Rodney Howard Hilton, was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 Marxist historian of the late medieval period and the transition from feudalism

Feudalism

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...

 to capitalism

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

. He was born in Manchester

Manchester

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

 and studied at Balliol College Oxford University

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

 and was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group

Communist Party Historians Group

A subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain , from 1946-1956 the Communist Party Historians Group formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to "history from below." Famous members included such leading lights of 20th-century British history as...

 before leaving the party in 1956 with many others. He had a 36-year teaching career at the University of Birmingham

University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...

.

Works

His works include:

• The economic development of some Leicestershire estates in the 14th & 15th centuries(1947)
• Communism and Liberty (1950)
• The English rising of 1381 (1950) (with H. Fagan)
• A medieval society : the West Midlands at the end of the thirteenth century(1966)
• The decline of serfdom in medieval England(1969)
• Bond Men Made Free: Medieval peasant movements and the English rising of 1381(1973)
• The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975)
• Peasants, knights, and heretics : studies in medieval English social history(editor) (1976)
• The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976)
• Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism(1983)
• The change beyond the change : a dream of John Ball (1990)
• English and French towns in feudal society : a comparative study(1992)
• Power and jurisdiction in medieval England (1992)

• Social relations and ideas : essays in honour of R.H. Hilton (edited by T.H. Aston) (1983)

His papers are held at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

External links

• A voice for the exploited Obituary by Brian Manning
  Brian Manning
  Brian Manning was a leading British Marxist historian, particularly of the English Civil War of the 17th century. A student of Christopher Hill, his best known work was The English People and the English Revolution....
  
  
• Obituary by Christopher Dyer
  Christopher Dyer
  Christopher Charles Dyer CBE FBA is Leverhulme Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History and director of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, England.-Background:...