Friday 17 July 2020

On Christopher Hill By Charles James

The number of people whose doctoral research was supervised by Christopher Hill must, I suspect, be diminishing year by year. It is over a decade and a half since he died and longer still since he ceased being active as a historian. His allies, former students and academic proteges are inevitably being culled by mortality too. My own memories of him are mixed: in personal terms, we got on perfectly well over several decades even though I was never sympathetic to his approach to the early modern period or to his political views.

My first encounter with Hill was as an undergraduate when I heard him give a series of lectures in Balliol College’s hall which later found their way into print in his book, Society and Puritanism. His general points were buttressed by copious quotations from late-sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth century printed sources, most of them pamphlets and sermons. He had a rather off-putting habit of sniffing after every two or three sentences which I found rather disconcerting.

Two and a half years later, I found myself assigned to him as my supervisor for my prospective research. Our initial talk took place in his office as Master of Balliol. He was interested in finding out what my social origins were, what the cost of my watch (which was one of the very first to show dates) had been and to invite me to the Monday evening parties to which his other pupils and girls from St Hilda’s College, where his wife taught, came for drinks. And that was about it. (I gave up on the Monday evening parties after attending one or two because I could not hear myself think due to the noise.)

Later meetings took place in a room where he had a chair held by a chain coming down from the ceiling. He used to sit in this chair swinging slightly from side to side whilst saying nothing. I found this silence disconcerting: it was only a year or two later that I was told that this was an old Oxford technique to encourage students to be forthcoming about their work. It did not work for me.

Much more seriously, Christopher Hill, for all his encyclopaedic knowledge of printed sources, was completely at sea as far as manuscript sources were concerned. I never saw him reading manuscripts in the Bodleian, in the British Museum or the Public Record Office or in any county archive then or in the better part of forty years that followed. Since I was desperately searching for the lost archives of the people I was investigating, his inability to help was a problem I had not anticipated. His comments on my written work were rather perfunctory too, probably because he soon recognised that I was not a follower or potential follower of his Marxist approach in any sense at all. As a potential protégé or candidate for academic jobs, I was without promise from his point of view.

I did see him once or twice after I ceased being a postgraduate – in Malet Street in London and again at The Huntington Library in California. He and his wife were friendly and polite but I got the distinct impression that he had found the changes in the historiography of pre- and post-revolutionary England since the mid-1970s invalid, unacceptable and nonsensical. He had gone on writing as if they had not happened and thereby lost touch with later generations of historians. This was sad but it happens sooner or later to most academic historians. I was pleased to have known him although never convinced by his arguments at any stage.