David Henry Hill
The Society has been informed that our Fellow David Henry Hill died on 19 July 2011, less than a year after his marriage to his colleague and co-author, Margaret Worthington. Before his retirement, David was a member of the Extra-Mural Studies Department and the English Department at the University of Manchester, where, through his Anglo-Saxon Diploma and MA classes, he did much to popularise Anglo-Saxon studies.
He was elected a Fellow on 4 March 1982 shortly after publishing his Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (1981), which has gone into many subsequent editions. His other works include The Defence of Wessex: the Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon fortifications (1996), jointly edited with Alexander Rumble; Æthelbald and Offa, Two Eighth-Century Kings of Mercia (2005), jointly edited with Margaret Worthington, and Offa’s Dyke: history and guide (2003), written with Margaret Worthington and short-listed for the British Archaeological Awards Archaeological Book Award in 2004.
Our Fellow Gale Owen-Crocker said of her former colleague: ‘He was one of the great figures of our time in medieval archaeology, and a great personality too. Since retirement from the University he has remained very research active, and despite his appalling health problems — which he bore cheerfully for many years — his death was unexpected, though peaceful.’
The following obituary appeared in The Times on 28 August 2011:
‘David Hill was a distinguished archaeologist and one of a now fast-disappearing band of scholars who spent the best part of their working lives teaching, mentoring, training, inspiring and collaborating with members of the public who joined classes in search of a new interest in their lives, a new stimulus, new friends and new directions. His success can be measured by the number of his students who went on to take higher degrees, publish their own archaeological research, write books, engage in experimental archaeology and/or become regular participants at the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies conferences, which were sustained by their enthusiasm for over a quarter of a century.
‘Hill also made a major contribution to the study of Anglo-Saxon England, which was always his first love, through the remarkable and extraordinarily scholarly Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (1981), his long-running research project on Offa’s Dyke — where much of the fieldwork training for his Extra-Mural Certificate students occurred — his work on Anglo-Saxon and contemporary continental towns and trading places, his seminal study of the Burghal Hidage — a problematic text dating from early in the tenth century — and, particularly later in life, his insights into the processes and mechanics of early medieval agriculture and land use. His work was published in a series of articles, the monograph Offa’s Dyke: History and Guide, with Margaret Worthington (2003), and a string of edited volumes.
‘David Henry Hill was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1937, and came comparatively late to archaeology, as a mature student. He was brought up in Watchet, Somerset, and on leaving school became a surveyor’s apprentice with Minehead Urban District Council. From there he moved to a post with Gloucestershire County Council. Hill never felt fulfilled in his career as a local government surveyor and eventually gained a place at teacher training college in Exeter, going on to teach history in Hemel Hempstead. But it was his decision to join the Royal Archaeological Society that began the process that changed his life, for the archaeologist Martin Biddle discovered that he had surveying skills and recruited him to work on his Winchester excavations.
‘Once there, the love affair with Anglo-Saxon archaeology which was to dominate the rest of his life, began. Fired by the experience, he went to Southampton University to take his doctorate on Anglo-Saxon fortified towns (“Burhs”), and with that under his belt he gained the new post of staff tutor in archaeology in the University of Manchester’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies. There he rapidly developed a wide range of archaeological courses, generating a rich menu of lecture courses, day schools, field visits and the three-year certificate programmes, managing a team of tutors but concentrating himself on the extraordinarily popular “Methods in Archaeology” certificate programme.
‘In the 1970s, archaeology began to capture the public imagination and a steady stream of people passed through his programmes. It was the lack of Anglo-Saxon archaeology in the immediate vicinity that encouraged Hill to set up the Offa’s Dyke project, which ran entirely with student and volunteer participants refining their archaeological skills through excavation and survey on Britain’s largest linear monument, which had been badly neglected to that point.
‘With the closure of the University of Manchester’s extra-mural education department in the 1990s following funding cuts, Hill moved to the Department of English, where other Anglo-Saxonists were concentrated, and found a new role teaching undergraduate students. His two daughters often joined him on digs but he was devastated when his wife Ann died of cancer in 2003 after forty years of marriage. By this time he had diabetes which first took its toll on his eyesight and, increasingly, his mobility. He was not happy living alone, but needed to be close to his university colleagues so that he could continue his research and find some purpose, but was ever more dependent on friends and former students to sustain him and give him mobility.
‘His greatest aide was Margaret Worthington, whom he had first met in the 1970s when training as a teacher in Manchester. She took the Certificate in Methods in Archaeology and later worked alongside him as research assistant, tutor, co-author and friend. In 2010, their close collaboration and friendship led to marriage. They moved to Margaret’s home near Oswestry, in the heart of the Offa’s Dyke landscape of which they had done so much to further knowledge. His health seemed to improve and his death, four days after a birthday tea at Tatton Park, was unexpected, despite his long struggle with diabetes. He will be remembered fondly by many people, whose lives he enriched and whose minds he engaged and his work will live on. He is survived by Margaret Worthington and by his two daughters from his first marriage.’
Fellow Linda Hall adds a personal reminiscence: ‘I was surprised and saddened to read of the death of David Hill. He was indeed an unforgettable character and will be sadly missed. He was one of the first people I got to know as a new archaeology undergraduate at Southampton in 1970 — indeed, you could hardly miss him, with his shock of curly hair, his glasses and his duffel coat (I seem to remember several of us sporting these useful items of clothing, blessed with large pockets to hold pens, notebooks, tape measures, etc, and with thick hoods to keep out the cold and rain!). We were indeed introduced to the Burghal Hidage from day one, and I still have a signed copy of one of the reports on Saxon Southampton which David gave me as thanks for translating a small portion of Latin which, inevitably, related to the Burghal Hidage! He was also hugely memorable for walking round for a whole term, if not longer, with one of his glasses badly cracked as he couldn’t be bothered to go and get them repaired! A great character, who imparted his love of the subject to everyone he met.’