RODNEY HILTON, MARXISM AND THE TRANSITION FROM FEUDALISM TO CAPITALISM*

S. R. EPSTEIN in C. Dyer, P. Coss, C. Wickham eds. 
Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages 400-1600, 
Cambridge UP 2006
A founding member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, of the journal Past and
Present, and of a distinctive and distinguished School of History at the University of
Birmingham, Rodney Hilton was among the most notable medieval historians of the latter
half of the twentieth century. He was also the most influential of a small number of Marxist
medievalists in Britain and Continental Europe who practised their craft before the
renaissance of Marxist and left-wing history after 1968. Surprisingly, therefore, his work’s
historiographical and theoretical significance has not attracted much attention.1
Although Hilton was, first and foremost, a ‘historian’s historian’, and made his most
lasting contributions to the fields of English social, agrarian, and urban history, his
engagement with Marxist historical debates cannot be lightly dismissed.2
 Hilton’s Marxism, a central feature of his self-understanding as a historian, reflects both strengths and weaknesses of British Marxist historiography in its heyday, and his interpretation of a locus classicus of Marxist debate, the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production, still carries
considerable weight among like-minded historians.