Modern Mind

ever had. A second reason why the
Annales
form of history has proved popular is its interest in ‘ordinary’ people and everyday life, rather than in kings and parliaments, or generals and armies. This shift of interest, very marked during the century, reflected the greater literacy achieved in Western countries at the end of the nineteenth century; poorer readers naturally wanted to read about people like themselves. It was also yet another fruit of World War I – that disaster affected the lives of ordinary people far more profoundly than it affected the generals or the leaders. Finally, the shifts in history writing formed part of a general trend: with the growth of mass society, of new media and popular forms of entertainment, the worlds of ‘ordinary’ people were a focus of interest everywhere.
    But in some quarters there was a more specific reason, and this found an outlet particularly in Britain, in the work of a small but very influential group of Marxist historians. The British Marxist historians were less original than their French counterparts but more coherent in their aim, which was essentially to rewrite British history from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘from the bottom up’ (a favoured phrase, which soon became hackneyed). Most of its seminal works were produced in or near the 1960s:
Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century,
by Christopher Hill (1958);
Primitive Rebels,
by Eric Hobsbawm (1959);
The Age of Revolution,
by Hobsbawm (1962);
Studies in the Development of Capitalism
(1963), by Maurice Dobb;
The Making of the English Working Classes
(1964) by E. P. Thompson (‘the pivotal work of British Marxists,’ 36 ‘probably the most important work of social history written since the Second World War’);
Labouring Men,
by Hobsbawm (1964);
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution,
by Hill (1965);
A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century,
by Rodney Hilton (1966);
Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530–1780,
by Hill (1967);
The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England,
by Hilton (1969);
Bandits,
by Hobsbawm (1969);
God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution,
by Hill (1970); and
Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Movements and the English Rising of 1381,
by Hilton (1973). Three men stand out in this history of the lower orders, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson. The issues they focus on are the way feudal society changed to capitalist society, and the struggle which produced the working class.
    Rodney Hilton, professor of history at Birmingham University, was like the others a member of the British Communist Party until the events in Hungary in 1956. His main interest was in the precursors of the working class – the peasants – and besides his own books on the subject, he was instrumental in the founding of two journals in the 1960s, the
Journal of Peasant Studies
in Britain and
Peasant Studies
in the United States. 37 Hilton’s aim was to show that peasants were not a passive class in Britain in the Middle Ages; they did not just accept their status but were continually trying to improve it. There was, Hilton argued, constant struggle, as the peasants tried to gain more land for themselves or have their rents reduced or abolished. 38 This was no ‘goldentime,’ to use Harvey Kaye’s words, in his survey of the British group, when everyone was in his place and satisfied with it; instead there was always a form of peasant ‘class-consciousness’ that contributed to the eventual decline of the feudal-seigneurial regime in England. 39 This was a form of social evolution, Hilton’s point being that this struggle gave rise to agrarian capitalism, out of which industrial capitalism would emerge. 40
    The next stage in the evolution was examined by Christopher Hill, fellow and Tutor of Balliol from 1938, who devoted himself to the study of the English revolution. His argument was that just as the peasants had struggled to obtain greater power in mediaeval times, so the English revolution, traditionally presented as a constitutional, religious, and political revolution, was in fact the culmination of a class struggle in which capitalist merchants and farmers sought to seize power from the feudal aristocracy and monarchy. In other words, the motivation for the revolution was