HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-12-23T13:29:41.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Let a little magic into your life
items: Don’t fear the fairies – but do allow a little enchantment into your life
items: How The Winter King brings Arthurian Britain to life
items: Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve?
items: The dark truth about Oliver Cromwell
items: Oliver Cromwell’s remarkable rise to power
items: 10 great misconceptions of the Civil War
items: Witchcraft through the ages
items: Ronald Hutton on the Witch
items: History explorer: The Restoration

Let a little magic into your life
type: item
date: 2025-12-23T13:29:41.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that we might benefit from seeking out a spot of magic in our modern disenchanted world
encoded: We live in a modern disenchanted world. That’s why, in this episode of our Life Lessons from History series, Ronald Hutton suggests that we might benefit from seeking out a spot of magic. Could we all do with a bit more of the thrill of the supernatural? Listen to this conversation to find out.

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Don’t fear the fairies – but do allow a little enchantment into your life
type: item
date: 2025-05-23T15:39:28.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Witches
description: In an age in which we are no longer mortally afraid of the supernatural, there's space to enjoy freely magic and ritual, Professor Ronald Hutton tells David Musgrove
encoded: Most of us, these days, do not believe in fairies. But maybe we should allow a little more enchantment into our lives – that is the Life Lesson from History that Professor Ronald Hutton would have us consider. In late December every year, on the winter solstice, I like to make a mini-pilgrimage to Avebury at dawn. Avebury is, of course, one of Britain’s most impressive prehistoric megalithic monuments – a huge Neolithic stone circle, surrounded by a massive bank and ditch, with two smaller stone circles inside. It’s so big, in fact, that inside the stone circle is an entire village and a pub (which are obviously substantially later in date than the megaliths). I’m not alone in heading to this huge henge for the solstice – many are drawn to it, and there is something of a carnival vibe. I get up at about 4am and generally make some of my friends get up as well (they thank me not for this). We drive for an hour in the dark and then go for a jog for a few miles from the stone circle, past the enormous and abundantly enigmatic Silbury Hill, up to the West Kennet Long Barrow, and then back along the avenue of standing stones that leads into the henge and circle. I try to plan it to arrive back in Avebury as dawn breaks, but I never get the timing right, and it’s invariably overcast anyway, so I’ve never witnessed an impressive spiritual sunrise moment. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/HEPKG2avebury-846ee37.jpg" width="5100" height="3400" alt="A large rock takes up half the image. In the background a long line of people gather together under the purple sky" title="Avebury in Wiltshire is home to Britain’s largest stone circle, which is so big that inside are an entire village and a pub (built much later) (Image by Alamy)" /> I thought about Avebury after I’d chatted to Professor Hutton, one of the leading experts on the history of belief, ritual and the supernatural. I invited him to talk about his life lessons from history and …

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How The Winter King brings Arthurian Britain to life
type: item
date: 2023-12-21T09:10:14.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: How do you approach the role of historical advisor on a TV series set in Arthurian Britain, when evidence of what happened is somewhere between scarce and non-existent? Professor Ronald Hutton tells us about his work on the new ITVX Arthurian drama The Winter King – and about life and death in fifth-century England
encoded: The car park adjacent to The Mall Cribbs Causeway shopping centre in north Bristol is not a location you would immediately associate with Arthurian Britain. On the day of our visit, it is grey and drab. However, behind the walls of a nearby warehouse lies the unexpected: a recreated world of Arthurian Britain – constructed for The Winter King. This series is a new adaptation of The Warlord Chronicles trilogy, novels written by Bernard Cornwell of The Last Kingdom fame, which are themselves an adaptation of the story of King Arthur. Here, in a space you might expect to see forklift trucks or light manufacturing, and which is noticeably colder than the mizzling day outside, the production crew have been busy building ‘rock’ walls from polyurethane, as well as cave interiors and vast menhirs. It’s fantastical and incongruous, but then who can say with any confidence what’s authentically Arthurian? After all, according to the show’s historical advisor, Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, interviewed in the significantly warmer environs of his office, we know little about the years between the Romans leaving Britain, in AD 410, and St Augustine arriving, in AD 597. “It is a major event and the records don’t start to go darker and darker – the plug is pulled,” he says of the early fifth century after Rome’s legions withdrew. “Instantaneously, the lights go out and it changes Britain completely. You have Saxons and post-Roman Britons roaming around this post-nuclear landscape of gigantic ruins. Technology crashes, people actually lose the art of making pottery for a while.” To understand why there was such turmoil, it helps to consider the Romano-British economy. Cash arriving to pay the army created “an immensely rich society”, Hutton says. This in turn attracted settlers from elsewhere in the empire, who built houses, and farmed and consolidated estates. When the Romans withdrew because the empire faced multiple attacks from barbarian tribes, the economy implo…

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Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve?
type: item
date: 2021-10-19T07:01:00.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: General prehistory
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stonehenge
description: If you believe that nothing is beyond the wit of modern historical research, think again – we will never unlock the secrets of Britain's ancient religions, according to Ronald Hutton
encoded: The opening of the long-awaited Stonehenge visitor centre highlights, with unusual clarity, how much we now know, and don’t know, about ancient Britain. An ever-increasing sophistication in the theoretical and technological techniques at their disposal enables archaeologists to say, better than ever before, who built the world’s most famous prehistoric monument – and when and how they did it. We can tell from where they came, what they ate, what they looked like, what tools they used, how they lived, and what the climate and landscape were like when they did so. The missing element, which is apparently lost forever, is what they thought. We have no better idea now than we had 200 years ago of what their political, social, legal or moral systems were like, what their gender relations were, or – this being the really big one where Stonehenge is concerned – of what their religion consisted. As a result, each generation has had to make up answers to these questions for itself. In the case of the religion practised at Stonehenge, these answers spring from people’s attitude to religious behaviour in general, which in turn are generated by their attitudes to their fellow human beings. In practice, the results have always been polarised. In one camp are those who want to see the monument as one inspired by an admirable spirituality, characterised by love of and care for the natural world and an instinctual understanding of its ways. In the other are those who view the monument as the product of a primitive and bloodthirsty world, representing ignorance, savagery and superstition. Digging for the Bible: 10 key discoveries from the Holy Land How does Easter relate to Jesus? The first school of thought is what draws many people to celebrate the midsummer sunrise at Stonehenge each year. The second offers a clue as to why one of the fallen megaliths has been known as ‘Slaughter Stone’ (with no justification) since the 18th century. The first response has tended to be manifested…

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The dark truth about Oliver Cromwell
type: item
date: 2021-09-30T06:44:36.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: The victor of the Civil Wars described himself as pious, honest and selfless. But, as all too many victims of his lies and malice would have attested, the reality was often more sinister, writes Professor Ronald Hutton
encoded: Listen to this article: Historical trends may ebb and flow but Oliver Cromwell never goes out of fashion. This brilliant general and statesman has proved a source of enormous fascination to generations of historians – and, more than 350 years after his death, that interest shows no sign of dimming. There can be few, if any, heads of the English state who have been studied as often and intensely as Cromwell. In the past three decades alone, he has been the subject of five full-length biographies, three studies of his career as a soldier, and a further three major collections of essays. Piled around these are numerous books and articles dissecting every episode of his remarkable career – from the causes of his radical Puritanism to his role in the execution of King Charles I. Given Cromwell’s unique importance to English history, this tidal wave of words is hardly surprising. After all, his is the story of a sensational rise from obscurity to supreme power, of a soldier who never lost a full-scale battle, of the only English commoner to become the sovereign authority in the nation. Cromwell’s pre-eminence is reflected in the statue that stands at the entrance of the House of Commons, and the fact that he has more streets named after him than anybody other than Queen Victoria and (perhaps) the Duke of Wellington. In 2002, a BBC poll voted him the tenth greatest Briton of all time, ahead of all monarchs except Elizabeth I. Cromwell’s tremendous stature is not, however, the whole reason for the intense and sustained attention paid to him by historians. That has been propelled also by an uneasy feeling that the man himself is still eluding us. There is a disturbing chasm between Cromwell as he represented himself – as an honest, pious, patriotic, dutiful and selfless servant of his God and his nation – and as most of contemporaries saw him. Those, including many who knew him well, found him to be ruthless, devious and self-promoting, with a track record of abandoning or o…

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Oliver Cromwell’s remarkable rise to power
type: item
date: 2021-08-02T14:40:48.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Soldiers
description: Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector
encoded: Historian Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector and explaining how he rose from obscurity to become one of the dominant figures of the age. Ronald Hutton is the author of The Making of Oliver Cromwell (Yale, due to be published 10 August) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-183816&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-making-of-oliver-cromwell%2Fronald-hutton%2F%2F9780300257458%3Fawaid%3D3787%26utm_source%3Dredbrain%26utm_medium%3Dshopping%26utm_campaign%3Dcss%26gclid%3DCjwKCAjwr56IBhAvEiwA1fuqGqetttghKWSLjkPVav_MzUTX1JTfW1D-68Vgr8muo23kdTYq-PzZwhoC1pYQAvD_BwE" target="_blank" rel="sponsored">Buy now on Waterstones

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10 great misconceptions of the Civil War
type: item
date: 2018-09-27T08:45:33.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: The Civil War (1642-51) was an accidental war. It was fought by gentlemen, and Cromwell was the key to victory... right? There are many myths and misconceptions about the seismic 17th-century conflict, which saw fighting break out between supporters of King Charles I and opposing groups in each of Charles's kingdoms (including Parliamentarians in England, Covenanters in Scotland and Confederates in Ireland). But what's fact and what's fiction? Here, a panel of experts debunk 10 Civil War myths...
encoded: War broke out by accident Wrong, says John Adamson This misconception has a long pedigree. It came about because, at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a number of those involved in raising forces against the king were still alive. They peddled the idea that the war was an accident and that no one was to blame; that the war “came out of the mist”, as the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelock had it. But it’s untrue. Recent archival research has revealed that Charles I’s aristocratic opponents, particularly the group around the Earl of Warwick, were preparing to use military force as early as the summer of 1640. They did this by calling in the Scottish army and by suborning English militia regiments that had been mobilised to meet the Scottish challenge. Warwick’s group had a military strategy in case the king refused to call a parliament: four Yorkshire militia regiments were to join the Scots and march on London. Browse | Expert articles, podcasts and video on the Civil War This was the backdrop to the first two years of the Long Parliament, called by Charles I in November 1640 in an attempt to raise money for war against the Scots. The king was aware that this group had committed treason. In fact, that was one of the reasons it was so difficult to reach settlement over the constitutional impasse in 1640. The stakes had been raised for both sides. Charles I showed himself ready to risk a civil war from May 1640 with the plan to use Spanish troops against his own subjects. He also tried to arrest five members of parliament in January 1642. The parliamentarians expected to win a decisive victory that would force the king to accept his subordinate position. The war that followed was longer and bloodier than the belligerents had expected, but its outbreak was anything but accidental. John Adamson is author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007) Cavaliers were aristocrats, Roundheads were yeomen Wrong, says Ronald Hutton When…

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Witchcraft through the ages
type: item
date: 2017-08-14T14:51:58.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Halloween
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy history of witchcraft course
subject: Witches
description: Historian Ronald Hutton reveals how the witch has been a symbol of fear across the globe for more than 2,000 years
encoded: We speak to Professor Ronald Hutton about his book The Witch, which reveals how societies throughout the globe have lived in fear of witchcraft for more than 2,000 years. Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy history of witchcraft course Video lecture: Demonology, with Professor Marion Gibson – watching time 15 mins Europe's holy war: how the Reformation convulsed a continent – reading time 9 mins From healing spells to conjuring demons: the medieval obsession with magic – reading time 8 mins Medieval magic at work: 7 spells and charms our ancestors used – reading time 2 mins

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Ronald Hutton on the Witch
type: item
date: 2017-08-13T11:04:58.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Halloween
subject: Medieval life
subject: Witches
description: "Witch-hunting has been found in every inhabited continent of the world": Ronald Hutton talks to Charlotte Hodgman about his new book examining the global figure of the witch – from ancient times to the present day...
encoded: This article was first published in the August 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine In context The European witch trials of the early modern period did much to create an enduring perception of the figure of the witch. But these trials were influenced by global, ancient, medieval and folkloric traditions whose history has often been overlooked. Ronald Hutton’s book sets European witchcraft in an ancient and global context to revise our understanding of the witch around the world. Your book takes a global view on 2,000 years of witchcraft and magic. Why did you choose to tackle such a huge topic? It’s a subject that has interested me since I was a teenager. There’s been an enormous amount of work done on the witch trials of the early modern period, but significantly less on witchcraft in ancient times and across the rest of the world. This book is my attempt to redress the balance, and it has taken me 25 years to research and write. When was the term ‘witch’ first used, and what does it mean? The word has different interpretations. The two oldest define a witch as someone who uses magic to hurt people, or somebody who uses magic for any purpose. The feminist reading of the term is a woman of independent spirit who is persecuted for it by men in an age of patriarchy. Others see a witch as being a practitioner of a surviving pagan religion. The term ‘witch’ itself is Anglo-Saxon but what it means is not actually all that clear. There are hints in the law codes that ‘witch’ could refer to someone who works harmful magic. But we can’t be sure. Academics also argue endlessly about the definition of ‘magic’. I define it as being a set of techniques employed by humans in the hope of exploiting supernatural power for their own purposes. How does Europe’s witchcraft history compare to that of the rest of the world? It stands out from the rest of the world for two main reasons. On the one hand it is the only place that associated witchcraft with a demonic anti-religion – a fully …

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History explorer: The Restoration
type: item
date: 2014-12-04T21:17:07.000Z
creator: Professor Ronald Hutton
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Stuart kings and queens
description: Dr Ronald Hutton and Daniel Cossins visit Banqueting House in London to explore the overthrow of the British Commonwealth and Charles II's perilous path to the throne in 1660...
encoded: This article was first published in the December 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine The road from Blackheath to London was lined with people. Tapestries hung from windows, trumpets parped and church bells peeled, and wine flowed freely. It was 29 May 1660. Charles II, turning 30 that day, rode at the front of a great procession heading for the political heart of the capital. He had come to reclaim the thrones of three kingdoms after more than a decade of republican government, and he was welcomed as a redeemer by a restless public that had seen the Commonwealth collapse from within. “The public was tired of years of political insecurity, crushing over-taxation and military rule,” says Ronald Hutton, professor of early modern history at the University of Bristol. “They imagined that, whatever the king stood for, he was bound to be better than that.” The press of the crowd was such that the cavalcade took seven hours to get through London. Finally, at 7pm, Charles reached the Palace of Whitehall, where English royalty had resided for more than a century before the monarchy was swept away following the Civil War. In the opulent surroundings of Banqueting House, both houses of parliament declared their loyalty to the king. In response, Charles made a promise: “I find my heart set really to endeavour by all means for the restoring of this nation to freedom and happiness; and hope by the advice of my parliament to effect it.” Commissioned by James VI and I and completed in 1622, Banqueting House was the first major classical building in England – and, with its Palladian facade, it certainly stood out from the Tudor-style brick buildings that made up the rest of the palace. It was designed by Inigo Jones to provide the setting for banquets and court masques, extravagant mélanges of poetry, dance, music and song performed for (and often involving) kings, queens and their courtiers. By the time Charles II was resident at Whitehall, Banqueting House no longer played host to m…

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