Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Bond Men Made Free first published in 1973 marks the summit of Rodney Hilton’s career as a historian. Together with his book on the English peasantry published two years later it demonstrates his remarkable ability to identify the patterns and meaning of the past. He combined an interest in broad questions derived from the social sciences with a scrupulous concern for historical evidence. He wrote with great economy confining himself to the essentials of the argument but emphasized the human side by citing deftly chosen examples of individual people. He was born in 1916 and taught for the whole of his professional life at the University of Birmingham. He studied many aspects of medieval economy and society to which he brought a Marxist perspective as his distinctive contribution. His work was informed by ideas such as class conflict and the transition from feudalism to capitalism but his application of Marxism was not dogmatic and he tested the theories by empirical research. He had an international outlook and was strongly influenced in particular by French historians such as Marc Bloch and Georges Duby. Hilton was a significant figure among British historians and he helped to found the journal Past and Present. (LL)