A pioneer of “history from below”, Hill used his immense knowledge of writing, poetry, diaries and pamphlets to give a Marxist explanation for the events of the mid 17th century. He argued that the period saw a “revolution”, which he compared to the events of 1789 and 1917.

Hill was a member of the Communist Party until 1957, and eight years after his resignation he became Master of Balliol, having been a Fellow there for more than 25 years. After he retired in 1978, he updated his previous works and brought out collections of his essays, but he also continued to write the sparkling prose that had brought him academic admirers - and opponents - for more than half a century.

John Edward Christopher Hill was born in York in 1912. His father, E. S. Hill, was a prosperous solicitor and a severe Methodist. His mother, in striking contrast, was a happy and charming woman. To her he owed much, including perhaps his own puckish humour and humanity. He showed devotion to both, despite their shocked reception of the communist sympathies he showed even in his schooldays. A puritanical upbringing and a reaction against it were, he half- .seriously claimed, a great asset in understanding the 17th century.

After a distinguished record at St Peter’s School, York, Hill went up to Balliol as Brackenbury Scholar in 1931. He had originally opted for Cambridge but the dynamic Kenneth Bell drove all the way to York to persuade him to choose Balliol. Hill won the Lothian Prize in 1932 (with an essay on the French Catholic circle of Port Royal) and the Elton Exhibition in 1933. There followed a brilliant first, a Goldsmith’s Senior Studentship, and a prize fellowship at All Souls. Astonishingly, even by his standards, these academic triumphs were matched on the sports field, where he scored the winning try in the year Balliol won the inter-college rugby cup.

He was greatly influenced by two leading Oxford figures of the time: Kenneth Bell and A. P. Lindsay, who was Master of Balliol from 1924 until 1949. Both had views that were far removed from his, but both rated humanity far higher than either doctrine or scholarship. The tutor who influenced him most, however, was Vivien Galbraith. After Hill had been inarticulate during his original interview for Oxford, Galbraith went to his room later that evening with another don and staged an argument to get him to talk. “What good thing ever came of the Church of England?” shouted Galbraith, at one point. “Swift?” said Hill, in a trembling voice. Hill later said: “They treated it as the most brilliant remark they had ever heard.”

Another of Hill’s tutors was Humphrey Sumner (later Warden of All Souls), an expert in the then neglected field of Russian history. It was Sumner who smoothed the path for Hill’s prolonged visit to the Soviet Union, from which he returned with fluent Russian and an approving but never wholly uncritical grasp of Soviet politics and society.

In 1936 Hill became an assistant lecturer at University College, Cardiff, and in 1938 he returned to Balliol as a Fellow and tutor. The Balliol life that was to continue until his retirement in 1978 soon had its only significant interruption, when, in 1940, he became a private in the Field Security Police, and then a second lieutenant in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. By 1943 he was a major in the Intelligence Corps, from which - despite his membership of the Communist Party - he was seconded to the Foreign Office.

He returned to Oxford to face the heavy tasks of the postwar years. The number of graduate and undergraduate students was swelled by the returning ex-servicemen, but two-thirds of the Balliol Senior Common Room had departed, among them the older history tutors. So from 1947 the formidable load of history teaching fell on Hill, A. B. Rodger and Richard Southern. This left little time for writing, but he derived great stimulation from teaching more mature ex-servicemen rather than undergraduates straight from school.

There were other reasons too why the books that made him famous were slow to come. Never a man for half-measures, he had - unlike most academic Marxists - become an avowed member of the Communist Party. His political discussions were conducted not only among dons and students but with working men and women. He wrote, not always under his own name, in a variety of left-wing publications, and his short monograph The English Revolution, 1640 (1955) became the standard Marxist interpretation of the Civil War. With Edmund Dell he edited The Good Old Cause (1949), literary and political extracts chosen to uphold the interpretation.

He often lectured for the Workers’ .Educational Association and the extra-mural movement, and to trade union students at Ruskin. But gradually his dogmatic allegiance to the Moscow line mellowed into the considered and lively humanism, albeit with a Marxist tinge, that shaped his major work.

In 1957, after the Hungarian revolution had been suppressed by Russian troops, and after a minority report calling for democratic reforms within the party had been rejected, he took the hard decision to resign from the Communist Party. He still believed firmly in economic forces and class conflicts as the most important historical forces, and in the goal of a socialist classless society; but he could not indefinitely ignore the feelings and the well-being or suffering of individuals.

Hill saw the ideals and aspirations of people in the 17th century as basically religious, and though his own faith was in humanity rather than in God, he came to put Puritanism at the centre of his work, the complex and paradoxical revolutionary force of its day. No other historian had equalled Hill’s ability to blend a deeply sympathetic understanding of the poor and unlearned with a seemingly limitless knowledge of intellectual and religious doctrine and strife. Those pragmatic politicians who have been puzzled to hear the Rev Dr Ian Paisley denounce the Pope as Anti-Christ could discover his 17th-century antecedents in Hill’s Riddell lectures, printed as Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (1971).