No history faculty can ignore its past. In very recent years the deaths of a number of outstanding former lights of Oxford History have provided a reminder of how distinguished the Faculty appeared in the middle and later twentieth century. We include tributes to two of the most recent losses.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003)

Hugh Trevor-Roper was the public face of the History Faculty from 1957 to 1980. This role came automatically after his appointment by Harold Macmillan as Regius Professor. But it was also earned by a willingness to write in daily, weekly, and week-end journals, to talk on the Third Programme of the BBC, and to appear on the television. He was not alone in this versatility. He had had competitors for the Regius Chair and continued to be challenged for the intellectual leadership of the Faculty. Colleagues wooed and were wooed by the media. Hugh's readiness to accept these invitations occasionally tempted him too far. Just as his bravado on the hunting field had led to a long spell in a hospital bed, so too his foolhardiness in the Grub Street tilt-yard allowed him to be worsted. However, rebuffs seldom deterred him for long.

The ease with which Hugh linked a sometimes introverted Oxford to other worlds told of the numerous connections which he had built up, with system and determination, thanks to contemporaries and pupils at Christ Church and in Intelligence during the Second World War. It also attested to his conviction that the past should be linked with and had to be explained to the present. Fame and a measure of fortune had come early with his reconstruction of Hitler's last days. The book (Hitler's Last Days published in 1947), much more than his earlier and more substantial study of Charles I's primate, William Laud (appearing in 1940), brought him public celebrity. Hitler, not Laud, prefigured the literary sprightliness which, at its best, was inimitable. Together the two books presaged historical interests which ranged across many centuries, but not across continents beyond Europe.

The virtuosity, early successes and incurable combativeness upset some. Hugh did nothing to mollify critics. He sponsored Harold Macmillan for Chancellor of the University against the favourite of bien pensant grandees, and so triggered a contest in striking contrast to the stultifying dullness of the recent one. The broadsheet newspapers published and constantly updated lists of the declared supporters of the two contestants in a way reminiscent of eighteenth-century polls conducted over many days. As Hugh put it, the choice lay between the Prime Minister of England and 'the chairman of Lloyds Bank' (Lord Franks). Perhaps it took more courage on the part of Macmillan to risk a humiliating defeat than for Hugh to organize the campaign.

Those out of sympathy with the cause and the style of these public forays might dismiss them as either mischievous or self-aggrandizing. For the Faculty, benefits surpassed any occasional embarrassments. Hugh ensured that the curriculum introduced undergraduates to the broad sweep and achievements of previous ages. Thanks to his journalism and broadcasts, not just the controversies over the motives and actions of Hitler and Albert Speer, but the insights of scholars as various as Braudel, Bataillon, Frances Yates, and Charles Webster were publicized. His readership reached far beyond Oxford, but he never shirked the chores of the Faculty, then housed in cobbled Merton Street. Primed by his wife (a memorable presence in musical and artistic society), he had the Indian Institute into which the Faculty decamped painted in striking Pompeian red (which survives). With glee he reported that the University had decreed that in future only its taste police, not the Faculty, should decide such details.

In intellectual matters he was equally innovative. Through his graduate seminar (briefly run in partnership with Keith Thomas), he introduced Oxford to the work of continental scholars little known in England. Never insular, he was alert to the currents which might rejuvenate the subject, and, such was his zest for history, he wanted others to share what excited him. Herein lay one of his most positive contributions which, especially for his graduate students, made him so stimulating.

As a lecturer he could appear mannered. Talks were read verbatim from a hand-written text, on to which various additions - also in long hand - were pinned. The fountain pen might be wielded during the talk, in order to amend punctuation or improve a phrase. These habits, perhaps a type of theatre, did not endear him to all. When lecturing on early Stuart politics to undergraduates in the Schools, he paused and asked rhetorically, 'Who now remembers any of James I's or Charles I's Lord Treasurers?' An undergraduate beside me (in 1964), correctly gowned as Hugh insisted, rose involuntarily and answered, 'Cranfield'. Hugh was discomposed. The set-piece, preferably written and much polished, was his forte.

He revelled in the power which reposed in him as Regius. There were few appointments in which he did not interest himself. His determination to right what he believed were ancient injustices, such as ensuring Richard Cobb's election to the chair which Namier had been denied, far outweighed his occasional misjudgements. Unlike his equivalents at Cambridge, he never founded a school. Nor did he seek to impose his interpretations on his pupils: that pluralism which he detected and admired in Erasmus or the devotees of Lord Falkland at Great Tew during the 1630s, he practised himself. He offered an example of prodigious but lightly-worn learning, an understanding of the need to caress, engage and excite readers, an unfailing curiosity, and a determination that knowledge and ideas were to be shared in print not reserved for a few initiates.

He attracted graduate pupils throughout the 1960s and 1970s (of whom I had the good fortune to be one). Readily available (if not in Scotland or on a well-paid lecture tour in the States), he read quickly and carefully whatever one had written. He discussed drafts at length, and with astringent but always positive comments. Partly because his social and recreational circuits had long encompassed Scotland and Ireland (hunting, he told me, went on later in the year in the then Free State than in Britain), he was enthusiastic about investigating the histories of those places, long before the fad of the new British history. As a one-time undergraduate tutor, even when he became unquestionably a grandee, he retained an essential egalitarianism towards pupils willing to work, question and laugh. Above all, he continued to be fascinated by the past. Like Gibbon (a potent model), he delighted in the glittering surface of events and the quirks of individuals, without ever forgetting the subterranean structures. Many of his arguments, over the rise or decline of the seventeenth-century gentry, provoked laborious research to modify and even refute them. Yet, his essays are not doomed to survive only as historiographical curiosities. They soar and swoop with often dizzying virtuosity sustained by Hugh's pen as surely as magnificent birds ride on thermals. To sample this mastery, which will ensure that he is read as long as the English language is known, turn to any of his collected essays.

Toby Barnard, Hertford College

Christopher Hill

Christopher Hill (1912–2003)

Christopher Hill, history tutor of Balliol from 1938 and Master from 1965 to 1978, died on 24 February 2003 at the age of 91. Something of a controversial figure, as a former member of the Communist Party who became a reforming (though far from revolutionary) head of a college, he was without question a major historian, often penetrating, always provocative. His influence came partly through the students he taught and supervised, partly through the journal Past and Present which he helped to found and continued for decades to shape, but most of all through his publications. His books and essays drew on an unrivalled knowledge of the printed literature of early modern England (he had less time for manuscripts), and his arguments had a force and clarity which left no one in any doubt about the case he was making. It always retained its Marxist base. There was a revolution in the seventeenth century, and it had vitally important social dimensions. But Hill's definition of it deepened and mellowed over time, coming to embrace more actors and more aspects.

Beginning with The Economic Problems of the Church from Whitgift to the Long Parliament (1956), arguably his most scholarly work, and culminating in The World Turned Upside Down (1972), perhaps the most innovative and exciting, a remarkable cluster of books showed previously unsuspected connections between religious, intellectual, social and political history. Reading Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964) or The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965) for the first time, it was possible to wonder whether the standard-bearers of modernization and enlightenment did not line up just a little too neatly on only one side; but there was no denying - and it is easy now to forget - how dramatically these works broadened the historical agenda. Social structure, local government, the family, historiography, science and imaginative literature all had their part in the revolution, and all demanded the kind of close attention which a generation of research has since given to them. The flow of books and articles continued long after his retirement, though with rapidly diminishing impact as various kinds of revisionist tide took hold. Yet he had altered the historical landscape for good; seventeenth-century England could never look quite the same again.

He was not a man it was easy to know well. There was an inscrutability about him, partly attributable to shyness, partly to defence strategies which had clearly been well practised over the years. In tutorials he was by all accounts often silent, curled up in his chair, achieving his effects by grunts and the occasional explosively pointed question. His Monday-evening parties for historians were famously open occasions, however, and he organised one of the first graduate seminars in the Faculty, where the students did the talking, about whatever they happened to be working on. He was always ready to listen, rarely dismissive of new arguments and approaches, equally rarely totally convinced - which made the triumph seem all the greater when he was. Those of us who learnt our trade in the Oxford History Faculty of the 1960s were fortunate to find Christopher Hill one of its pillars in Balliol, while Hugh Trevor-Roper was another, across the High, both of them committed to graduate studies, both moving research on the seventeenth century in new and exciting - and not always divergent - directions.

Paul Slack, Linacre College