Kmflett's Blog

Historian Christopher Hill, an Ashes defeat & The Experience of Defeat

England have lost the latest series of Ashes cricket Tests against Australia 4-1.

Australia had a weakened side throughout but England still failed badly on the pitch but also on occasion off it as well.

Christopher Hill (1912-2003) the Marxist historian of the English Civil War and after, and Master of Balliol College Oxford aspired in his youth to be a first class cricketer. Not for England but for the County of his birth Yorkshire which he saw as a higher honour.

He wrote a book The Experience of Defeat about what happened to those who had supported Cromwell and the Commonwealth after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The defeat was considerably more significant than losing a series of cricket matches but there are some broad parallels..

The restoration saw numbers of those who had signed the death warrant for Charles 1st- regicides- executed. Cromwell who had died in 1858 was dug up and executed in his absence as it were. Censorship of radical ideas was reinstated and those who held such ideas were persecuted.

Hill notes:

we know something of the practical consequences of defeat. After 1660 nearly one in five of the beneficed ministers lost their livings, without even the meagre compensation which the ejected of the 1640s and 1650s had received. Lay dissenters had to endure nearly thirty years (until 1688 KF) of sporadic but often very damaging persecution

Hill was interested in the radicals that had supported the revolution and how they came to terms with events after 1660, in particular the poet and radical activist and thinker Milton.

Even so it’s a reminder that defeats, often very serious ones, happen, but ideas and radical organisation survives. Whether that will be true of Bazball is another matter