Trevor-Roper inverted this theory, arguing that in fact the Civil War was caused in part by court gentry who had fallen on bad times.
Hexter's contribution, puckishly titled "The Storm over the Gentry" and originally published in a popular magazine, contends that both theses are undermined by their authors' social determinism which causes them to overlook the ordinary business of the House of Commons.
Hexter maintained that the overlooked group, the rural magnates, the wealthier of the country gentry, wielded the most influence in the House of Commons and had brought no real interest in revolution.
Hexter in 1978 wrote a bitter historiographical review in which he attacked younger scholars for reducing the analysis of the Civil War to an essentially amoral struggle for power (socio-economic for the Marxists; religious, political and fiscal for the revisionists), which he argued was too dismissive of the intrinsic moral strength of Parliament's position.
He thus declared his preference for the 19th-century narrative by Samuel Rawson Gardiner over the new interpretation, and, true to form, even adopted an exaggerated Whig-style argument: that one should recognize and accept the principles of the Parliamentary rebels because these ideas about freedom were the very foundation for our modern sense of political liberty.
Another famous Hexterian intervention in historiography is his article "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien", which can be seen as a more appreciative, temperate, and intellectually sophisticated antecedent to Hexter's attack on Hill.
Here, Hexter dissected Braudel's vast "geohistory", La Mediteranée, marvelling at the organization of the Annales School but pointing out the ironic tensions between the Annales' rigorous, collaborative, scientific institutional ethos and its leader's passionate, highly personal, often factually inaccurate or poorly sourced book (for which much of the intellectual labor was carried out from memory while Braudel was in a prisoner-of-war camp).