Rodney Howard Hilton FBA (17 November 1916 – 7 June 2002) was an English Marxist historian of the late medieval period and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

He acquired a first-class degree in modern history in 1938, was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford 1939-1940,[2] and took his DPhil in 1940, writing his dissertation on The Economic Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

[3] His communist allegiances had attracted the interest of British military intelligence and during his service, his superiors were tasked with monitoring and recording his movements.

[4] Returning to England, in 1946 Hilton co-founded the Communist Party Historians Group and was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Birmingham, where he remained until his retirement in 1982.

[5] Hilton married his second wife Gwyneth Joan Evans in 1951 (although his son Tim [1] suggests that Rodney and Margaret went on holiday to France when he was 11, which would have been in 1952), and together they had two children, Owen and Ceinwen.