of international contacts. He gave lectures and attended conferences abroad, attracted research students from Israel and Argentina, was translated into many languages, and welcomed scholars from eastern and western Europe and the third world into his home. In the 1970s and 1980s he achieved the difficult feat of being admired by radical youth, while winning the acceptance of the establishment as a fellow of the British Academy (elected in 1977).

Those who spent time with Rodney Hilton appreciated his informal, irreverent and boisterous style. He gave his opinions robustly, and no one could get away in discussion with platitudes or a weakly supported generalisation. Any criticism, however, was usually delivered with good humour. He discussed theory and general ideas, but in unpretentious language, without jargon, and with such good sense that even hostile listeners found it hard to argue back. His conversations, though directed towards serious purposes, usually took place in bars or in the presence of uncorked bottles, and there was much profanity and outbursts of laughter.

He was married first to Margaret, with whom he had a son, Tim, a former art critic of the Guardian. By his second wife, Gwyn, he had two children, Owen and Ceinwen. His third wife, Jean Birrell, who also writes on medieval social and economic history, supported him through his most productive years and looked after him to the end.

Hilton was one of the leading medieval historians of the 20th century, and a leading figure in Marxist historiography. A lasting achievement of his was to open up understanding of the real lives of the medieval peasantry and ordinary townspeople.

He was born on November 17th 1916 in Middleton, Lancashire to a family with ILP traditions, went to Manchester Grammar School and then to Balliol College, Oxford. There, he encountered medievalists, VH Galbraith and Richard Southern, and the Marxist historian of the 17th century, Christopher Hill.

At university, Hilton joined the Labour Club and the Communist Party, in the company of Denis Healey. His thesis applied a Marxist analysis to the rural economy of Leicestershire between the 13th and l5th centuries, focusing on the emergence of agrarian capitalism.

During the Second World War, he was on active service in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Italy. At the end of military service, in 1946, he was appointed to a lectureship at Birmingham University.

A leading figure in the Communist Party’s historians’ group, a collective study from these discussions, The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism was eventually published by him in book form in 1976. Hilton left the Communist party in 1956 but remained a steadfast advocate of the British Marxist tradition throughout his life.

Hilton was appointed to a personal chair in medieval history at Birmingham University in 1963, and served for some years as the head of its school of history in the late 1960, a post he later left to concentrate on research. He remained at the university until his retirement in 1982.

He co-authored a book on the 1381 Peasants’ revolt, with the fellow Communist Hymie Fagan in 1950. Hilton was encouraged to resume a theoretical interest in revolts by the student rebellions of the 1960s, including the sit in at Birmingham University in 1968. In 1977, his Bondman Made Free marked a return to these themes. It was an influential book, which surveyed peasant unrest over many centuries and countries, though focusing on the 1381 rising. Hilton saw in those events a coherent programme and lasting effects, both of which were denied by more orthodox historians.

The English Peasantry In The Later Middle Ages (1975) was the book of the Ford lectures that he had delivered at Oxford in 1973. He wrote about medieval women in the 1970s and explored the ballads of Robin Hood as an insight into popular mentalities of his period. 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 over the next few years, he published a series of innovative studies of medieval towns, placing them in the framework of feudal society, rather than the beginnings of modernity. Hilton’s work was rooted in impeccably researched detail from archival sources, especially of the West Midlands and another book was an exploration of that region in the 1300s.

Hilton became associated with the use of new archaeology as a source of historical information, best exemplified by his involvement in the excavation of a deserted medieval village. His work also revels in colourful episodes, such as the quarrelsome people of Halesowen, whose behaviour demonstrated the social disruption caused by the growth of a new town in his period of study. This heavy emphasis on detailed research and treating medieval folk as real people has influenced a trend in historians, sometimes called “the Birmingham school” in homage to his influence. He died at the age of 85, on June 7th 2002.

A founding member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, of the journal Past and Present, and of a distinctive and distinguished School of History at the University of Birmingham, Rodney Hilton was among the most notable medieval historians of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was also the most influential of a small number of Marxist medievalists in Britain and Continental Europe who practised their craft before the renaissance of Marxist and left-wing history after 1968. Surprisingly, therefore, his work’s historiographical and theoretical significance has not attracted much attention.

Although Hilton was, first and foremost, a "historian’s historian", and made his most lasting contributions to the fields of English social, agrarian, and urban history, his engagement with Marxist historical debates cannot be lightly dismissed.

Hilton’s Marxism, a central feature of his self-understanding as a historian, reflects both strengths and weaknesses of British Marxist historiography in its heyday, and his interpretation of a locus classicus of Marxist debate, the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production, still carries considerable weight among like-minded historians.

This brief essay proposes to identify the salient features of Hilton’s contribution to the ‘transition debate’; examine his move in the early 1970s to address certain problems he identified with that debate, and his renewed concern with the question of the ‘prime mover’; suggest reasons why this theoretical move was only partly successful; and, by way of
conclusion, set out briefly some lines of future empirical and theoretical engagement.

Studies in the development of capitalism, first published in 1946, which proposed a model of the feudal mode of production that became the theoretical benchmark for all subsequent debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Dobb followed Marx’s Capital in explaining England’s ‘truly revolutionary path’ to capitalism through class struggle - the ‘prime mover’ - and class differentiation in terms of property rights to land, and defined the historical and theoretical problems with which Hilton grappled throughout his life as a historian.

Marx’s theory of history rests on three pillars: a theory of class determination and class struggle; a theory of technological development; and a theory of the state, which - since the state requires a surplus to operate effectively - must include a political economy of markets.

However, for complex political and historiographical reasons that cannot be explored here, Dobb based his model on class struggle alone. This gave rise to two serious weaknesses in his and his followers’ approach to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

First, Dobb’s model aimed in essence to explain the transition to capitalism, that is, to explain why the feudal mode of production was destined to fail in a ‘general crisis’ vaguely dated between the fourteenth A crucial influence on Hilton and most other British Communist historians formed during the 1940s and 1950s came from Maurice Dobb’s
and the seventeenth century.

Dobb argued that this failure was caused by systemic disincentives to capital accumulation and innovation, including peasant over-exploitation; but he did not have a convincing explanation for why the feudal mode of production had been capable of expanding, territorially, economically and technologically, for more than half a millennium before the crisis. The absence of a positive theory of development - which is a central feature of the Marxist theory of history
and which must, ultimately, be mediated by some kind of scarcity-based transactions - probably also expressed the ‘anti-market bias’ that coloured Dobb’s views of socialist planned economies when he wrote the Studies in the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, as he later recalled, he underestimated ‘the role of prices and economic incentives’ in socialist economies, and his view of the feudal economy was clearly analogous.

That bias, and the subordination of positive incentives and markets in Dobb’s scheme were reinforced by his subsequent debate with the American Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, a debate that canonised the misleading theoretical alternative among Marxists between long-distance trade as an exogenous, independent cause of change, or ‘prime mover’, and petty commodity production as an endogenous source of historical evolution.