Robert Howard Hodgkin

Despite his Quaker roots, Hodgkin supported the Second Boer War, volunteering as a lieutenant with the 1st V.B. Northumberland Fusiliers from 1900 to 1906.[4][37][38] That year, he wrote to the Quaker magazine The Friend, saying many members of the movement—known as the Society of Friends—shared his views but hid behind the Quakers' pacifist stance, "bringing on the Society the shadow of hypocrisy".[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. Thos. Hodgkin's son a Lieutenant, though still a nominal Quaker, heads a procession to burn Kruger in effigy, T. Hodgkin makes the speech and Lily [Lucy?] Hodgkin lights the faggots ... the spirit of war, stalks the land naked, unashamed & our leading Quaker gives his benediction!"[40] Not all agreed; Caroline Stephen wrote to Robert Hodgkin's mother that there was "much of nobleness ... much that appeals to all one's best feelings" in what he had done.[9] Hodgkin was ultimately forced to leave the Society of Friends in 1903 because of his military service in the Second Boer War.[4][34] The severance was "a blow to him and to all of us", his sister later wrote, since he had been "a loyal if not an enthusiastic Friend" since his time at Leighton Park.[41]

Before the First World War, Hodgkin had a small number of students, and would socialise with them over meals, tennis, and walks on Shotover.[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.[46] Accepted on 11 December and commissioned a temporary captain in the Seventh Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers,[47] he was posted to the battalion headquarters in Alnwick.[46] Because Hodgkin was deemed medically unfit for foreign service, his four years of service were primarily spent in coastal defence,[34] split nearly equally between Northumberland (1915), Herne Bay in Kent (1916–1917), and (from 1917 to 1919) the War Office in London,[37][48] where he served in the General Staff for Operations.[4] Other than the first year, he was able to spend the time with his family.[46] Following the war, Hodgkin was a staunch supporter of the League of Nations Union.[49]

Front Quad at The Queen's College, Oxford

Demobilised in January 1919, Hodgkin returned with his family to Oxford, where he found substantially more students and consequentially more demands on his time.[50] Norman Sykes, who joined Queen's as a student in 1920, recalled that "[t]he protracted tenure of the Provostship by Magrath meant the disappearance of hospitality from the Provost's lodgings"; he looked instead to Hodgkin for "generous and hospitable entertainment".[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.[53] In October 1927, a month after the death of his daughter, he began a sabbatical year with time spent at the British Museum and at libraries and museums in Germany and Denmark.[53][note 3] The sabbatical "spared the ordeal", his wife later wrote, "of living for that first year of our loss in an empty house".[53] Upon his return, in 1928 Hodgkin was appointed university lecturer in modern history, a post he held until 1934.[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.[56][57]

From 1935 to 1936, Hodgkin took a second sabbatical.[58] Most of the time was spent in a cottage in Broad Campden, although two spring months were spent in Palestine, where his eldest son was working, and his second son visiting during a break between graduation and work.[59] Among others, Hodgkin met Arthur Grenfell Wauchope and George Antonius.[60] Once returned to Queen's College following the 1936 summer vacation, Hodgkin spent two terms as pro-provost,[note 5] filling in for an ill B. H. Streeter.[62][note 6] Hodgkin's diligence and success in the role came as a surprise to some of his colleagues, who had understood him to prefer the human side of college work to the business side; his disapproval of those who were distracted during meetings caused some comparisons to poachers turned gamekeepers.[65] In February 1937, Hodgkin was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries,[66][note 7] and in April he stepped down from the provostship upon Streeter's return.[68]

Hodgkin had spent around two years looking for a retirement home; his wife later wrote "the country within a forty mile radius of Oxford is dotted with houses that we looked over, and in several cases came near to buying".[69] During his 1935–1936 sabbatical he received a notice in the morning post that an Ilmington house, Crab Mill,[70] would be auctioned "unless previously disposed of", and upon looking it over Hodgkin purchased it outright, along with eleven surrounding houses and cottages, for some £11,250 (equivalent to £693,000 in 2019).[69][71] Hodgkin retired around August 1937 (effective 29 September), moving to Crab Mill.[72][73]

Shortly before Hodgkin's retirement was set to go into effect, Streeter died in a plane crash.[63] The fellows of the college had only three weeks to pick a successor.[68] Hodgkin was seen as a logical choice as the senior official fellow at the time, and had demonstrated his abilities when filling in the previous year.[74] Although he supported electing Oliver Franks, Hodgkin let colleagues know that he would be unable to refuse if chosen.[73] Hodgkin was unofficially selected at a meeting on 22 September, his retirement went into effect on the 29th, and he was officially elected provost on 5 October; his six days spent as an ordinary fellow set a record for brevity, Crab Mill went from retirement home to weekend retreat, and the Hodgkins moved into the provost's lodgings.[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.[79]

Only the first two of Hodgkin's nine years as provost were not during the Second World War, and even then, the first two years were spent under its encroaching shadow.[80] Much of the first two years was spent socialising, with guests, and in committees.[81][note 8] He also began collecting material for a work on the history of the college.[81] Britain's declaration of war on Germany created a dual life for the college, with students conscripted and buildings requisitioned.[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.[81] Hodgkin also joined the Hebdomadal Council during the war years.[83] The college celebrated the six-hundredth anniversary of its founding in 1940, with more muted celebrations than had first been planned.[84][4][5]

Hodgkin's time as provost was remembered for two major works, and for his dedication to the college.[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.[84] Hodgkin's second major work was his undertaking of a written history of the college, finished in retirement.[84] Especially during the war years, too, when the college was missing much of its population, Hodgkin—who probably saw his office as a trusteeship—was credited with preserving the continuity and traditions of the college.[87]

Hodgkin retired for the second time in 1946, and was named an honorary fellow.[5] He was 68 at the time and could have held the post for another two years, but was at least partially spurred on to retire by the desire to have Franks replace him.[88] "The College has never had a more devoted or self-effacing Head", wrote Brook, "[a]nd even at the end, he timed his resignation to suit what he thought were the interests of the College."[89] Hodgkin was disappointed when Franks left only two years later to take up the post of British ambassador to the United States.[90]

Hodgkin returned to Crab Mill in retirement, spending time with his family, and completing his book on the history of Queen's College.[90] The book came "into being more rapidly that his Anglo-Saxons", wrote Godfrey Elton, "partly perhaps because he had shed his early inhibitions, but chiefly no doubt because, even more than the Anglo-Saxons, it was a labour of love".[55] It was in press in the spring of 1949, when Hodgkin received news that the sole manuscript had been destroyed in a fire at the printers.[91] A week later, Hodgkin—who had declared "I can never re-write it" but also been offered help by a former pupil to do so—burst into tears upon finding out that the book had been set up in type before the fire, and had thus survived.[92] He also continued to have thoughts of writing a second volume of A History of the Anglo-Saxons and, more so, a family history, although he started neither.[93]

Front cover of the first volume

A History of the Anglo-Saxons was first published in 1935.[57] The two-volume work traced the Anglo-Saxons from their first mentions to the death of Alfred the Great in 899.[122] Noting Hodgkin's father, Charles Wendell David wrote that "[b]eing of the present generation, [Robert Hodgkin's] work necessarily rests more largely on the researches of specialists and is correspondingly more solidly based, but it still has the sweep and roominess and charm with which the elder Hodgkin has made his readers familiar."[123] Reviewers praised Hodgkin's use of archaeological and philological developments, as well as studies of aerial photography and toponymy.[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."[130] According to another reviewer, "Hodgkin deals fearlessly—it might be said ruthlessly—with much of the interpretation of historians treating of this period, who wrote so late as two generations ago."[131]

A second edition, predominantly a corrected version of the first,[132] followed in 1939.[133] Reginald Ralph Darlington wrote that "the appearance of a second edition within four years bears witness to its wide appeal",[134] and Kendrick wrote that the work "is now to be regarded as one of the established great books of our age".[135] A year after Hodgkin's 1951 death, a third edition was published.[136] It was little changed, except for a 48-page appendix on the Sutton Hoo ship-burial authored by Rupert Bruce-Mitford, the assistant keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities of the British Museum.[132] The appendix, Magoun wrote, "is in effect a second interim report which summarizes material scattered through the literature of the intervening years" since Bruce-Mitford's 1946 publication of a report on the find.[132]

Hodgkin's second book, Six Centuries of an Oxford College: A History of the Queen's College, 1340–1940, was published in 1949.[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. It is not every college which can boast of two cardinals, one of whom was poisoned by his own chaplain!"[139] According to the first reviewer, the work included "pleasant anecdotes, some shrewd personal judgements and a slight air of nostalgia in the later chapters".[140]