Medieval History and Marxism in England, 1950–1956*

One way or another, the earth will turn red:

Whether with life or with death

We’ll make sure of that.

                     Wolf Biermann

This article focuses on the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party between the years 1950 and 1956. My personal link with this is Rodney Η. Hilton, an outstanding historian whose contribution to the field remains crucially important.¹ He was my supervisor during my MA and Ph.D. studies in England and I remember him with love and gratitude because it was near him, and in the environment he created around him, that I spent ten fascinating years learning the historian’s craft. In 2016 his wife, Jean Birrell, also a medieval historian and a good friend of mine, gave me the material (hitherto unpublished in the West) which now forms the main body of this article.²

The story of how these texts were located is recorded in a series of emails exchanged in late 2016. It started with an album of photographs among Hilton’s papers from a visit he had paid to the Soviet Union in 1953 as a guest of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Unable to find any mention of this trip in the British press, Jean Birrell turned to Maureen Perrie, emeritus professor of Russian history at the University of Birmingham, who consulted the digitized Russian periodicals available online. There, Perrie located relevant newspaper reports but also an article sent by Hilton to the prestigious historical journal Voprosy istorii (Issues of History). She further discovered in the same journal the text of a speech he gave to the history section of the academy during his visit. Research around these almost serendipitously discovered texts led me down many exciting pathways before I was finally able to give this article its present distilled form.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

What came to be known as the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party was initially a gathering of members or simply friends of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who by the end of 1946 had begun to hold regular meetings in London. We know much about them from their body of work, and from what they wrote years later about themselves and their comrades, as well as from what was, and still is, being written by others about these historians, their journey and their writings.³ The purpose of this article is to add to the existing corpus two hitherto unknown texts, written at the time when these historians were at the beginning of their careers: the ‘Letter from England’, which Rodney Hilton wrote in 1951 regarding the reception of the Soviet experiment by British historiography; and the talk entitled ‘On Historical Scholarship in England’, which Hilton gave in Moscow two years later. They are augmented by other relevant writings from the time, and by newspaper articles published in Moscow in 1953.⁴

Reading the ‘Letter from England’, I was immediately struck by its youthful and exuberant spirit — the spirit of a world now forever lost which has nothing to do with the universities of today, with their research exercises and their ceaseless quest for extra funding. It seemed to me like a snapshot in time, shedding light on the presence and spirit of the communist intelligentsia in England during the first decade after the Second World War. An additional interesting feature of both the articles and the Moscow newspaper reports is that they addressed a Soviet reading public.

To get a sense of the realities of the time, we need to remember that the end of the war marked not only the defeat of state fascism and Nazism but also the beginning of a virulent anti-communism. Having embraced Marxism in their student days, and having then been dispersed during the war, in which they all took an active part, the young historians returned home to a climate of escalating Cold War hostility and mistrust.⁵ It transpires from recently declassified documents of the intelligence service MI5 that they were already known for their political activism. The file referring to Rodney Hilton states that ‘as a junior army officer in World War II he showed no evidence of communist activity but at the same time maintained contact with the Party HQ’, and that his superior officers had been asked to monitor and record his movements.⁶ After the war the police, working with MI5, continued to watch him: his phone calls were recorded and his mail opened until 1952, when Hilton got wind of the interception and queried it with the manager of his local post office. A note in his file testifies that an order was subsequently given to stop intercepting his mail in order ‘to allay suspicions’; yet the next year, following his participation in a number of radio broadcasts, ΜI5 wrote to the BBC to inform them that ‘Hilton has been known to us as an active member of the Communist party since 1937’: while, in other words, he was still a student at Oxford.⁷

While I was working on this article, it became clear that the evidence regarding this intensive activity on the part of the British, ultimately aimed at the preservation of the ruling class, was matched by evidence of similar activity in the opposing camp. A large portion of the state archives of the Soviet Union and the minutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for the relevant period were made accessible, and much hitherto unrecorded evidence can now be found in an article by Antonina Sharova entitled ‘History and Politics: Contacts of Russian and British Historians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’.⁸ Based on the available documents, she shows that during the war the Soviet Union received from its historians the ideological support it required as part of the military alliance against fascism. After 1945, when the priorities of Soviet policy changed, those historians who promoted the idea of scientific exchange were severely criticized by the Communist Party, especially for not condemning as enemies the so-called ‘bourgeois English historians’.⁹ According to Sharova, the group, particularly Hilton, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm, forced their Soviet colleagues to overcome their hesitation, which, in the circumstances, was fully justified.¹⁰ The attitude of the Soviet authorities is exemplified by their refusal to grant visas to Hill and Hilton in summer 1955, even though their impeccable ideological position was known and they had both already visited Moscow. They were driven to write to the Soviet historian Evgenii Kosminskii,¹¹

We have been somewhat amazed to hear that our visas are not to be granted, on the grounds that the Academy of Sciences does not wish to see us in Moscow. This information has arrived rather late, in view of our early application for the visas, and we are perplexed about the reason. It occurs to us, that it may be assumed at the Academy that we were expecting to be entertained when in Moscow. This was far from our expectations or wish. We hoped to be able to talk to such [Soviet] historians as would be in Moscow … We were expecting simply to look about us, to visit places of interest and to improve our knowledge of Russian.¹²

THE JOURNAL PAST AND PRESENT

Meanwhile, a crucially important event had taken place, namely, the inauguration in 1952 of the journal Past and Present.¹³ This was a collective initiative of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party and may have been linked to a programme adopted by the CPGB in the previous year regarding the British road to socialism through an alliance with the country’s progressive forces.¹⁴ However, it was equally a direct outcome of the ideological leanings of the group, of their belief that progressive intellectuals were duty-bound to educate, as well as of their wish to promote a particular type of history. As Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm recalled, the founders were linked by a common past, a shared political orientation, a passion for history and regular meetings in which they debated the Marxist interpretation of historical issues. In the ‘military jargon then favoured in Bolshevik circles’, they did everything they could to ‘wage the battle of ideas’ on the ‘front’ most suitable to historians.¹⁵ Pursuing their stated aim that the journal would be a platform for free speech for its contributors, the members of the first editorial board consisted of the Marxists Maurice Dobb, Hilton, Hobsbawm and John Morris, as well as the non-Marxists A. H. M. Jones and R. R. Betts.¹⁶ Furthermore, the founding members’ commitment to multiplicity of opinion is clearly stated in the introduction to the first volume:

There is plenty of room for difference and disagreement. The Board, and contributors to Past and Present study different periods and aspects of history, inherit different preconceptions, and hold differing views. The Editorial Board therefore takes no responsibility for the views of contributors, nor does it seek to impose its own on them, where it is united, nor to exclude contributions which are at odds with some or all its members.¹⁷

If integrity compelled the group’s historians to engage in a free exchange of views, the open disagreements that inevitably ensued as they attempted to convince others of their own irrefutable values proved useful to them at many levels: so much so that Hobsbawm concluded that ‘perhaps this was where we really became historians’.¹⁸ Yet only a few years later, in 1956–7, there was a fundamental breach between the group’s members when many of them, including Hilton, left the CPGB in protest at the suppression by Soviet troops of the Hungarian uprising.¹⁹ Disagreements with the party line had already been expressed, but an open letter written by Hill and Hilton and signed by Robert Browning, Hobsbawm and others gives an idea of the impact this crucial and final clash had on the group at the time:

We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure by British Communists to think out political problems for themselves … . The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems in Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on a false presentation of the facts — not an out-of-date theory, for we still consider the Marxist method to be correct.²⁰

THE HISTORIAN HILTON’S RELATIONSHIP WITH MARXISM

Hilton’s application of Marxism to his work as a historian forms an essential part of the background to the ‘Letter from England’. I have avoided giving detailed biographical or work references here as these are fully covered in articles written after his death, and in the comprehensive list of works published by Jean Birrell.²¹ Throughout his professional life Hilton emphasized that the historian’s primary duty is a careful examination and interpretation of the sources, as opposed to historiographical questions or theory for theory’s sake. It is thus ironic that he and the other members of the Historians’ Group have themselves become part of myth and history, and subjects of historical research.

It is true that the long period of time that separates medievalists from their object of study can falsely and conveniently reassure them that the distant past of the Middle Ages can have no relevance to current societal problems. Yet, as Hilton said somewhat ironically (while also forestalling potential criticism) in the same year he wrote the ‘Letter’, ‘Even medievalists cannot expect to be sheltered from the world in which they live’.²² He himself had consciously chosen to examine the medieval past as a seedbed for the present, and to find in that past the roots of social relations and other phenomena that developed in the subsequent capitalist phase. Inspired by Kosminskii’s studies, he focused his entire research on the notion of feudalism, a subject still hotly debated today. Yet in 1940 the foundations of hitherto established interpretations had already been shaken by the non-Marxist Marc Bloch, who, in the introduction to his book Feudal Society, described the phenomenon in a few incisive words: ‘The term “feudalism” applied to a phase of European history … has sometimes been interpreted in ways so different as to be almost contradictory, yet the mere existence of the word attests the special quality which men have instinctively recognized in the period which it denotes’.²³

In the second half of the twentieth century there were two great debates on the development of feudalism and the transition to capitalism, a subject which, as we shall see in the ‘Letter’, was one of the first to preoccupy the Historians’ Group. Contributions to the first public debate were brought together in 1976, in a book with an introduction by Hilton. The second debate unfolded through the pages of Past and Present, the relevant articles being subsequently reprinted in one volume in 1985, also introduced by Hilton.²⁴ During the period that concerns us, research on the subject was still in its infancy. Its subsequent development marked the end of the early, ‘heroic age’ of the young committed historians, and paralleled Hilton’s own evolution: his mature historiographical works are built on well-judged argumentation and based on an ideology that was lived and evidenced, while Marxism retains a constant but discreet presence.

Upon reading Hilton’s articles one may be reminded of the witty Italian wordplay traduttore–traitore; all the more so as the texts I present here have been sifted through two or three ‘treasonous’ filters, given that Hilton wrote the ‘Letter’ and his speech in English, the first (anonymous) traitor–translator rendered it in Russian, and Maureen Perrie subsequently translated it back into English. Furthermore, given the circumstances of the time, one can reasonably suppose that the Russian translator deliberately changed whatever was considered to be not entirely correct from a Marxist or party point of view.²⁵ However, since what is really important to us here is the content rather than strict linguistic accuracy, I have focused on what I understand to be the meaning of the original text, which I have then tried to place in its historical context.²⁶

TEXT 1: RODNEY HILTON, ‘THE WORK OF ENGLISH MARXIST HISTORIANS IN THE FIELD OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY (A LETTER FROM ENGLAND)’, VOPROSY ISTORII (1951), NO. 9^a

Marxist historians in Great Britain have for some years been organized into a group. This group began its existence on the eve of the last war. At the end of the war it was reorganized and became an established, permanently acting collective. It comprises people with various interests. The most active members of the group, naturally, are those for whom the teaching of history and research in that field are their permanent occupation, that is, university and schoolteachers. But it also includes a significant number of workers who are interested in historical problems, and who consider that the discussion of historical problems from a Marxist point of view helps them to understand better the problems of contemporary society, and thereby helps them to participate more actively in the labour movement and in the contemporary movement of democratic forces.

After the end of the war the group of Marxist historians was divided into the following sections: ancient history, history of the Middle Ages, history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modern history (eighteenth to twentieth centuries), the schoolteachers section, the student section, the orientalism section and the section for local history (recently formed). These sections conducted discussions on the specialist topics that interested them. Then the group as a whole met annually for the discussion of more general problems. At these meetings each section made a report. An example of such a discussion is the recent debate on the role of ideology in the class struggle.

The tasks which the group of Marxist historians has set itself can briefly be summed up as follows: firstly, to help the labour movement, and especially the Marxist press, by writing articles on topical issues of current politics; secondly, to make use of the knowledge and experience of the Marxist historians in the educational work conducted by workers’ organizations; thirdly, to deepen, on the basis of Marxism, theoretical understanding both of the historical past and of current problems of the development of human society; fourthly, to contribute to the development of historical scholarship through academic research. These tasks, of course, have not been fully realized, but considerable progress has been achieved in their resolution.

I should add that at the present time we are discussing a proposal for reorganizing our work by strengthening it at the local level. If this is done, then an even greater number of non-specialists who take an interest in the Marxist approach to history will be drawn into our work. So far the sections have had a tendency to display activity only in London or nearby, and work in the provinces has been neglected.

The work of researchers in the field of general historical problems will, of course, continue.

The work of the Marxist medievalists displays both the weaknesses and the considerable achievements of the English Marxist historians as a whole. But the medievalists have a number of specific issues.

In general, Marxist historians in a capitalist country have a natural tendency to study the history of the struggle of the working class against capitalism. This research is seen as the most useful from the perspective of clarifying the possibilities of practical revolutionary activity. Consequently, many young Marxist historians are more attracted to modern history than to the history of the Middle Ages. As a result of these considerations, historians concerned with the Middle Ages tend to focus their attention on the period of the English Revolution of 1640 and on the century that immediately preceded the revolution.²⁷ They display considerably less interest in the problems of medieval history of the period prior to the end of the fifteenth century, because these problems seem more remote from the practical issues of the present day.

It should not be forgotten that English Marxist historians work in a society where the means for the formation of ideology (the education system, the press and radio) are in the hands of capitalists. Two important consequences result from this. First of all, the historians themselves were brought up and educated in this society, and so bourgeois ideas have had a significant influence on them. Even those who have fully assimilated the political aims of the Marxist movement still have to undergo a lengthy process of re-education. This process to a considerable extent amounts to independent self-retraining, the aim of which is a complete command of the theory of Marxism.

Therefore, historical works written by English historians who are seriously attempting to become Marxists can vary very significantly in their degree of closeness to genuinely Marxist views. The conversion into true Marxists of historians who [only] claim to be Marxists will depend, of course, on the degree to which their consciousness has been liberated from the influence of bourgeois ideas, and on how long and how profoundly they have been studying Marxism. Secondly, the fact that the overwhelming majority of publishers and periodicals are bourgeois is reflected in the publication of work by Marxists.

In Great Britain there is only one Marxist publisher, and it is natural that it should publish mainly works that are important for the present-day struggle.²⁸ These publications include, of course, in the first instance, the classics of Marxism-Leninism: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin. The publisher does not have the opportunity to publish works of a specialist character, especially on medieval history. So Marxists working in the field of medieval history must seek the opportunity to publish their works in bourgeois periodicals and through bourgeois publishers. The fact that Marxist historians have to publish their works in journals which are read by non-Marxists has a positive significance as well, since it facilitates the dissemination of Marxist ideas and the development of historical scholarship. Of course, at the same time the Marxist historian must take into account the level of understanding of the non-Marxist reader. In spite of the fact that many of Marx’s works were based on English source material, they are still less familiar to the majority of English people than they are on the Continent. Because of this, the English Marxist historian must, for example, speak of the decisive role of the class struggle in historical development in language that is dissimilar to the language of Marxist works written in completely different circumstances — in the USSR or the countries of the People’s Democracy.²⁹

The most important achievements of the English Marxist historians are to be found in the study of the English Revolution. As I have already observed, there is a special section of the group of Marxist historians that is concerned with working on the problems of the history of this revolution. The first significant contribution to the study of these problems was a short book published in 1940 under the editorship of Christopher Hill: The English Revolution, 1640. The book comprises three essays: a general study of the revolution by Hill himself; an essay by the late Margaret James on English materialism; and an assessment of the views of the poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, by Edgell Rickword.³⁰ This book provoked considerable interest among the general public and stimulated an interesting discussion among Marxists.

Hill’s critics attacked his assertion that the movement that began in 1640 was a bourgeois revolution. They asserted that the absolutism of the Tudors had already abolished feudalism and that the events after 1640 were only the defeat of a feudal counter-revolution. These views were again put forward after the war, and after a very lively discussion the Marxist historians published a special resolution which decisively condemned the view that the events of 1640 and the subsequent period were only resistance to counter-revolution. It was also noted that the assertion that Tudor absolutism abolished feudalism did not correspond to Marxist-Leninist teaching about the state; it contradicted the facts that showed that in spite of the rapid development of capitalist relations in industry and agriculture, the forms of the state at that time remained feudal and state policy was directed against the development of capitalism.^b

The year 1949 saw the three hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the English republic and the execution of Charles I. A special issue of the Marxist review the Modern Quarterly was prepared by Marxist specialists in this field.^c The outstanding articles in this issue were: an article by Hill on the English Revolution and the state, an article by E. D. on Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers; an article by A. L. Merson on the English Revolution and the British empire; and an article by S. F. Mason on the influence of the revolution on the development of science.³¹ Other articles were devoted to specific events of the revolution, the reform of education and John Milton. At the same time a number of more popular articles aimed at acquainting the British people with its revolutionary past were published in the Daily Worker, World News and Views (a weekly), Labour Monthly and Communist Review (a monthly).³²

The most important contribution of the English Marxists to the study of the problems of the English Revolution was a collection of documents illustrating the history of the revolutionary movement of the seventeenth century, recently published by C. Hill and E. Dell under the title The Good Old Cause.³³ Soviet readers will know about this work from the review by S. ArkhangelЬskii.^d

This collection was subjected to vitriolic attacks in the bourgeois press by reviewers who particularly objected to the idea which defined the character of the collection: that objective history was a weapon in the class struggle. They tried to discredit the principles on which the documents were selected, calling them ‘dogmatic’. However, they were unable to cast doubt on the scholarly level of the book, and succeeded only in openly revealing their own class prejudices. It is very significant that the bourgeois press found it necessary to submit this book to criticism since their usual method is to attempt to dismiss Marxist works by ignoring them.

Before examining the general trend in the works of Marxists devoted to the early Middle Ages, it is worth mentioning the names of two historians who, although they are not medievalists, are associated with the study of the Middle Ages. The first of these is A. L. Morton, whose History of England was published before the war.³⁴ This was a valuable and bold attempt to provide English workers with a brief account of English history from the viewpoint of Marxism. However, this book is not free from inadequacies, which are inevitable in such a work undertaken by one man. There are several weaknesses in Morton’s book, including some in the section on the Middle Ages. Here there are mistakes, both in the exposition of facts, and in their interpretation, as a consequence of excessive credulity towards bourgeois authorities. The general picture of the development of English feudalism given in the book does not essentially differ from that which we find in the works of liberal historians. This was not Morton’s fault: he is not a specialist in the field of medieval history, and he did not have any help from Marxist medievalists in the writing of his book since there were none in England at the time.

After the war Morton’s book was corrected by the collective efforts of a group of Marxist historians. This joint work significantly contributed to bringing together the Marxist historians, who had become dispersed as a result of the war. It could even be said that in a way the Marxist Historians’ Group grew out of the discussions linked with the revision of the History of England.

Another scholar working on broad historical themes, whose work is important also for historians of the Middle Ages, is Maurice Dobb. His studies in the development of capitalism have been noted in the Soviet press.³⁵ The first five chapters of this work have great significance for the Marxist medievalists of Great Britain. Not being a specialist in the history of the Middle Ages, Dobb has not used primary sources, but his knowledge of Marxist political economy has enabled him, in spite of this shortcoming, to pose a number of very acute questions relating to the problem of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Specialists in the field of medieval history, too, must engage with Dobb’s conclusions in their research. In particular, Dobb was the first person in England to apply to the problems of the history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the theoretical analysis provided by Marx in the third volume of Capital. He [Dobb] put the discussion of the problems of feudal rent on a scientific basis, in contrast to the confused empiricism that characterizes bourgeois scholars in their treatment of this problem. On the basis of Marx’s works, Maurice Dobb showed the correct way to examine the problems relating to the role of merchant capital, and laid the basis for a critique of the attempts of bourgeois historians to regard capitalism as an extra-historical category, placing it far back into the past, to the epoch of feudalism and slavery. It goes without saying that Dobb left many problems unresolved, and that some of his answers to the questions he raises are unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, his book has been — and will continue to be — very helpful to Marxists in their future work on the topic.

The work of English historians on the central period of the history of the Middle Ages (eleventh to fifteenth centuries) has been less productive than their work on the period of the bourgeois revolution. Two well-known English medievalists, Beryl Smalley and Marion Gibbs, published the majority of their works before they had firmly adopted a Marxist point of view.³⁶ Marion Gibbs recently attempted to write a short popular account of English feudalism for a progressive publisher. This book (Feudal Order) was subjected to harsh criticism from Marxists in Czechoslovakia, who criticized it for many mistakes, including its non-Marxist analysis of the feudal state. Certainly there are a number of non-Marxist propositions in the book. This may partly be explained by the fact that at the time of writing it M. Gibbs was only at the initial stage of her Marxist ideological development. In addition, the character of the series in which the book was published did not permit the propositions advanced in the book to be fully formulated in Marxist terminology.³⁷ Nevertheless, the book also has positive features, especially in the section relating to the characteristics of the development of feudalism. Here the author correctly stresses that feudalism in the period of its upsurge was a progressive phenomenon in the history of humanity. This runs sharply counter to the views of various bourgeois schools, which identify feudalism with decentralization and anarchy, and therefore do not regard it as an essential step in the progressive development of humanity. Correspondingly, they consider the growth of feudal state power to be the result of the anti-feudal activity of the monarchy.

Of paramount significance for the theoretical preparation of English Marxists concerned with the history of the Middle Ages were the works of V. I. Lenin and J. Stalin, especially The Development of Capitalism in Russia and The Agrarian Question in Russia towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century.³⁸

The works of Russian historians on the history of England in the Μiddle AΑges, [written] both before the Great October Socialist Revolution and subsequently, have had a great influence on English medievalists. The influence of the works of P. Vinogradov and A. Savin on English historical scholarship is sufficiently well known that there is no need to dwell on it here.³⁹ The influence of Soviet medieval studies on research on English medieval history is mainly manifested through the works of E. A. Kosminskii. R. Hilton’s doctoral dissertation, ‘The Economic Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries’, was written to a significant extent under the influence of E. A. Kosminskii’s articles.⁴⁰

The subsequent specialist works of Hilton have been devoted to the history of the peasantry of central England and to peasant uprisings.^e In these works Hilton attempted to explain the paths followed by the disintegration of feudal formations in agriculture, the most important sphere of production in the Middle Ages; how new formations arose; and how these two processes interacted. He continues to work on these fundamental problems.

In connection with peasant uprisings, it is necessary to mention the popular book by H. Fagan Nine Days that Shook England, published in 1938.⁴¹ This agitational work was written by a party worker of the Communist Party of England [sic]. The aim of the work was to remind English workers of their revolutionary traditions by recalling the events of 1381. However, the book had many mistakes, both of a factual character and in the interpretation of the facts. Therefore, the medieval section of the group of Marxist historians, at the suggestion of Fagan, took a decision that the book should be corrected and, if necessary, significantly rewritten. The discussion of this issue led to co-operation between H. Fagan and R. Hilton in joint work. The first part of the new book, constituting a historical introduction, was written by Hilton; the second part, an account of the uprising, by Fagan. The book was published in English under the title The English Rising of 1381, and it is soon due to appear in Czech.⁴²

Two Marxist specialists in ancient history, although they are not specialists in issues relating to the Middle Ages, have undertaken research on the problems of the origins of feudalism. The first of these is E. A. Thompson, who has recently published a study of Ammianus Marcellinus and another work, entitled Attila and the Huns. The latter work is very interesting for Marxists as it represents an attempt to re-create the structure of Hun society. Also of importance is the analysis provided in the book of Byzantine policy in that period.⁴³ Another historian, R. Browning, is preparing an edition of the sermons of St John Chrysostom.⁴⁴ Browning is particularly well suited to the study of the late Roman empire and Byzantium since, in addition to his knowledge of ancient history and classical languages, he has considerable knowledge of Slavonic languages and Slavonic history. He recently published in a Bulgarian historical journal an article about the uprising of the Zealots in Salonica in 1342.

The issues which are discussed on a daily basis by Marxist medieval historians relate mainly to the period of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. At its recent meetings the section concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discussed the issue of ideological struggle in this period. The participants in the discussion were particularly interested in issues relating to the emergence of Puritanism as an expression of the revolutionary views of the bourgeoisie. While examining this problem they naturally also discussed the issue of the historical and class significance of humanism and the early Protestant movements associated with Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. Another important theme put forward for discussion was the development of science, especially in the seventeenth century.

The most recent cycle of discussions has now begun with a consideration of the problem of the development of capitalism in the midst of feudal society. The polemic between Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb that unfolded on the pages of the American Marxist journal Science and Society was the starting point for the discussion.^f This polemic bears some similarities to the earlier discussion of the nature of the English Revolution. Sweezy criticizes Dobb on the basis that feudalism and commodity production are incompatible. Sweezy’s viewpoint evidently leads to an overestimation of the role of merchant capital.^g Although the future course of the discussion cannot be accurately predicted, it is probable that central to the debates will be Dobb’s view that the decline of the feudal mode of production was due to its internal contradictions. R. Hilton has made an attempt at a preliminary examination of this issue in an article entitled ‘Was there a General Crisis of Feudalism?’^h

It must be said that although a number of the most fundamental themes are already being worked on by the Marxist medievalists, there are still many important issues which, partly because of the lack of specialists, have not yet been put forward for discussion. These include, for example, issues relating to the emergence of feudalism in England, where the remnants of the late Roman empire had much less influence on the Germanic conquerors than they had on the Continent. This issue, which is linked with the problem of the direct transition from tribal to feudal society, has already been touched on by M. Gibbs, who stresses the presence of elements of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England.

The Marxist medievalists as a whole, as a group, have also not paid attention to the political and ideological problems of the period of mature feudal society. However, Beryl Smalley has made a thorough study of data on the universities in the thirteenth century and on the general political and social significance of the works of the teachers of Oxford, Paris and other universities in that period.⁴⁵

One of the main obstacles in the path of the development of Marxist research in the field of medieval English history is the shortage of cadres. But in so far as the problems of capitalism, imperialism and the development of the labour movement remain first-ranking political problems, it is natural and correct for Marxist historians to concentrate their attention on issues of modern history. As in all other branches of scholarship, a true leap forward in the study and understanding of feudal society will obviously be achieved on the victory of socialism over capitalism in the entire world.

Translated by Maureen Perrie

December 2016

Revised May 2018

COMMENTS ON THE ‘LETTER FROM ENGLAND’ AND OTHER TEXTS

Reading the ‘Letter from England’, anyone who knows anything about medieval history in general and medieval England in particular is impressed by the strides that had already been made in the study and understanding of the period. These huge advances were due, by and large, to the impetus given by Hilton and those who followed in his footsteps.⁴⁶ At another level, the ‘Letter’ also highlights the determination of members of the group to be an integral part of the labour movement — participating in political processes, expending time and energy in the education of the people and the dissemination of communist ideas — without abandoning their personal ideological inquiries or historical research. The ‘Letter’ thus encapsulates an aspect of the intellectual climate that moulded some of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, and was in turn remoulded by them.

The text also exemplifies the awe with which these Marxist intellectuals regarded the Soviet Union: their fundamental and non-judgemental belief in the country’s directives is difficult to comprehend today, given the passage of time and the hugely transformed international political scene.⁴⁷ I thus found myself wondering whether, or to what extent, the ‘Letter’ reflected Hilton’s general political stance in the early phase of his career as a historian. This led me to study three published, though peripheral and little-known, texts of his from this period: a pamphlet entitled Communism and Liberty, published in 1950, the introduction to Kosminskii’s Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century and an essay on historical materialism, both published in 1953.⁴⁸

Communism and Liberty (1950)

The earliest and longest of these texts, Communism and Liberty, palpably demonstrates the ethos and often diachronic perceptiveness of the communist intellectuals of the time; an idealism they would have been loath to admit to; and their impossible quest for total ideological consistency and clarity. Hilton speaks with passion about what communists understand by ‘freedom’:

In the one word, ‘liberty’ are epitomised many of the finest popular aspirations. They also know that it is not an abstract quality which never changes, that its real meaning has changed, and is changing. But in the hands of those who try to make an abstraction out of it, it is being used to destroy all that it has ever meant, and can mean for us in the future. (p. 7)

He opens with a discussion of liberation struggles:

We live today at one of the greatest turning points in human history. Tremendous movements of human beings the whole world over are abolishing established social orders, some of which have seen little change for centuries. (p. 5)

He notes further that:

Every reactionary trend in modern politics now dons the mantle of ‘liberal democracy’, with the result that it is scarcely possible to distinguish between a speech, an article or a wireless talk by a Conservative of the extreme Right and one by a pseudo-Left of the Parliamentary Labour Party. (p. 7)

 In the second part of the pamphlet Hilton focuses on the meanings of the term ‘liberty’ through English history. He starts with Magna Carta, signed in 1215, when the barons wrested a number of privileges from King John but the rights they gained had no impact on the majority of the population. The next watershed was the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. While the revolutionaries had a vested interest in destroying the feudal remnants that obstructed the development of capitalist production, the bourgeois theory and practice of national freedom did not preclude a bourgeois nation’s freedom to exploit other nations: one of the first outcomes of the English Revolution was the subjugation of Ireland (p. 10). It is in light of public statements such as this clearly unpatriotic-sounding conclusion that the nationalistic British establishment’s mistrust of communists appears hardly surprising. It is a fact that, as the revolutionary events unfolded, the more radical ideas were eliminated. However, those who supported the tendencies that prevailed did succeed in establishing freedom of speech and of the press, which in turn brought about a flowering of bourgeois culture. By the eighteenth century the vitality of the English Revolution had waned, but the ferocity of the similarly bourgeois French Revolution provoked the overthrow of established regimes not only in France but across the whole of Europe.

In the next part of the pamphlet Hilton refers to the transformation of society to a collection of individuals and to the dictatorship of the proletariat, a concept ‘which has been more misrepresented by the enemies, and even by the friends of communism than most of the other fundamental concepts of Marxism’ (p. 18). Class analysis shows that bourgeois states appear to be based on popular consent, yet even the most democratic among them are ruled by a capitalist dictatorship since, as a ruling class, the capitalists continue to govern through the violence exercised on their behalf by the forces of the police, the judiciary and the army. In the case of Britain, the relative affluence of the population in the nineteenth century was due to the despoliation and exploitation of its colonies, in contrast to what was happening in the Soviet Union and the New Democracies.

Having explained that some of the problems will continue to exist under socialism, ‘when the bourgeoisie as a class is overthrown by the working class’ (pp. 22–4), Hilton points out that Lenin was careful to make a clear differentiation between socialism — the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat — and communism, which ushers in the definitive dissolution of class distinctions and finally of the state itself. A world without social antagonisms and differentiations will bring about a profound change in human nature. In socialism, freedom is a power concentrated in the hands of a huge and increasing majority, whereas in communism, power through social relations becomes meaningless; hence freedom, which acquired so many different meanings in different periods of human history, will also be meaningless (p. 25).

After this dreamy digression, we are brought back to reality with a jolt when we hear that

in Strasbourg in the summer of 1949 a motley collection of Tories, clerical reactionaries and social-democrats attempted to embody their professions of freedom in a programme of human rights. We know, of course, that the real purpose of the so-called European Assembly is to organise the capitalist counter-offensive against the socialist sector of the world.⁴⁹ (p. 26)

Hilton particularly emphasizes that the obligation to hold elections is confined to independent European states led by colonial leaders, who are themselves acting under the nearby control of the United States.

At the very moment when these Morrisons and Churchills, Schumans and Spaaks were discussing the Strasbourg freedoms, the armed forces of Britain, France and Holland were occupied precisely in quelling movements expressing the people’s will in Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia.⁵⁰ … But according to Mr Bevin, imperial rule is necessary to preserve the ‘Western’ way of life in the metropolitan countries.⁵¹ Can we even say, however, that in denying freedom to the colonial peoples, the capitalists of Europe have guaranteed the Strasbourg freedoms to their own workers — or are likely to do so in the future? What hypocrisy to talk of freedom of opinion and expression in the face of the capitalist monopoly of 99 per cent of all of the means of expression! … The Strasbourg Assembly is as impotent as a fly on the wheel of history, but it mirrors the sordid reality of contemporary bourgeois freedom … . The communists are excluded in principle from the charmed circle of Western democracy, an act by which the bourgeoisie confirms that its democracy is a class democracy. (pp. 27–8)

To clarify further his arguments for the sake of his readers, Hilton explains:

The Marxist analysis is not just another attempt to sort into a pattern the complexities of modern society. It is a method by which we can shape society to the only pattern which can ensure our future freedom. Marxism stands in relation to society as the scientific laws of the structure and development of matter stand in relation to nature. Neither for Marxism nor for the laws of natural science do we claim absolute, revealed truth, but both are developing and flexible instruments in the hands of man. (p. 30)

He argues that the working class must play a leading role in this social transformation, but to succeed, it must first win over the overwhelming majority of the people:

The free society which we shall achieve through socialism will not come easily … It must be our aim, now and afterwards, to explain, to convince, and to draw into action. This is the only way in which we, in our own day too, can … win what we most desire. (p. 32)

Introduction to Kosminskii’s Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (1953)

As we saw in the ‘Letter from England’, Hilton’s evolution as a historian was decisively influenced by Kosminskii. Sharova’s work on the exchange of letters between the two historians is particularly interesting as it brings to the fore the difficulties both sides faced in publishing Kosminskii’s Studies in Britain — a book which had been proposed for the Stalin Prize in 1949 but had subsequently been heavily criticized for its author’s ‘academicism and bourgeois objectivism’. Equally, it was difficult to find a British publisher prepared to take on a work from the Soviet Union; and when one was found, the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy withdrew its permission to publish abroad on the basis that it was ‘wrong and un-Marxist’.⁵² An updated and partially revised edition of the book was finally published in 1956. In his introduction, dated 1953, Hilton analyses his Soviet colleague’s contribution to medieval history, identifies the aspects of Kosminskii’s work that influenced him personally, and points out that to appreciate his work fully the reader needs to be familiar with the approach and terminology of Marxist historical methodology. As we saw earlier, the ‘Letter’ contains similar suggestions; it is noteworthy, however, that in the book addressed to the British reading public Stalin’s name is absent, in contrast to the text that was intended for Moscow.

‘Historical Materialism’ (1953)

Hilton opens this article with an axiomatic statement:

Although it would be untrue to suggest that all modern bourgeois thought is irrationalist, there is no doubt that irrationalism is an important feature of it. In historical studies irrationalism shows itself in various ways. Some bourgeois historians are quite unconscious of their own irrationalism, and would deny it if accused. In practice, however, their irrationalism appears in the absence in their work of any coherent principles of historical connections. They are fact accumulators whose selection of facts (since some selection is inevitable) is a process determined by their own prejudices, of which they are themselves unconscious. (p. 5)

As an example, Hilton points out that liberal idealist historians, ‘in keeping with the general trend towards scepticism, irrationalism and nihilism in all branches of bourgeois thought … deny that the history of human society is a law governed process’. He explains that this is an illusion and emphasizes that Marxism ‘is a method, a tool of analysis and not a dogma’. He repeatedly makes the point that ‘naturally, all the observed laws of social evolution have to be constantly checked against newly discovered facts, or perhaps as a new interpretation of facts’ (p. 6). Interestingly, exactly the same idea reappears in an expanded form much later when, in a critique of the British academic historians ‘who do not like Marxism’ published in 1976, he observes:

What is preferred in the British academic tradition, at any rate since the end of the nineteenth century, is exact and detailed scholarship directed towards the amassing of verifiable data. The training of the historian does not lie in the discussion of hypotheses by which significant historical developments can be explained, still less in the attempt to penetrate to the essence or ‘prime mover’ of socio-political formations.⁵³

 The spirit of the post-war era is expressed even more clearly in the second volume of the great study of dialectical materialism by the Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth, which was published in the same year as Hilton’s article and bears the same title. In the prologue to the second edition, published in 1962, he notes:

This volume has been so much revised and changed in this new edition as to be virtually a new book. These extensive changes have been made in the attempt to eradicate any kind of dogmatism, and to bring theory into closer accord with practice and with the actual course of events.⁵⁴

The concern—anxiety even—of ‘true Marxists’ not to appear to be dogmatic, so clear in these texts, was of course mainly due to the fact that in Western societies their much more numerous opponents were for decades relentlessly holding forth about communist dogmatism, even though it is clear, in hindsight, that dogmatism existed then, and continues to exist, under flags of all sorts.

Hilton’s early, more overtly political texts can obviously lead to debates on many issues. I have been selective in my references to them simply because my specific aim here is to present the concrete evidence they contain on how the Marxists of that era viewed the communist revolution: they felt that the time was nigh when the world would be ‘re-created | Beautiful from the beginning to the dimensions of the heart’.⁵⁵

AFTERWORD

In September 1953 a formal delegation of British scientists arrived in Moscow following an invitation by their Soviet colleagues. Rodney Hilton was the only historian among them, and according to the archives of the Soviet Academy, his sincerity, openness and charm made an excellent impression.⁵⁶

During the visit some of the foreign scientists gave lectures, and Hilton spoke before the history section of the academy. The text of his talk (reproduced below) is much shorter than the ‘Letter from England’, and was published in the same historical journal in which the ‘Letter’ had appeared two years earlier. From the very beginning Hilton is critical of historical scholarship in England, which was ‘characterized by individualism and the absence of plans, that is, by the same features that characterize the capitalist mode of production’. He goes on to give a fascinating account of British academia, discussing historical training, the role of universities and postgraduate studies, the main academic trends, individual historians and so on. A full discussion of his talk would be beyond the scope of this article. I have therefore kept my comments in the footnotes to a minimum.⁵⁷

TEXT 2: R. HILTON, ‘ON HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN ENGLAND’, VOPROSY ISTORII (1953), NO. 10

It is impossible to explain the situation of English historical scholarship in a short communication, especially since it does not comprise any kind of organized whole. Historical scholarship in England is characterized by individualism and the absence of plans, that is, by the same features that characterize the capitalist mode of production. There is no historical research institution in England that can be compared with the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The great majority of historical works are created in universities, and the rest, by individual historians.

Only a small number of students study in university history departments. In Birmingham University, for example, there are between twenty and thirty students in each of the three years. When they finish university, the students in history departments take exams for the degree of BA. A very insignificant number of graduates (not more than two or three students each year) have the opportunity to continue study as postgraduates, so that the number of postgraduate students in history does not usually exceed ten. The basic factor that limits the number of postgraduates is a lack of material resources and sources of finance for their research work. Various capitalist organizations finance research primarily into those problems whose resolution is necessary to the interests of capital and the war industry.

The greatest numbers of postgraduates in history are at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities. The explanation for this is that there are more resources there than at universities on the periphery. Moreover, students at the former universities can take advantage of the richer library resources and archives, which are lacking in provincial towns. Oxford University has the Bodleian Library, Cambridge has the university library, and London has the British Museum and the state archives, besides the smaller libraries in each of these three cities.

London University has a number of specialist institutes. It has the Institute of Archaeology, headed by the well-known progressive professor V. Gordon Childe; the university’s School of Oriental and African Studies has departments of language, literature and history of the Arab countries, China, Africa and others. The activity of this institute is of a political nature since it produces not only academics but also colonial administrators. The School of Slavonic and East European Studies prepares students for first degrees in the languages, history and literature of the peoples of the USSR and the countries of the People’s Democracies. The school also has a small body of postgraduates in these subjects.

It is worth mentioning the London School of Economics and Political Science, founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Here the reactionary tendencies of bourgeois economic theory predominate, but there is also a more progressive trend, whose representatives study contemporary economic history. This trend is headed by Professor T. S. Ashton, well known for his work on the history of the industrial revolution.⁵⁸

The academic work of postgraduates in the history faculties of English universities usually begins after the award of the degree of BA, that is, after a three-year university course. The postgraduate chooses the topic of his research on the advice of the supervisor allocated to him. After two years the student takes a qualifying exam, which admits him to submission of a thesis. The thesis should be written as an independent scholarly work, but usually it contains a comparatively limited amount of material and in character it is to a significant extent a work of compilation. If the dissertation is successful, the student obtains the degree of MA (except at Oxford and Cambridge, where all BAs can acquire the degree of MA on paying the required fee). If the MA graduate can find the funds from private individuals or receive a stipend (from the university or the state), he can begin to prepare a Ph.D. thesis. The registration period is usually three years. The Ph.D. thesis is a more independent piece of research, and is based on a broader source base than an MA thesis.

The training of postgraduates in English universities is fundamentally different from the training of Soviet academic cadres. Individualism and the absence of co-ordination are the distinguishing features of academic work in England. The choice of a thesis topic is usually fortuitous. Therefore, the topics chosen often have no serious scholarly significance.

The academic work of individual research and teaching institutions in England is not co-ordinated. All institutes and universities jealously defend their ‘independence’. Usually there is not even any planning in history faculties. Professors, lecturers and research students sometimes express no interest in their colleagues’ work.

In English universities there are some attempts to create collective scholarly works on history. Research students sometimes work together on the solution of a certain problem. In such cases a professor of history may exert influence over his research students to draw them into topics associated with his own work. There have been productive examples of such work in the past, for example, among research students in the history faculty of Manchester University. The late Professor T. F. Tout, author of Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, created a whole school of historians studying the structure and personnel of central government in medieval England.⁵⁹ At the same university a group of research students under the leadership of the late Professor George Unwin worked on problems of the economic history of England in the late medieval period.^a Professor R. H. Tawney trained a number of young historians studying problems of the economic and social history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^b,60

However, after the death of its leader the collective usually disperses. Bourgeois historical scholarship lacks the guiding and unifying influence of a truly scientific philosophy and methodology. Long-lasting collective work is impossible if the collective is not guided by a single research outlook. The nearest thing to collective work is the research on English history published by Cambridge University. I have in mind the well-known Cambridge Histories.^c

The method of creating these collective works is the following: the editorial board for the volumes invites well-known historians to write articles on specific themes. In this process, a major role is played by personal contacts rather than academic criteria. Everyone works in isolation, without knowing the overall plan for the work or meeting the other authors. There is no collective discussion of the finished articles. As a result, each volume is just a collection of individual essays without an overall guiding principle, with no single unifying idea or plan. Individual essays may be useful, but readers do not obtain an integrated picture of the process of historical development in a given epoch.

Thus, academic work in history in English universities is mostly the isolated work of individual people.

The historical views of the English bourgeois scholars of the nineteenth century — Macaulay, Freeman, Stubbs and many others — were limited.⁶¹ All these scholars approached the resolution of historical problems as idealists. They were not interested in the economic base of the society whose history they were writing, nor the situation of the popular masses, nor the class struggle.^d They were inclined to assume that the English constitution, as they understood it, was the highest and most indisputable achievement of civilization. In spite of the erroneousness of their outlook, the bourgeois historians of the nineteenth century nevertheless expressed many correct views on specific concrete historical events.

At the beginning of the twentieth century great changes took place in approaches to the study of the historical process. This was undoubtedly a reflection of the new position of the English bourgeoisie. In the era of imperialism, capitalist contradictions intensified. The Boer War, the rise of the labour movement, the struggle between competing imperialist powers, these and many other factors showed that the English bourgeoisie was losing its hegemony. This situation could not help but be reflected in the views of the bourgeoisie on the historical process.

It was at this precise moment that the quantity of historical research works increased significantly. As a result of the systematization of the rich source material in the state archives, many narrowly specialized historical works were created. The increasingly narrow focus of historical research was, of course, necessary in order to enrich our general understanding of the historical process. However, the narrow specialization and excessively detailed character of historical research marked the departure of English bourgeois historians from more general issues. It also characterized bourgeois historical scholarship in the era of imperialism. Bourgeois historians began to be afraid of generalizations. The detailed study of short periods of time, of second-ranking institutions or insignificant historical problems became virtually the sole aim of such historians. The study of the history of the Middle Ages began to predominate over the study of the era of capitalism. This kind of historical research found (and still finds) its most notable expression in the major history journal the English Historical Review.

The Great October Socialist Revolution and the successful socialist construction in the USSR facilitated the strengthening of the influence of Marxism in England. The elegant scientific system of historical materialism provides a sharp contrast to the bourgeois historical outlook, which lacks wholeness and is incapable of explaining the true essence of the historical process. In their attempts to counter the growing influence of Marxism, some bourgeois historians are trying to revive outmoded anti-scientific concepts of the historical process.

The most significant attempts by bourgeois historians to create a general theory of historical development have been made in France. It is well known that the school of Marc Bloch and the ‘synthesizing’ historians of Les Annales has a great influence on French historians at the present time. M. Bloch took several ideas from Marxism, but used them for the creation of his own anti-Marxist conception. At the present time the influence of Bloch in England is quite widespread, especially among the colleagues of M. M. Postan, professor of economic history at Cambridge University.^e

A group of English bourgeois historians, attempting to restore the old tradition of creating generalizing works, has united around the Economic History Review. But this tendency is not the predominant one, and represents only one of many in contemporary English historical scholarship. The works of so-called ‘technical historians’ are widespread in England. In these works, devoted mainly to the history of the Middle Ages, there are no generalizations.

The great majority of English historians, as ever, remain defenders of the external and internal policies of the English bourgeoisie and speak out against Marxism. Thus, for example, certain economic historians (J. Chambers, W. E. Tate) are attempting to refute Marx’s thesis that the dispossession of the English peasant was the chief means by which the labour force was transformed into a commodity for capitalist industry.⁶² Many English historians distort the history of diplomacy. They attempt to depict the creators of the Holy Alliance as wise statesmen guided by the ‘principles of collective security’.

The reactionary tendency in contemporary English historiography is headed by A. J. Toynbee. Take, for example, his Study of History.⁶³ One of the principal founders of the myth of ‘Western’ civilization, Toynbee attempts in every way to demonstrate the existence of irreconcilable antagonism between the ‘West’ (all the imperialist powers) and the ‘East’ (the USSR and the other democratic states). Toynbee bases his arguments not on exposing the bases of capitalism and socialism, but on the contrast between supposedly alien cultures, isolated from and hostile to one another over the course of many centuries.^f

Toynbee is the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which is linked to official circles. It specializes in the publication of materials justifying England’s imperialist foreign policy. Toynbee has many followers. They include the Oxford historian J. Bowl, who has worked in various ‘European colleges’ created for the advocacy of the advantages of the so-called ‘European Defence Community’ and the aggressive North Atlantic Treaty Organization.⁶⁴

English bourgeois historiography is opposed by England’s young Marxist historical scholarship. I have already written about the work of the English Marxist historians in the journal Voprosy istorii.^g I should add that in recent years the work of the English Marxist historians has expanded. In many large cities, for example, such as Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and others, local branches of the Marxist Historians’ Group have been formed. The newly created branches have begun to collect material on the history of their region, in particular on the history of the struggle of the working class. At meetings of these branches they discuss issues of the history of the English working class, the history of the anti-war movement, etc.

The local branches act in close contact with sections of the Historians’ Group, especially with the section concerned with the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The members of the local branches benefit from the general knowledge of the university-based specialist historians, while the specialists receive valuable material collected by the local historians from newspapers, pamphlets and personal memories.

Of great significance is the work on the creation of a short history of the English labour movement, which has been started by the English Marxist historians. The need for such a work has been recognized for a long time. The majority of the previous works on the history of the English working class were written from a bourgeois or petty bourgeois point of view. Moreover, new material has been found which requires analysis. The creation of a work on the history of the labour movement in England is necessary not only for academic, but also for practical political purposes. Such a work is necessary for the members of the Communist Party and all conscious workers.

The members of the English Communist Party take a great interest in the history of their nation and their class. In courses for party workers organized by the leadership of the party, issues relating to the history of the English labour movement have been discussed. Party workers have helped the historians to develop a deeper understanding of the historical events of recent times, and the historians have explained to party workers the historical roots of many phenomena in contemporary political life. This mutual exchange of views will help to create the necessary publication on the history of the English labour movement.

The English government attempts in every way to limit the influence of Marxism in the country. Books written from a Marxist point of view do not receive objective evaluation in the press; they are either ignored or vicious reviews are written of them which distort the books’ content. This attitude towards Marxist historical scholarship is part of the Cold War against communism which is conducted by aggressive reactionary forces in England.

The English Marxist historians are fighting against reactionary bourgeois historiography, and hope to unite all progressive scholars in this cause. A major event in their activity has been the creation of a new historical journal, Past and Present. The basic task of this journal is the publication of articles on the most important historical problems of all ages. The editorial board of the journal aims to attract contributions not only from Marxists, but also from all those who sincerely want to truly understand historical events. The editorial board of the journal includes not only Marxists, but also other historians who have adopted progressive positions, people of good will. They actively co-operate in the journal.

Our journal arose without financial assistance from any quarter, apart from modest contributions from members of the editorial board themselves. This is the first such case in the history of England. The journal’s print run is still small, and it is experiencing considerable difficulties, but its existence serves as a graphic confirmation of the vitality of this initiative, which has great significance for the development of progressive historical scholarship in England.

Translated by Maureen Perrie

November 2016

Revised July 2018

APPENDIX Soviet Reports On The Delegation To Moscow In 1953

Jean Birrell and, later, I myself became aware of information on the Moscow delegation only thanks to Maureen Perrie, who found and translated reports on it in the Moscow press, specifically in Izvestiia and Pravda. Since they are not easily accessible to the non-Russian reader, they are reproduced here in Perrie’s translation. It is worth noting that nothing in them indicates that Stalin had died six months earlier, for though administrative reforms may have started immediately, official de-Stalinization would not materialize until some two and a half years later. Finally, despite the wooden language and the predictable content, we still get a sense of the occasion through the formal speeches of the hosts, cast in Soviet state rhetoric, and those of their British colleagues. Reading between the lines, it is not difficult to discern what lay behind these formal exchanges, beyond a shared genuine desire for scientific exchange: on the one hand, the wish of the British communists to affirm the superiority of the socialist paradigm; on the other, the wish of the Soviets to break out of their isolation and cultivate friendly voices in a British society that was fundamentally ideologically opposed to their own.

‘THE ARRIVAL OF ENGLISH SCHOLARS AND SCIENTISTS IN MOSCOW’¹ (IZVESTIIA, 18 SEPTEMBER 1953, 4)

On 17 September a delegation of English scientists invited by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR arrived in Moscow. The delegation included representatives of various branches of science. They included the well-known physicist and progressive social activist J. Bernal, the eminent biochemists J. Bacon (Sheffield University) and A. Gordon, the crystallographer D. Crowfoot (Oxford University), the mathematician J. Whitehead, the well-known botanist D. Fyfe and the historian R. Hilton (Birmingham University).²

At Vnukovo airport the guests were given a warm welcome. They were greeted by leaders of the Academy of Sciences, academicians, professors and members of the press.

On behalf of the Academy of Sciences and Soviet scientists, the chief academic secretary of the presidium of the Academy of Sciences, Academician V. Topchiev, made a short speech. Turning to the English scientists, he said, ‘Soviet scholars are well aware of your fruitful activity directed towards the preservation of peace. And we are glad that your aspirations coincide with the interests of Soviet scholars, whose scientific achievements serve the cause of peace and the welfare of the people’.

Academician Topchiev added that Soviet scientists would be delighted to share with their English colleagues the experience of their work and their scientific achievements. He also stressed that the visit to the Soviet Union of such outstanding English scientists would further strengthen the friendly scientific and cultural relations between England and the Soviet Union.

In his reply Professor J. Bernal said that for his part he considered it a great pleasure to visit the Soviet Union again and to be a guest of the Academy of Sciences. He expressed the conviction that the combined efforts of the scientists of all countries would facilitate the great cause of the fight for peace.

During their stay in the Soviet Union the English scientists will become acquainted with the activity of the Academy of Sciences and its institutes, and with the organization and principles of scientific research work in the USSR. (TASS)

‘A WELCOMING RECEPTION FOR ENGLISH SCIENTISTS AT THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE USSR’³ (IZVESTIIA, 19 SEPTEMBER 1953, 4)

On 18 September the president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Academician A. N. Nesmeianov, held a reception in honour of a delegation of English scientists who had arrived in Moscow.⁴ The reception was attended by members of the delegation and also by eminent representatives of various branches of Soviet science.

In their short speeches, Academicians A. N. Nesmeianov, V. I. Volgin, A. V. Topchiev, T. D. Lysenko, D. V. SkobelЬtsyn, M. M. Dubinin, G. F. Aleksandrov and others observed that the arrival of the eminent English scholars would promote the strengthening of scientific and cultural relations between the USSR and England.

In their speeches in response, the members of the delegation Professors R. Hilton, A. Gordon, D. Crowfoot, D. Fyfe and J. Bacon expressed their warm desire to become acquainted in detail with the achievements of science in the USSR and to establish firm creative links with Soviet scholars in various fields of knowledge.

Professor J. Bernal declared in his speech that the experience of Soviet research work, which the English delegation intended to study, would facilitate the common cause of peace and progress, and also the strengthening of friendship between the peoples of both countries. (TASS)

‘FOR FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN THE PEOPLES OF THE USSR AND ENGLAND’⁵ (PRAVDA, 2 OCTOBER 1953, 4)

The delegation of English scientists that is visiting the USSR at the invitation of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR has been familiarizing itself with the activity of the institutes, laboratories and other institutions of the academy. It has held discussions with a number of Soviet researchers in various fields of knowledge. The delegation has visited Leningrad and Tbilisi.

Yesterday at the request of the English scientists a press conference was held at the presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The following members of the delegation took part: the well-known physicist Professor J. Bernal, the biochemistry professors A. Gordon and J. Bacon, the botanist D. Fyfe, the historian R. Hilton, the crystallographer D. Hodgkin (Crowfoot), the mathematician J. Whitehead and also Soviet scholars and representatives of the press.

Professor A. Gordon made a statement at the press conference on behalf of the entire delegation, as follows:

It has been a great pleasure for the delegation of English scholars to become acquainted with the scientific work of our Soviet colleagues. Among the things we have seen here, we have been greatly impressed by the level of theoretical and technical achievements of Soviet science, and the enormous role that science plays in the development of Soviet society. We were particularly impressed by the access enjoyed by the majority of the population to higher education in universities and technical colleges, and by the large percentage of female students studying the natural sciences.

Our visit to the new building of Moscow University showed us what great significance the Soviet people attach to the further development of education. We are convinced that the fruitful development of science on a worldwide scale is impossible without the peaceful and friendly collaboration of all scientists, whatever the political system of the country in which they live. We have found that our Soviet colleagues share this view, and we are sure that our joint discussions will eliminate many of the difficulties that have existed in the past in scientific relations between our two countries.

When we return home we shall do everything possible to facilitate closer co-operation between Soviet and English scientists.

We all take part in the fight for peace. The majority of men and women across the globe aspire for peace, and nowhere is this aspiration expressed more ardently than in the Soviet Union. We have seen the enormous achievements of Soviet science and technology in the development of fundamental research and their application in the interests of peace for the welfare of mankind.

Our visit to the Soviet Union has inspired us to work with even greater determination to prevent war and to strengthen friendship and sympathy between the peoples of the Soviet Union and our country.

The English guests then replied to numerous questions from representatives of the Soviet press. The leader of the delegation, Professor J. Bernal, gave a concluding speech.

Yesterday, after the press conference, there was a reception for the English scientists in the Academy of Sciences.⁶

Footnotes

*

A version of this article has been published as an independent book: Οι Βρεταυοί Μαρξιστές ιστορικοί: άγνωστες ιστορίες, 1950–1956 [The British Marxist Historians: Unknown Stories, 1950–1956] (Athens, 2018). I should like to dedicate this article to Jean Birrell, and I offer my warm thanks to her for the material she gave me and for her unstinting help with bibliographical research, as well as for years of stimulating exchanges on medieval history. As ever, I am grateful to Katerina Krikos-Davis and Theano Michaelidou for constructive and practical help. I also wish to thank Catia Galatariotou for translating my text into English. Maureen Perrie translated into English all the Russian texts reproduced in this article. I am deeply grateful to her for permission to use this material, her encouragement thereafter and her informative comments on realities in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

1

Rodney Hilton (1916–2002) taught at the University of Birmingham for thirty-six years. For his early career, see his ‘Letter from England’, Text 1, note a, below.

2

Regarding Jean Birrell’s work, see, for example, her study of the recording of customs in both large and smaller manors: Jean Birrell, ‘Manorial Custumals Reconsidered’, Past and Present, no. 224 (Aug. 2014).

3

The CPGB was active from 1920 until 1991, when it dissolved itself, as did the Historians’ Group. For a concise history of the group, see, for example, Gil Shohat, ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, aptly subtitled ‘Ten Years that Reshaped History’, <https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2016/03/08/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party-ten-years-that-reshaped-history> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). For more details, see Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton (London, 1978); Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002); Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge, 1984); John Haldon, Μαρξισμός και ιστοριογραφία: προσφατες εξελίξεις και σύγχρονες συζητήσεις στη Βρετανία [Marxism and Historiography: Recent Developments and Contemporary Debates in Britain] (Athens, 1992). For very different appreciations, see, for example, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York, 1991) by the Canadian anti-communist Norman F. Cantor (1929–2004), a 477-page book without even a passing reference to Hilton. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb (b. 1922), who discusses from a different perspective the collusion between historiography and ideology: The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. ch. 4. Compare the special volume on medieval studies in the Soviet Union which, although well informed on the early contributions of the English medievalists, ignores the seminal work of Hilton and even of the Soviet historian Evgeny Kosminskii, who had inspired him: especially Lev Cherepnin,‘Feudal Institutions of Rus, the Southern Slavs and Moldavia’, in The Comparative Historical Method in Soviet Medieval Studies, special issue of Problems of the Contemporary World, 79 (1979). For a more recent collective and general appreciation, see Harvey J. Kaye, ‘Fanning the Spark of Hope in the Past: The British Marxist Historians’, Rethinking History, iv, 3 (2000).

4

Rodney Hilton, ‘The Work of English Marxist Historians in the Field of Medieval History (A Letter from England)’ [‘Rabota angliiskikh istorikov-marksistov v oblasti istorii srednevekovЬia (PisЬmo iz Anglii)’], Voprosy istorii (1951), no. 9, and R. Hilton, ‘On Historical Scholarship in England’ [‘Ob istoricheskoi nauke v Anglii’], Voprosy istorii (1953), no. 10, reprinted below as Texts 1 and 2. For the newspaper reports, see the Appendix below. According to Maureen Perrie, it was not common practice for Western historians to submit unsolicited articles to Soviet scholarly journals; she surmises, therefore, that the ‘Letter’ was probably sent at Kosminskii’s request.

5

Hilton served for six years, mostly as an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment in the Middle East and later in Italy. Although he did not talk much about the war, he did tell me that, when his unit was transferred from Egypt to Greece in 1944–5, then in the midst of civil strife, he was left behind because of his politics.

6

Following standard practice, the declassified documents were transferred to the National Archives and can now be accessed on the internet. No information is given regarding the types of document still classified as secret, but the material already declassified is extremely revealing as regards the activities of the secret services. I have not yet studied the documents themselves, but see the National Archives, KV 2/4299, <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_aq=CPGB%20HISTORIANS&_or1=MEDIEVAL&_or2=OXFORD&_or3=BIRMINGHAM&_dss=range&_sd=1936&_ed=1981&_ro=any&_st=adv> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

7

Guardian, 28 Sept. 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/28/historian-ep-thompson-denounced-communist-party-chiefs-files-show?CMP=share_btn_link> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). This source shows that both Hilton’s and E. P. Thompson’s files were declassified in 2016. E. P. Thompson (1924–93) was a rather idiosyncratic member of the original group. An activist, pacifist, poet and social historian, he is known above all for his hugely influential book The Μaking of the English Working Class (London, 1963). See Vasilis G. Manousakis, ‘Ο E. P. Thompson, το Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Μεγάλης Βρετανίας και η παρακολούθηση από το ΜΙ5’ [‘E. P. Thompson, the Communist Party of Great Britain and his Surveillance by MI5’], Historica, lxvi (Oct. 2017). On documents declassified in 2014 concerning Hill, Hobsbawm and other intellectuals, see Guardian, 24 Oct. 2014, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/24/mi5-spied-historians-eric-hobsbawm-christopher-hill-secret-files> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

8

Istoriia, vi, 10 (2015), <https://history.jes.su/s207987840001332-4-1-en> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). The precise meaning of some passages is unclear owing to Sharova’s use of English.

9

Ibid., paras. 37, 41.

10

Ibid., para. 44. Christopher Hill (1912–2003); Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012).

11

Evgenii Alekseevich Kosminskii (1886–1959) was a Soviet historian specializing in the agrarian economic history of medieval England.

12

Sharova, ‘History and Politics’, para. 55. The stance of the Soviet authorities is even more puzzling in light of the fact that in December 1954 four members of the group, including Hill and Hobsbawm, had visited Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Academy: Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 197.

13

On the seminal importance of Past and Present, see their website, <https://academic.oup.com/past> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). From the rich bibliography, see, for example, the hundredth issue of the journal, published in 1983, with evaluations from three of its founder members as well as from the non-Marxist French medieval historian Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014): Christopher Hill, R. H. Hilton and E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present: Origins and Εarly Υears’; Jacques Le Goff, ‘Later History’. See also Hilton’s own account in the last paragraphs of his Moscow talk, when Past and Present was in its early days: ‘On Historical Scholarship in England’ (reprinted as Text 2 below).

14

See Communist Party of Great Britain, ‘The British Road to Socialism: Programme Adopted by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, January, 1951’, Marxists Internet Archive, <https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/1951/51.htm> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). See also Sophie Scott-Brown, The Histories of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (Canberra, 2017), ch. 4.

15

Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present’, 3.

16

Maurice Dobb (1900–76) was probably the most eminent Marxist economist of the twentieth century. He was a member of the newly established CPGB from 1920 and mentor of the group, based in Cambridge. See also n. 35 below. John Morris (1913–77) was an English historian specializing in the Roman and early medieval periods in Britain. A member of the Communist Party, he was considered by his early comrades to be the principal force behind the conception and inauguration of Past and Present: it was ‘his brainchild’ (Christopher Hill, ‘John Morris’, Past and Present, no. 75 (May 1977)), which he ran for a number of years. A. H. M. Jones (1904–70) was an English historian of the ancient Roman period. R. R. Betts (1903–61) was an English historian specializing in the medieval history of Bohemia. According to his obituary, his work as a founder member of the editorial board of Past and Present helped to ‘transcend that tendency to a narrow West European focus’ that ‘still contricts historical research and teaching in this country’: ‘R. R. Betts’, Past and Present, no. 20 (Nov. 1961).

17

Past and Present, no. 1 (Feb. 1952), p. iv (editors’ intro.).

18

Interesting Times, 191.

19

As far as I know from those directly involved, the most detailed accounts of what transpired at the time were given by Hobsbawm and the much younger Raphael Samuel (1934–96): see Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London, 2006), and his four articles with the same title in New Left Review, i, 154 (Nov.–Dec. 1985); i, 155 (Jan.–Feb. 1986); i, 156 (Mar.–Apr. 1986); i, 165 (Sept.–Oct. 1987).

20

Recalling Hilton’s own account, Jean Birrell confirms that he left the CPGB mainly because of his disagreement with the party’s uncritical attitude. Robert Browning (1914–97) was a Scottish professor at London University, a classical philologist, modern Greek specialist and historian of Byzantium, and a member of the CPGB until 1956. The party newspaper the Daily Worker refused to publish the letter, which finally appeared in the progressive publications the New Statesman and Tribune on 1 Dec. 1956. For the original text, see <https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/the-cpgb-historians-groups-new-statesman-letter> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

21

See, for example, Christopher Dyer, ‘Rodney Howard Hilton (1916–2002)’, Proceedings of the British Academy, cxxx, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows IV (2005). Christopher Dyer is emeritus professor of regional and local history at Leicester University. His work focuses on aspects of daily life, mainly in the English Midlands, from the seventh to the sixteenth century. See also Terence J. Byres, ‘Rodney Hilton (1916–2002): In Memoriam’, Journal of Agrarian Change, vi, 1 (2006). Terence Byres is a specialist in peasant studies and emeritus professor of political economy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. See also Jean Birrell, ‘Bibliography of Works by Rodney Hilton’, Past and Present, no. 195 (Jan. 2007).

22

R. H. Hilton, ‘Y eut-il une crise générale de la féodalité?’, Annales ESC, vi, 1 (1951), trans. as ‘Was There a General Crisis of Feudalism?’, in Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History, revised edn (London, 1990), 166.

23

Marc Bloch, La Société féodale (Paris, 1939), trans. L. A. Manyon as The Feudal Society, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1962), vol. i, p. xx. On Bloch (1886–1944), a French historian of the Middle Ages, see, for example, François Dosse, L’Histoire en miettes: des Annales à la ‘nouvelle histoire’ (Paris, 1987); Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989). For a classic exposition of Bloch’s approach, see La Société féodale. Regarding Bloch’s relationship to Marxism, the anti-communist Cantor took the extreme and singular view that the ‘social history advocated by Bloch is Marxism softened by anthropology’: Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, 142 and passim. Compare Hilton’s diametrically opposed view, published in 1953, that ‘M. Bloch took several ideas from Marxism, but used them for the creation of his own anti-Marxist conception’: Hilton, ‘On Historical Scholarship in England’ (reprinted as Text 2 below). Nonetheless, Hilton was clearly influenced by aspects of Bloch’s work and it was under his guidance that I also came to study and appreciate it. On Hilton’s mature views on the meaning of feudalism, see R. H. Hilton, ‘Feudal Society’, in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford, 1983).

24

Rodney Hilton, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Sweezy et al. (eds.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, revised edn (London, 1976). On the second debate, see T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).

25

This inference is now supported by irrefutable evidence: Sharova, ‘History and Politics’, para. 42. It seems, at any rate, that this kind of ‘editing’ was common practice; for example, a century earlier the editors of the New York Tribune made important changes in texts by Marx and Engels on the Crimean War (1853–6): Amy E. Wendling, ‘Comparing Two Editions of Marx–Engels Collected Works’, Socialism and Democracy Online, xix, 1 (Mar. 2005), <http://sdonline.org/37/comparing-two-editions-of-marx-engels-collected-works> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

26

The lettered footnotes are Hilton’s own. Where necessary I have added further information in square brackets.

27

It is worth noting Hilton’s inclusion, here, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the medieval period, whereas in his earlier discussion of historical periods he had referred to these centuries as forming a distinct unit of time, between medieval and modern history. He certainly seems to include the sixteenth century in the Middle Ages, diverging from the traditional period classifications of the time.

28

The reference is to Lawrence and Wishart, who more recently published Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols. (London, 1975–2004). The progressive publisher Victor Gollancz also published works on socialism, pacifism and Zionism, but even before the war had already been strongly critical of the Soviet Union.

29

‘Countries of the People’s Democracy’ (or ‘New Democracies’) refers to the Soviet Bloc: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia had succeeded in maintaining a greater degree of autonomy from Moscow.

30

Christopher Hill (ed.), The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays (London, 1940). I have not been able to obtain any information on the historian Margaret James. Edgell Rickword (1898–1982) was an English poet, critic and journalist, the editor of literary works and director of Lawrence and Wishart. He was a leading figure in the British communist intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s.

31

I have not been able to ascertain to whom the initials ‘E. D.’ refer. Gerrard Winstanley (bap. 1609, d. 1676) was a social reformer, philosopher, activist and pamphleteer. During the English Revolution he led the movement of the True Levellers, who propagated the idea of the abolition of ownership. They took over land and began to cultivate it collectively; hence their opponents called them ‘Diggers’. Allan L. Merson (1916–95) was a scholar, an academic and a communist. He taught history at Hartley University College, Southampton. His papers are held at the People’s History Museum: see <https://unlockideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/the-papers-of-the-historian-allan-merson-held-at-the-peoples-history-museum> (accessed 2 Dec. 2018). Stephen F. Mason (1923–2007) was a British chemist and scientific historian. He published the popularizing book A History of the Sciences (London, 1953) and ‘Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, no. 3 (Feb. 1953).

32

The Daily Worker was the newspaper of the CPGB from 1930 to 1966. Renamed the Morning Star in 1966, it continues to be published today as a forum for left-wing, ecological, trade unionist and religious inquiry.

33

The Good Old Cause: English Revolution of 1640–1660. Its Causes, Course and Consequences. Extracts from Contemporary Sources, ed. Christopher Hill and Edmund Dell (London, 1949). Dell (1921–99) was an English politician, entrepreneur and author. He was a member of the Communist Party while reading history at Oxford, and a Labour Party MP from 1964 to 1979. He resigned from the Labour Party on the basis that it had moved too far to the left, and in 1981 joined the Social Democratic Party. Although Jewish, he was publicly opposed to Zionism.

34

A. L. Morton (1903–87) was a prolific Marxist historian who worked mainly as an independent researcher. He was president of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party for a number of years from 1946, and never left the party. His best-known work is A People’s History of England (London, 1938), of which there are two revised editions.

35

See Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1946).

36

Beryl Smalley (1905–84) was a British historian and member of the British Academy best known for The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1941), of which there are several revised editions. See also n. 45 below. Marion Gibbs (1901–?) was the author of Feudal Order: A Study of the Origins and Development of English Feudal Society (London, 1949); the ‘progressive publisher’ mentioned lower down was Cobbett Press. ‘Molly’ Gibbs ended her university career in Melbourne: Trove, National Library of Australia, <https://trove.nla.gov.au/people/932418?c=people> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

37

In one of his frequent exchanges with his Soviet Academy colleagues, Hilton wrote to Kosminskii, ‘The situation in England is such that either this Aesopian technique is used or nothing is published. Insistence on the full and proper employment of Marxist terminology might lead to an abandonment of the ideological struggle’: Dec. 1950, quoted in Sharova, ‘History and Politics’, para. 53.

38

Both works are Lenin’s: V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow, 1899); The Agrarian Question in Russia towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century (Moscow, 1918). No work by Stalin is cited, but there may be an implicit reference to a text of his entitled ‘The Agrarian Question’ (Mar. 1906): see Marxists Internet Archive, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1906/03/x01.htm> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

39

Pavel Gavrilovich Vinogradov (Sir Paul Vinogradoff; 1854–1925) was a Russian and British historian of medieval English law. He taught in Moscow and later at Oxford. Important works include Paul Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor (London, 1905) and English Society in the Eleventh Century: Essays in English Mediaeval History (Oxford, 1908). Aleksandr Nikolaevich Savin (1873–1923) was a student of Vinogradov and later professor of English medieval history at Moscow University. His publications in English include Alexander Savine, ‘Copyhold Cases in the Early Chancery Proceedings’, English Historical Review, xvii (1902); Aleksandr Nikolaevich Savin, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution (Oxford, 1909).

40

Kosminskii’s articles had been published in Britain thanks to another important medievalist, Michael Postan (1899–1981), who also made the necessary linguistic corrections. Postan was not a Marxist but had been born in Bessarabia, then part of imperial Russia, and completed his undergraduate education there.

41

Hyman Fagan, Nine Days that Shook England: An Account of the English People’s Uprising in 1381 (London, 1938). A book review in the left-wing press at the time praises Fagan (1903–88) for combining a masterly presentation of detail, and a real feel for the revolutionary traditions of the English people, with the broad understanding and perceptiveness that only Marxism can provide. In contrast, the reviewer criticizes academic historians for their interpretations, which, the reviewer notes, are hardly surprising since ‘Across the centuries class speaks to class’: E.M., ‘The Peasants’ Revolt: Review of Nine Days that Shook England by H. Fagan’, Labour Monthly, xx, 12 (Dec. 1938), Marxists Internet Online, <https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/labour_monthly/1938/12/peasant_revolt.htm> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). For a brief bibliographical note on Fagan, see University of Nottingham, ‘The Fagan Collection of Political Prints and Caricatures, 1653–1911’, Jisc Archives Hub, <https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/7fb679ee-38d3-399d-84c4-6998385130d8> (accessed 11 Nov. 2018).

42

R. H. Hilton and H. Fagan, The English Rising of 1381 (London, 1950).

43

Edward Thompson (1914–94) was an Irish classics professor at the University of Nottingham. The works referred to here are E. A. Thompson, The Historical Work of Ammianus Marcellinus (Cambridge, 1947) and A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948).

44

For Browning, see n. 20. Browning never published Chrysostom’s sermons; Hilton must have had in mind his research around Chrysostom’s sermon 21, which led to the article: R. Browning, ‘The Riot of ad 387 in Antioch: The Role of the Theatrical Claques in the Later Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies, xlii (1952).

45

The unspecified publication must be one of the papers in Beryl Smalley, Studies in Medieval Thought and Learning: From Abelard to Wyclif (London, 1981). It is worth noting the importance Hilton attaches to political history and ideology in this passage, even though as a researcher he himself was not particularly engaged with either, whether at the time or subsequently.

46

For the relationship between Marxism and contemporary historiography, see Chris Wickham (ed.), Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2007). Chris Wickham is a British medievalist specializing in the early Middle Ages and the Italian peninsula. He was a professor of early medieval history at the University of Birmingham and is now emeritus Chichele professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford.

47

In his memoirs and elsewhere, Hobsbawm discusses the communist historians’ dilemmas regarding the Soviet Union, and the impact the events of 1956–7 had on them. However, these are later appreciations personal to Hobsbawm and do not necessarily represent the views of all the members of the original group.

48

Rodney Hilton, Communism and Liberty (London, 1950); E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, ed. R. H. Hilton, trans. Ruth Kisch (Oxford, 1956); Rodney Hilton, ‘Historical Materialism’, in Essays on Socialist Realism and the British Cultural Tradition (London, [1953]). This last publication is dedicated to the British and Soviet peoples; its foreword explains that it was written for a workshop on socialist realism organized by the National Cultural Committee and the Central Educational Department of the Communist Party.

49

The European Assembly of the Council of Europe (the distant precursor of the European Union) held its first meeting on 10 Aug. 1949: see Council of Europe, ‘Origins and History of Parliamentary Assembly’, <https://www.coe.int/en/web/tbilisi/the-coe> (accessed 3 Dec. 2018).

50

The European politicians referred to are, from Britain, the Labour Party’s Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) and the Conservative Party’s Winston Churchill (1874–1965); from France, Robert Schuman (1886–1963); and from Belgium, Paul-Henri Spaak (1899–1972). Since parts of Malaya were occupied by various European armies over time, it has had a succession of masters, capitals, borders and names. Cyprus, under British rule at the time, is also referred to among the examples of British colonial policy.

51

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) was a British Labour Party politician with strong social-democratic leanings. Despite a rudimentary education, he became leader while still young of the powerful Transport and General Workers’ Union, which he had played a major part in creating. During the Second World War he was a minister in Churchill’s coalition cabinet, and in 1945 he became foreign secretary in the post-war Labour government. He worked for the implementation of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, and for the establishment of NATO in 1949. From the beginning of the Cold War he strove to ensure the strongest possible alliance between the United States and Britain against the Soviet Union.

52

Sharova, ‘History and Politics’, paras. 48–9.

53

Hilton, ‘Introduction’, 10.

54

Maurice Cornforth, Dialectical Materialism: An Introduction, 2nd revised edn, 3 vols. (London, 1955–68), ii, Historical Materialism, 5. Maurice Cornforth (1909–80) was a Marxist philosopher, a student of Wittgenstein at Cambridge and a member of the CPGB from 1931 until his death. He was managing director of Lawrence and Wishart from 1950 to 1975, where he edited, among other things, the complete works of Marx and Engels.

55

Odysseus Elytis, ‘ Drinking the Sun of Corinth …’, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Poetry International Web, <https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/2630/auto/0/Drinking-the-sun-of-Corinthe> (accessed 1 Oct. 2018).

56

Sharova, ‘History and Politics’, para. 46. Hobsbawm made the interesting observation that, when it came to scientific integrity, the CPGB historians did not feel compromised because they were not engaged with Soviet or current issues, whereas, for the natural scientists, acceptance of Soviet orthodoxies, ‘some only faintly related to Marxism and several absurd’, was a problem: Interesting Times, 191. See also Appendix, n. 2, below.

57

Again, the lettered footnotes are Hilton’s own. Where necessary I have added further information in square brackets.

58

Thomas Southcliffe Ashton (1889–1968) was a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics (1944–54). His best-known work is the textbook The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (London, 1948), in which he argues that the often maligned Industrial Revolution was an important and beneficial mark of progress, during which the material living standards of most of the British people improved.

59

T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seals, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33). Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929) was a professor of economic and business history at the University of Manchester. He is best known for the above work, which has stood the test of time.

60

George Unwin (1870–1925) was an English economic historian, a pioneer in economic and business history who held a chair at the University of Manchester. Some of his papers are kept there. See <https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb133-unw> (accessed 10 Dec. 2018). R. H. (Richard Henry) Tawney (1880–1962) was an economic historian and a radical social critic and reformer, aligned with the Labour Party. He was professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. His most influential work was Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926).

61

Thomas Babington Macaulay, first Baron Macaulay (1800–59), was a British historian and a Whig politician. His major historical work, which he left unfinished, is The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols. (1848–61), which in retrospect has been considered to follow the ‘Whig interpretation of history’. Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) was an English historian and Liberal politician. He held the position of Regius professor of modern history at Oxford University. He was a prolific writer and one of his best-known works is The History of the Norman Conquest of England: Its Causes and its Results, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1867–79). William Stubbs (1825–1901) was a historian and a bishop of Oxford. His research and published studies relate to the constitutional history of England.

62

J. D. (David) Chambers (1898–1971) was a professor of economic history at the University of Nottingham specializing in regional history. W. E. (William Edward) Tate (1902–68) was particularly interested in the enclosure movement: see, for example, his book The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (London, 1967).

63

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) was a prolific historian and a leading specialist on international affairs whose work A Study of History, 12 vols. (London, 1934–61) put forward a philosophy of history that provoked much discussion. He worked for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, and was a war correspondent and university professor.

64

I have no further information on J. Bowl and his activities. The proposed European Defence Community went to the heart of Cold War politics: conceived under pressure from the United States, its object was to undermine the growing power of the USSR through the creation of a supranational European army. The plan envisaged a leading role for France, as well as the remilitarization of (West) Germany. It was signed in 1952 by the European integration: West Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries. The United Kingdom refused to participate. After protracted negotiations, the scheme was abandoned in 1954 when the French parliament refused to ratify it.

1

‘Priezd v Moskvu angliiskikh uchenykh’.

2

John Bernal (1901–71) was an Irish molecular biologist and pioneer of the use of X-ray crystallography. He was the author of popularizing books on science and society, and of a classical analysis of the ways in which wider social relations can define the limits and practical application of scientific theory, The Social Function of Science (London, 1939). He was a member of the CPGB until 1956. Hobsbawm considered him a genius who, however, destroyed his reputation by his attempts to justify scientifically untenable Soviet views: Interesting Times, 181, 191–2. I have found references to the work of J. C. D. Bacon, A. H. Gordon and D. Fyfe but am unable to trace any further biographical details about them. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–94) was a British chemist credited, among other things, with the discovery of the structure of vitamin B12 and of insulin. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964. She maintained close scientific co-operation with the Soviet Academy but was not a member of the CPGB (in contrast to her husband and Bernal, her mentor). J. H. C. (Henry) Whitehead (1904–60) was a British professor of mathematics at Oxford University known mostly for his pioneering work on simple homotopy theory.

3

‘Priem angliiskikh uchenykh v Akademii nauk SSSR’.

4

Aleksandr Nesmeianov (1899–1980) was the president of the Soviet Academy from 1951 to 1961. He was one of the fathers of the modern chemistry of organometallic compounds. I have not thought it essential to seek further information on other members of the Soviet Academy; I simply note that this indicates that the Soviets had made great progress in some branches of education and science, a fact proved only a few years later by their successful space missions. However, compare Hobsbawm’s impression, gained during a visit in 1954, that the Soviets were completely unaware of English scientific publications: Interesting Times, 197.

5

‘Za druzhbu mezhdu narodami SSSR i Anglii’.

6

A similar article appeared in Izvestiia: ‘A Press Conference by the Delegation of English Scientists’ [‘Press-konferentsiia delegatsii angliiskikh uchenykh’], 3 Oct. 1953, 4.

a

The author of this letter, Rodney Hilton, a professor at Birmingham University, is well known for his research on the agrarian history of medieval England. His work [R. H. Hilton], ‘A Thirteenth-Century Poem on Disputed Villein Services’, [English Historical Review, ccxxi] was published in 1941. His book The Economic Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries [published in London] came out in 1947. R. Hilton is a contributor to the journal of the English Communist Party, the Communist Review. His journalistic work Communism and Liberty [published in London] appeared in 1950. At Birmingham University R. Hilton lectures on economic and social history.

b

See [Historians’ Group], ‘State and Revolution in Tudor and Stuart England’, Communist Review (July 1948).

c

[Modern Quarterly], new ser., iv, 2 (1949).

d

[S. ArkhangelЬskii, ‘The Good Old Cause: The English Revolution of 1640–1660’ [‘Dobroe staroe delo: Angliiskaia revoliutsiia 1640–1660 godov’]], Voprosy istorii (1950), no. 5.

e

[R. H. Hilton], ‘A Thirteenth-Century Poem on Disputed Villein Services’, English Historical Review, [lvi] (1941); ‘Kibworth Harcourt: A Merton College Manor in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, in [W. G. Hoskins (ed.)], Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History [([Leicester], 1949)]; ‘Winchcombe Abbey and the Manor of Sherborne’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, ii, 1 [(1949)]; ‘Peasant Movements in England before 1381’, Economic History Review, new ser., ii, 2 [(1949)]; Social Structure of Rural Warwickshire in the Middle Ages (Dugdale Society [Occasional Paper, 9, 1950]).

f

[Paul M. Sweezy, ‘The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, and Maurice Dobb, ‘A Reply’, both in] Science and Society, xiv, 2. [See also n. 24 above. Paul Sweezy (1910–2004) was an American Marxist economist and professor at Harvard University whose interests included social theory.]

g

The danger of this viewpoint is intensified by the fact that on issues of economic history in the Middle Ages Sweezy relies entirely on H. Pirenne. [Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) was an important Belgian historian of the Middle Ages.]

h

[Hilton], ‘Y eut-il une crise générale de la féodalité’, Annales, Paris, 1951. [See n. 22 above.]

a

For example, the collective work [‘by members of the History School’] Finance and Trade under Edward III, [ed. George Unwin (Manchester, 1918)].

b

The Oxford University historian H. Trevor-Roper is now trying to refute from a reactionary perspective Professor Tawney’s important conclusions about the growth of capitalist relations in agriculture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [For references in this historiographical debate, see <https://www.revolvy.com/page/Storm-over-the-gentry> (accessed 3 Dec. 2018).]

c

For example, The Cambridge Ancient History, The Cambridge Medieval History, The Cambridge Modern History, The Cambridge Economic History, The Cambridge History of the British Empire, etc.

d

Only at the end of the nineteenth century did a group of historians interested in the problems of social structure and the laws of social development begin the systematic study of the conditions of life of the medieval peasantry. Their work is discussed by Academician E. A. Kosminskii in his work Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, [ed. Hilton].

e

This school, for example, is inclined to concentrate on phenomena in the realm of (monetary) circulation and exchange, preferring them to problems of production.

f

A critique of Toynbee’s latest work, The World and the West [(London, 1953)], by the author of this article, can be found in the English Marxist journal the Modern Quarterly, [new ser., viii] (1953).

g

Voprosy istorii (1951), no. 9 [that is, the ‘Letter from England’].