The following year, he volunteered to serve in the Northumberland Fusiliers, rejoining them during the First World War, which ultimately led to him being forced to leave the Society of Friends.

Retirement lasted less than a week, however, for Streeter (now returned to his duties) died in a plane crash, and Hodgkin was asked to take on the role permanently.

As a teacher, Hodgkin was remembered by a student for being "suggestive rather than purely instructive", offering signposts for "the roads and tracks" but "leav[ing] his pupils to explore for themselves".

[8] Hodgkin would pray for the school to burn down, and one year his prayers were answered, in a fashion, when an outbreak of scarlet fever led to all the boys being sent home.

[8] The situation improved slightly when Hodgkin's brother George, three and a half years his junior, entered Seabank, and (as his sister wrote), "Robin became resigned".

[20][21] In 1894, meanwhile, Hodgkin and his sisters Lily and Ellen were taken by their father to Italy and Austria, where they spent time in Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, and Vienna.

[24] In Hodgkin's first year at Bamburgh, his father became acquainted with Arthur Smith, a teacher at Balliol College at the University of Oxford who had his holiday home nearby.

[29][note 2] His best friend was Richard Denman, and at one point, along with two others, they worked their way on a cargo steamer to Saint Petersburg before travelling along the Volga and exploring the Caucasus, stopping in Tiflis in Georgia, and eventually leaving for home from Odesa in Ukraine.

[32] Hodgkin and another friend, Kenneth Swan, were part of the short-lived "Romance Society" at Balliol, which met once a fortnight to hear and discuss short stories written by its members; they also played hockey and tennis, and enjoyed Sunday teas at the home of the Smiths.

[33] In 1899, Hodgkin was proxime, or runner-up, for the Stanhope essay prize, behind Robert Rait, and in Trinity term obtained first-class honours in the Final School of Modern History.

[39] His father also supported the war, rankling other Quakers, and causing John Wilhelm Rowntree to write to Rufus Jones in indignation, saying "[y]ou would hardly believe your eyes if you came over here.

[41] After graduating, Hodgkin competed unsuccessfully for various prize fellowships, and was considering a business career when, in 1900, Queen's College, Oxford, offered him a lectureship in modern history.

[45] After Britain declared war in August 1914, Hodgkin began volunteering at a YMCA embarkation camp in the New Forest; over Michaelmas term, he watched the college population gradually dwindle as its members were accepted for service, while awaiting the result of his own application to rejoin the Northumberland Fusiliers.

[51] Hodgkin's health, meanwhile, never particularly robust, also became more of an issue, with frequent colds and flu during the winters, and recurring migraines that would last for several days.

[52] For years, Hodgkin spent vacations working on a history of Anglo-Saxon England; his initial idea had been to write a life of Alfred the Great for the Heroes of the Nations series, but it quickly blossomed into something larger.

[4][5] Owing in large part to the sabbatical, Hodgkin finally finished A History of the Anglo-Saxons, his first major work, in 1933;[note 4] the following two years were spent refining it and collecting illustrations, leading to the book's publication in the spring of 1935.

[75][27][73][76] The new post interrupted plans for a second volume of A History of the Anglo-Saxons, which contemporaries such as F. M. Powicke and V. J. K. Brook[77][78] either lamented or justified by Hodgkin's contributions as provost.

[81] It also added the duties of the Ilmington Home Guard, with Hodgkin doing drills and spending some nights in makeshift dugouts in the hills, watching for Germans.

[84] First, he began the reconstruction of the library, which, the fellow Ughtred Shuttleworth Haslam-Jones wrote,[85][86] was "one of the finest buildings in Oxford" once "restored to its former glory".

[84] Haslam-Jones termed Hodgkin a "wise ruler" in his oversight of the project, as of the university, setting general principles and delegating authority, while investing himself neither too much nor too little in the details.

[90] Hodgkin returned to Crab Mill in retirement, spending time with his family, and completing his book on the history of Queen's College.

[27][95] The engagement was facilitated by Hodgkin's sister Violet, who invited the unsuspecting Smith, summering at the nearby family house, to Barmoor.

[108][109][110] The death particularly affected both Robert and Edward Hodgkin; for the former, wrote his wife, "I think there was never a time in the years that followed when the joy of her lovely life and the sorrow of her loss were not as present to him as all the happiness that came to him from his two sons and from his grandchildren.

[120] Hodgkin lost sight in one eye in November 1943, which he discovered upon waking; his wife attributed this, and other health ailments, to his frequent bicycling when wartime petrol rationing prevented the use of a car.

[123][124][122][125] T. D. Kendrick praised Hodgkin's "enviable skill in writing", and how the "volumes tell their tale with such clarity, such vigour, and such humour that the reader finds himself anxious to compliment him on the sustained interest of this very long book before paying tribute to the soundness of the author's judgement and the vast trustworthy knowledge that he possesses of all aspects of his subject".

[126] Though it was intended for the more general reader,[127] Francis Peabody Magoun wrote that it "becomes overnight the first history to put in the hands of the serious beginning student of any aspect of English life before the death of Alfred".

[122] This balance was criticised by one reviewer, however, who suggested that the book created "a real danger" that it would be used by students as "a heaven-sent labour-saving device", without necessarily doing "full justice to the theories and opinions which he summarises and discusses".

[128][129] Kemp Malone said Hodgkin "writes a somewhat pedestrian but a readable prose", but added "[a]ll in all, his is by far the best general work that we have on the earliest centuries of English culture.

[137] The book, wrote one reviewer, told "every thing that is of real significance for the college, from the issue of the Founder's cumbrous statutes to some considerations of the effects of the war of 1939–1945 on the collegiate ideal".

[138] Another reviewer wrote that Hodgkin linked "skilfully, and always in close relationship to national history, the varying fortunes of the university and the college and tells of the great men, from John Wyclif to Oliver Franks, whom it has produced or harboured.