15 Facts About Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.

Ronald Hutton volunteered in a number of excavations until 1976 and visited the country's chambered tombs.

Ronald Hutton studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, before he lectured in history at the University of Bristol from 1981.

Ronald Hutton followed these with books about historical paganism, folklore, and modern paganism in Britain: The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, The Stations of the Sun, and The Triumph of the Moon, the last of which would come to be praised as a seminal text in Pagan studies.

Ronald Hutton was born on 19 December 1953 in Ootacamund, India, to a colonial family, and is of part-Russian ancestry.

Ronald Hutton won a scholarship to study at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where 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.

In 1981, Ronald Hutton moved to the University of Bristol where he took up the position of reader of History.

Meanwhile, whilst he faced criticism from some sectors of the Pagan community in Britain, others came to embrace him; during the late 1980s and 1990s, Ronald Hutton befriended a number of practising British Pagans, including "leading Druids" such as Tim Sebastion, who was then Chief of the Secular Order of Druids.

Ronald Hutton questioned many assumptions about Wicca's development, argued that many of the claimed connections to longstanding hidden pagan traditions are questionable at best and for its importance as a genuine new religious movement.

Farrell-Roberts was of the opinion that in his works, Ronald Hutton dismissed Margaret Murray's theories about the Witch-Cult using Norman Cohn's theories, which she believed to be heavily flawed.

Ronald Hutton next turned his attention to Siberian shamanism, with Hambledon and London publishing Shamans: Siberian Spirituality in the Western Imagination in 2001, in which he argued that much of what westerners think they know about shamanism is in fact wrong.

Ronald Hutton was married to Lisa Radulovic from August 1988 to March 2003, when they divorced.

Ronald Hutton has become a "well-known and much loved figure" in the British Pagan community.

Ronald Hutton was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to history.

Ronald Hutton concluded that the violence of the act would have resulted in an even more severe backlash against suspected Catholics than was caused by its failure, as most Englishmen were loyal to the monarchy, despite differing religious convictions.