Rodney Howard Hilton (17 November 1916 – 7 June 2002) was an English Marxist historian of the late medieval period and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Biography
Hilton was born in Middleton in Lancashire. His father, John James Hilton, was a weaver who later became the manager of the local Co-operative Society; his mother was also a weaver who had started work at the age of 12. Hilton studied at Manchester Grammar School and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1935. There he joined the student branch of the Communist Party. The influence of his tutors V. H. Galbraith and R. W. Southern drew him to medieval history. He acquired a first-class degree in modern history in 1938, was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford 1939-1940, and took his DPhil in 1940, writing his dissertation on <em>The Economic Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries</em>. In 1939 he married fellow student and communist Margaret Palmer. Their only child, Tim Hilton, was born in 1941.
He entered the army in 1940, serving as a regimental officer 46th battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment. During World War II he was posted at first in Italy, then in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon.
Returning to England, in 1946 Hilton co-founded the Communist Party Historians Group and was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Birmingham, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. Together with other CPHG members and non-Marxist historians, he founded the journal Past and Present in 1952. He continued to be monitored by police and MI5, who recorded his phone calls and opened his mail.
Hilton married his second wife Gwyneth Joan Evans in 1951 (although his son Tim