Ronald Edmund Hutton (born 19 December 1953) is an Indian-born English historian specialising in early modern Britain, British calendar customs, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism. A professor at the University of Bristol and Gresham College, Hutton has written over a dozen books and often appears on British television and radio.
Born in Ootacamund, India, Hutton returned to England as a child, where he attended school in Ilford. Interested in archaeology, he volunteered on various excavations. He studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge and then took a DPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford, before securing a position at the University of Bristol in 1981. Specialising in early modern Britain, he wrote four books on the subject: The Royalist War Effort (1981), The Restoration (1985), Charles the Second (1989), and The British Republic (1990). He followed these with three books on Britain's pre-Christian religions and calendar customs: The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991), The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994), and The Stations of the Sun (1996). These were followed by The Triumph of the Moon (1999), an examination of Wicca's history which would receive praise as a seminal text in Pagan studies.
After Shamans (2001), which considered Western perceptions of Siberian shamanism, Hutton focused on the role of the druids in the British imagination, producing two books, The Druids (2007) and Blood and Mistletoe (2009). Revising his earlier approach to pre-Christian religion with Pagan Britain (2013), he then addressed witchcraft for The Witch (2017) before beginning work on a three-volume biography of Oliver Cromwell (2021–24). In addition to appearing in various television documentaries, he fronted his own series, Professor Hutton's Curiosities, in 2013. After 2009 he also became a commissioner and then a trustee of English Heritage, a chair of the organisation's blue plaque committee, and academic advisor for their development of the Stonehenge visitor centre. In 2022 he became Gresham Professor of Divinity.
Hutton's work has brought recognition from a range of institutions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Society of Antiquaries of London, Learned Society of Wales and the British Academy, and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He has also become a popular figure in the British Pagan community and has received honours from the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids.
Biography
Early life: 1953–1980
Hutton was born on 19 December 1953 in Ootacamund, India. His father was British, his mother Russian. Hutton's father died when Hutton was still an infant, leading his mother to move them to Britain, where they settled into a council flat in eastern England. There, Hutton attended Ilford County High School, further developing his knowledge of history through television documentaries and books from a local library.
Interested in archaeology, Hutton joined the committee of a local archaeological group and from 1965 to 1976 took part in excavations, including at Pilsdon Pen hill fort, Ascott-under-Wychwood long barrow, Hen Domen castle and a temple on Malta. Between 1966 and 1969 he visited every surviving prehistoric chambered tomb in England and Wales, writing a guide to them for himself and his friends. In 1967, he also traveled to Canewdon, Essex to talk with locals who remembered the reputed cunning man George Pickingill.
As a teenager, Hutton was involved with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, attending folk clubs and free festivals. Hutton's mother had been Pagan and in this period he encountered other Pagans, joining Pagan rituals held in Epping Forest between 1968 and 1969. Through this interest, he met Alex Sanders, the head of the Alexandrian Wiccan tradition. He has noted that at the time, he believed in the witch-cult theory that was used by many Wiccans to connect their religion to the pre-Christian past. Supporting that theory, in 1973 he argued for the veracity of Charles Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches against the historian Norman Cohn but, as Hutton related, "was floored by him". This encouraged Hutton to later read more of the new research emerging regarding the early modern witch trials. Hutton was also politically active in the anti-racist movement, in 1978 being badly injured by Neo-Nazis for his involvement with the Anti-Nazi League.
Despite his love of archaeology, Hutton decided to study history at university, believing that he had "probably more aptitude" for it. He won a scholarship to study at Pembroke College, Cambridge. There, he continued his interest in archaeology alongside history, in 1975 taking a course run by the university's archaeologist Glyn Daniel, an expert on the Neolithic. While Hutton was a student, his mother died. After completing his undergraduate degree at Cambridge, he moved to the University of Oxford, where he completed his DPhil on the English Civil War at St John's College, Oxford in 1980.
Bristol University and first publications: 1981–1990
After a brief fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, Hutton secured a job at the University of Bristol in 1981. That year, he published his first book, The Royalist War Effort 1642–1646, which was adapted from his DPhil thesis and focused on how King Charles I raised support from Wales and the West Midlands during the Civil War. It was reviewed by Ian Roy in History Today. Also in 1981, Hutton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Hutton followed with another book on 17th-century Britain, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667, published in 1985. C. John Somerville reviewed it for the Church History journal, deeming it "a work of great energy in research, sober judgement, and readable presentation." In The Historian, Michael J. Galgano thought Hutton's book "a valuable corrective to the pioneering works" of Godfrey Davies and David Ogg and believed that it would "remain the standard for some time".
In 1988, Bristol University promoted Hutton to the position of reader. The following year he brought out Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland and Ireland. Lois G. Schwoerer reviewed it for The American Historical Review, noting that Hutton was "the first professional historian to write a critical full-length biography of the king" and describing the result as "excellent"; she thought it was "notably readable" and rooted in "exemplary research". In The Historian, Barrett L. Beer commented that Hutton's "scholarship is meticulous" and that he had produced an "evenhanded and convincing" portrayal of Charles II, although cautioned that the book, while clearly written, was too complicated for most undergraduates.
Continuing his focus on early modern history, in 1990 Hutton published The British Republic 1649–1660, a short book on the Commonwealth period. In the History journal, historian Ivan Roots characterised the work as being "stuffed with incisive comments, many expressing fresh insights." Glyn Parry, writing in Parergon, praised "Hutton's trademark ability to weave a broad range of recent scholarship into a compelling historical tapestry" but was concerned that many recent academic publications, although utilised, had not been cited directly.
Hutton's interest in early modern Britain extended from his academic research and led to an involvement with The Sealed Knot reenactment group. Interested in public outreach, he also began appearing in the media, initially through local and then national radio and subsequently, from the mid-1980s, through television. Hutton's interest in supernatural beliefs also developed; while traveling in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, he was able to speak with people who had memories of shamanic traditions. In the late 1980s, Hutton began to read upon systematically on the history of the early modern witch trials, material he later drew upon in publications during the 2010s.
Shift towards pre-Christian religion and calendar customs: 1991–1998
In 1991, Hutton published The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, a synthesis of known information about pre-Christian religions in Britain and Ireland. Later scholars noted that the book played an important role in raising public awareness regarding how, since the 1970s, historians and folklorists had grown increasingly sceptical of the idea that recorded folklore from recent centuries represented pre-Christian survivals. The book was well received by archaeologists and in 1994 Hutton was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Hutton's book attracted the interest of many Pagans. On the basis of it, Tim Sebastion, Chief of the Secular Order of Druids, invited Hutton to speak at a conference in Avebury. There, Hutton befriended various Pagan Druids, including Philip Carr-Gomm and Emma Restall Orr. In the 1990s, the Council of British Druid Orders granted Hutton honorary life membership. Hutton was also a friend of the prominent Wiccan Doreen Valiente and was one of the few individuals invited to her funeral in 1999. Certain other Pagans proved more critical of Hutton's book, including Goddess movement feminists Asphodel Long and Max Dashu, who charged Hutton with failing to take into account their movement's beliefs about ancient goddess worship; Hutton later related that Long subsequently "recognised that she had misunderstood me" and the two became friends.
Hutton followed with two books on British calendar customs, both published by Oxford University Press: The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (1994) and The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996). In these works he criticised commonly held attitudes, such as the idea of Merry England and the idea that folk customs were static and unchanging over the centuries. These books proved popular among "more intellectual sectors of the Pagan milieu." In 1996, Hutton was also promoted to the rank of professor at Bristol University.
The Triumph of the Moon: 1999
In 1990, Hutton had attended a King's College London conference at which prominent British Pagans had acknowledged that Wicca was not the survival of a pre-Christian religion, as earlier generations of Wiccans had commonly claimed. Hutton noted that this encouraged him to research Wicca's "real history". Although aware that addressing Wiccan history could harm his reputation among academic historians, he thought he could take the risk because he had gained tenure at Bristol.
Hutton's research led to The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, published by Oxford University Press in 1999. This was the first monograph on Wiccan history to be written by a professional academic. Various colleagues and students made disparaging comments about Hutton because of his research topic and he believed that Triumph caused his career to stall for "nearly ten years". This academic prejudice towards Wicca and other alternative spiritualities was also reported by other scholars studying the subject.
Hutton's book was nevertheless cited as a forerunner of a wider range of academic publications on modern Paganism and Western esotericism that came in the following decade; an academic journal devoted to modern Paganism, The Pomegranate, launched in 2004, while the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism was established in 2005. Triumph of the Moon became "a classic" among scholars working on Western alternative spiritualities; two edited volumes and a special issue of the journal Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft would later be dedicated to marking its legacy.