Pagan Britain

by Ronald Hutton

Britain's pagan past, with its mysterious monuments, atmospheric sites, enigmatic artifacts, bloodthirsty legends, and cryptic inscriptions, is both enthralling and perplexing to a resident of the twenty-first century. In this ambitious and thoroughly up-to-date book, Ronald Hutton reveals the long development, rapid suppression, and enduring cultural significance of paganism, from the Paleolithic era to the coming of Christianity. He draws on an array of recently discovered evidence and shows how new findings have radically transformed understandings of belief and ritual in Britain before the arrival of organized religion.
 
Setting forth a chronological narrative, along the way Hutton makes side visits to explore specific locations of ancient pagan activity. He includes the well-known sacred sites—Stonehenge, Avebury, Seahenge, Maiden Castle, Anglesey—as well as more obscure locations across the mainland and coastal islands. In tireless pursuit of the elusive “why” of pagan behavior, Hutton astonishes with the breadth of his understanding of Britain’s deep past and inspires with the originality of his insights.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Paganism, Archaeology, British Literature, Spirituality

480 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

About the author

Ronald Hutton (born 1953) is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A professor of history at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

So ive read this diligently for a while now & in the 4 page conclusion section it tells me that basically...... we don’t really have a Scooby about Pagan man before the Romans......

I wanted to like it more.... I really did as a lot of research & effort & thought has gone into writing this but........

I feel slightly tricked as Ive not discovered anything amazing & revealing from reading this book about Pagan Britain from times before the Romans as I didn’t really count the Roman belief system as being a British influence. I wanted to know about prehistory, Iron & bronze Age man but sadly all we learn are about different concepts, none of which are really proved & much of the time is spent disproving theories by the competing archaeologists who put a new modern twist/slant onto every discovery as mankind “develops” – we have Christian, Victorian, feminist & Marxist views of their time impinged on the findings of the past which is quite frustrating but also in a ways, good to know how such views/theories are tainted. It’s certainly opened my eyes on the subject matter & the “conclusions” arrived at by some, in this the author does a very good job, he is very non-subjective in that respect.

Its quite comprehensive as it includes sections on extraterrestrials, fairies, witches.... they all get a mention...... which makes for an entertaining read..... at times....

Not enough though to make me sit up & go WOW! Even when there was it was then shot down in flames a few chapters later with a very disappointing poof (thats the deflated balloon variety too).....

It did though get me thinking about it all & my own conclusion (well everyone else has had a go at it so why not me!) is thus: my own view is that early man was fascinated by the world around him & chose to mimic landscapes in his building of early creations. He also lived at one with nature. It’s kinda like today as the majority of us look upon landscape & nature with awe & it’s not a great leap to believe that our ancestors in their own way looked upon the land (mother nature if you like) with perhaps a certain reverence.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may not be the definitive text on paganism in Britain before and during the Christian era but it is not going to be easily bettered in terms of grand narrative.

Hutton's approach, not at all unsympathetic to the way we all imaginatively reconstruct the world out of slender evidence, is highly sceptical of academic claims to know very much about paganism.

Until we reach the historical record, imperfectly represented for Roman evidence and only becoming clearer during the Middle Ages, what we have is material evidence that can be interpreted in many ways.

Over and over again, he takes a site or an artefact or a 'deposit' and shows us how little we can be certain of what it may have meant to the people of its time.

The book, for much of its length, runs along two parallel tracks: a precise description of the evidence to hand and an account of how earlier and current generations of academic have interpreted it.

We are all used to books of archaeology that give us inordinately dull descriptions of pots and post-holes and then, having flummoxed us with 'facts', try to persuade us of something we cannot argue with.

Although Hutton's book has its share of descriptions of burials and stone circles, just as we are about to stifle a yawn, up he pops with a bit of intellectual history that makes it interesting again.

His fundamental scepticism about claims is refreshing which is not to say that he is not describing significant progress in the archaeology of belief if only to show how evidence can strip away old theory.

As he suggests, the evidence has the virtue of not permitting certain beliefs to hold water (e.g. that the Egyptians built Stonehenge) but it has the vice of allowing a great deal else.

His response is to be tolerant - to let a thousand flowers bloom of academic suggestions and counter-cultural beliefs so long as none claims the mantle of evidenced truth.

From this perspective, the book is invaluable. He strips away the nonsense of the great goddess as truth but permits women to invent her (even if it clearly turns some of them into irrational harridans).

He does similar 'knife jobs' on the survival of the old religion as witch cults, the 'Celtic goddesses' allegedly to be found in Celtic literature, Heathen survivals and more.

Perhaps the best chapter is the last where some historical evidence can be added to the archaeological yet even here texts prove slippery and contingent with much later invention being misinterpreted.

His critical analysis of all the evidence, written or otherwise, tells us that we are unlikely ever to know what pagans actually believed and did before Christians arrived and started writing texts.

Hutton is also fair to the totalitarian religion that replaced paganism. He elucidates its power well and is persuasive that it did, indeed, almost entirely replace paganism without permitting survivals.

He reinstates Britain as a fundamentally Christian country between the integration of the last pagan Scandinavians and the recent arrival of secularism, atheism, pagan revivalism and imperial migration.

Indeed, from this perspective the last three hundred years or so of rationality looks a little exposed and vulnerable in the long run of 5,000 years - though perhaps palaeolithic man was rational too.

In that last chapter, he takes a surgical knife to almost every claim of pagan survival from the sacredness of yew trees to the existence of Herne the Hunter so that we are left with very little tangible.

What survives is a generalised set of cultural assumptions that do seem to have survived Christianity simply because they were not a challenge to it - and were largely expressed as folklore and 'cunning'.

He is persuasive that belief in fairies and elves is an ancient pre-Christian survival and there are a number of other customs and habits that may be but almost no identifiable folk rituals.

The final picture is one of a somewhat anxiety-driven middle class rediscovering paganism in response to modernisation and desperately seeking proofs that are not there of meaningful continuities.

Many appropriations are purely political - especially for feminism but also as reflections of the uncomfortable status of the middle class in relation to its own working class and the colonised.

Hutton is persuasive that what we might attribute to pagan sensibility was actually fully Christianised in the sense that no one believing in folk ideas or doing folk acts was not self-defined as Christian.

This book will be troublesome to true believers who want belief to be true. Hutton is more tolerant than me in that he wants us to have respect for belief rather than (my view) respect for the believer.

He leaves open the door to the right to accept an unproven belief (which is going to be no worse than believing Christian claims) so long as it is definitely not contradicted by the evidence.

And, of course, the nature of the evidence means that a lot of reconstructionist neo-paganism cannot be contradicted as a claim about past belief. Phew! Like Christianity, neo-paganism can be absurd.

A pagan Kierkegaard might now with justice throw himself or herself into the Mother Goddess or communion with Nature or Odin without having to worry about most claims by most archaeologists.

He is, consequently, as tough or gentle with his fellow academics as with believers and he maintains his scepticism about their claims being anything more than probabilities and possibilities.

Even more, he recognises that counter-cultural theories about survivals or the beliefs of the ancient may have been shown to be wrong-headed but they did stimulate important lines of research.

Although most cases result in investigation showing why the counter-cultural belief was false, this is far from the case in every respect - sometimes, the line of enquiry throws up new evidence.

Although ley lines now seem to have no basis in fact and archaeo-astronomy is highly problematic, serious investigation of both has thrown up new facts to consider.

He thus places counter-cultural believers in, say, earth mysteries much closer to most academic theorists as really not that different in their relationship to truth-telling.

Both sets of believer really can believe that they have the answer to the same evidence under conditions where neither can prove their claims, merely offer contingent probabilities and possibilities.

This is why the book is so useful. It offers us a senior academic's assessment of academic epistemology and it comes to a conclusion that is highly sceptical (possibly an edge too much so in the last chapter).

There are philosophers today who are also asking similar questions about their own discipline, beginning to question whether they are destined always to go round in circles on some central questions.

The value here lies in demarcating the so-called social sciences - the exploration of what is human that is not hard biology - much more from the 'hard' sciences which have laws and can create technologies.

This is important because the 'soft' sciences are making claims increasingly in political contexts that are merely probabilities and possibilities and have always done so, sometimes dangerously.

The point is that, as with half-baked genetics in the nineteenth century, soft scientists are in danger of claiming that they can provide technologies - of social control above all.

This book and other humanist contributions rightfully help us to be sceptical of theory based on evidence with multiple interpretations and sparse or selective in its nature. So much for 'nudge' ...

By repositioning archaeology as a hard science in terms of provision or critique of evidence but as a humanity in terms of its interpretation of evidence, he does a great service.

He runs both positions in parallel in this book to the benefit of the discipline. We thus feel more confident about the facts but decline to accept the fact-definers as more than guides to interpretation.

Not only can facts be overturned (after all Christ just could appear in all his glory on Tuesday morning) but interpretations are seen as highly contingent on social conditions and personal prejudices.

Hutton shows that the history of archaeology has included a Mulderian 'need to believe' and, if this is so, then the 'need to believe' is a human quality that neo-pagans have as much right to.

However, what he also does is reintroduce us to the concept of judgement, weighing up all the options and sceptically waiting until the balance of evidence holds little other than one interpretation.

Very few claims about the actual beliefs and behaviour of pre-historic Britons hold water in that context. We are faced with hypotheses that we should treat as more or less plausible stories.

Nor can we expect this situation to change. All early historical texts are unreliable. Stones do not speak. Our ancestors cannot be brought back from the dead. So much has been destroyed.

[Iset · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is yet another book that gives an overview of pagan European cultures from the Palaeolithic to the Dark Ages. I’ve read so many of these lately that I admit that I’m starting to find it slightly soporific. This book focuses on Britain in particular, as opposed to the whole of Europe, but nevertheless it ends up covering much of the same ground. That said, I do like how up to date the book is with current thought in the archaeological field. It rejects the male/female dichotomy that was one time applied inexplicably to Palaeolithic art, and David Lewis-Williams’ later ideas about shamanic symbols. And in contrast to the two others books I’ve recently read about pagan religion in Europe – Jean Markale’s The Great Goddess and Marija Gimbutas’ The Living Goddesses – Ronald Hutton takes a much more objective view, noting the lack of evidence for a unified mother goddess and pointedly highlighting how this hypothesis arose out of Romantic idealism of the 18th century. In other words, whilst early religions were replaced and appropriated by later ones, the notion of one unifying European goddess has more to do with wishful thinking than the facts, and is just a bit too far-fetched. Just to be clear, Hutton does not deny that ancient peoples worshipped goddesses; only that there was one single unifying, monotheistic goddess across the entirety of Europe. To the contrary, it seems clear that ancient peoples worshipped a wide variety of distinctly local and unique goddesses (and gods). Hutton also thoroughly examines and debunks crackpot nonsense about ley lines, water dowsing, Atlantis, and ancient aliens, to boot. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this.

8 out of 10

[Beorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you see in the book store, you read the back and find yourself intrigued.
Sadly, while it does a great deal of work speculating on what COULD have been, what MIGHT have been, what SHOULD have been, there is far too much inconclusive postulating about what could have been that you end up feeling like you've not learned everything as each & every time you feel like you picked up some information that could stand up to scrutiny, the rug is pulled out from under your foot and you're back to square one.

This book could have easily been condensed into the following sentences;
"There were Romans who became Christians. When Rome left, there might have been pagan practices develop. There might not. We just don't know."

At least that way, you'd be spared almost five hundred pages of pontificating, pondering and vagueries.

[Matthijs Krul · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic book. One learns more from one book by Ronald Hutton than from a whole library of folklorism and 'esoterica', and that is particularly true for this book. It's 400 dense pages in which Hutton with his typical flair and clarity discusses the archaeological, textual, and symbolic evidence about paganism in Britain. This book retains Hutton's characteristic union of extremely solid historiography and scientific discussion with a personal sympathy for the validity of mystical, neopagan etc. interpretations of the past, but unlike some of his previous works does not concern itself with neopaganism itself or the reception history as separate topics. Here, the discussion is strictly limited to historical paganism in Britain, from the Paleolithic to the last Viking vestiges.

As one might expect, the general conclusion from the work is that we know next to nothing of prehistoric paganism and little indeed about historic paganism, simply because such material evidence as there is allows for too many different interpretations. But those interpretations and their discussion are fascinating in their own right. Hutton clearly sets the boundaries of the possible. He does not hide his assent to the strong scholarly consensus, still not well reflected in the popular view, that essentially nothing remained of any historic paganism as a religion rivalrous with Christianity after the last conversions (of the 'Danes') in the Middle Ages. He also discusses why this is and why so many have wanted to find the opposite, and - a particular topic of his interest - engages with the ways in which Christianity did give new substance to old moments in the ritual calendar and provided parallel 'services' to fulfil the same needs of the old faith. (He has written in more detail on this in other works as well.) Such hoary topics as the Mother Goddess, human sacrifice, and the Green Man make their appearance also and are deftly dealt with.

The emphasis in the work is on archaeological evidence more than on philology and linguistics, but this is as much because about 2/3rds is concerned with prehistoric paganisms as because of a greater interest in material culture. The general point of the book is not just to give an excellent overview for the informed lay reader about the state of knowledge on historical paganism in Britain, but also to make the very Huttonian historiographical point that it is good to openly acknowledge how little that knowledge really is, and to encourage the public to engage with and interpret such evidence as there is according to their own needs and desires - within the bounds of the possible - rather than forever seeing the domain as the scene of a turf war between professionals and speculative amateurs.

[Monty Milne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, dense, detailed, and engaging. Professor Hutton is a very likeable guide and his judgements all feel very persuasive and balanced. Unfortunately, they almost always come down to showing how very little we know for sure about the pagan past. Hutton treats us to a very thorough review of the archaeological evidence, then discusses the many different interpretations of the evidence, in all its changing fashions, and finally gives a few of his own suggestions as to how we might think about it. I like this approach very much.

When it comes to contemporary paganism, Hutton’s wisdom and balance is clear. Essentially, modern paganism is an invention of an imagined past which is generally speaking unknowable and irrecoverable. Most of the alleged survivals of paganism turn out to have been much later inventions or misunderstandings, and were in all cases perpetuated by people who were convinced of the truths of Christianity. The triumph of Christianity in these islands was so thorough and complete that the notion of some kind of underground river of paganism surviving the centuries is fanciful. But this doesn’t make contemporary pagan re-imagining entirely spurious: there is nothing wrong with making imaginative back projections on the past, according to Hutton. It might make you feel better, and in any case there is almost nothing we know for certain, so your guess is almost as good as anyone else’s.

[H.E. Bulstrode · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Hutton is, perhaps, one of the most affable and publicly recognisable academics in Britain today and, arguably, its greatest authority on this country’s pagan history and heritage. In this volume, he sets himself the task of surveying the rise and fall of paganism in our island story, from the distant Palaeolithic to the early modern period. However, whereas the matter of the pagan revivalism of the past century is touched upon, it is not treated in any depth in itself, although it is considered in connection with the retro-projection of its beliefs, and practices, into the distant past. He has previously dealt with the subject matter of the history of Wicca in his book, ‘The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft,’ a work that, apparently, caused umbrage amongst certain elements of the contemporary pagan community.

The primary message that came through in this thorough and engaging treatment of the subject was this: there is much that remains in terms of the material legacy of the pagan past, yet next to nothing with respect to our knowledge of the concrete beliefs and rituals conducted by pagans at various points in the pre-Christian era of our island. Much of what is commonly supposed about the pagan beliefs of the inhabitants of Britain is little more than that: supposition, based upon the most tenuous of textual evidence, and erroneous conjecture arising from the once widespread belief that the uneducated mediaeval populace adhered to a basically pagan set of beliefs beneath a superficial veneer of Christian piety. None the less, it is this very absence of certainty with respect to the beliefs and practices of our pagan past, in which much of this subject’s charm and appeal inheres; it is cloaked in an aura of mysticism.

Hutton marshals and interprets an impressive array of evidence to provide an outline of developments in ritual practice. From prehistory we by definition have access only to archaeological remains, but this period has bequeathed to us such a rich legacy of different types of ceremonial monument – henges, stone avenues, barrows cursuses, dolmens, etc. – that it is evident, thanks to the development of carbon dating, that beliefs were far from static. From the Mesolithic onwards, there were significant shifts in monumental form, with many sites – the most famous of all being Stonehenge – being refashioned over the centuries and millennia, presumably to keep pace with changing ritual practice and belief. As to the detail of the actual substance of these beliefs – the names of any gods, goddesses and spirits called upon and propitiated, and the mythologies attendant upon them – they will forever remain beyond our grasp. Only with the entry of the island of Britain into the orbit of the ancient literary cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, do we find any indications as to what these beliefs and deities were, and even then, what we are left with is fragmentary and, perhaps, rather tendentious in nature; it does not present us with an objective ethnographic commentary on the beliefs and practices of the ancient Britons. We remain in the historical twilight.

Rather more is known about the religious beliefs and practices of the Roman conquerors, and cult precincts and associated dedicatory inscriptions reveal that many of their gods and goddesses were revered here, often, as elsewhere in the Empire, in syncretistic form with native deities, with the most famous case being that of Sulis-Minerva at Bath. To what extent the coming of these new deities supplanted those already resident in the imaginations and devotional practices of the island’s inhabitants is unknown, but it could be argued that an eclectic form of fusion and co-existence took place, before Christianity asserted its grip.

One question that will also forever go unanswered will be the extent to which late-Roman Britain was Christianised. Evidence exists – such as from the Romano-British pagan temple at Brean Down – that non-Christian beliefs were still adhered to in the second part of the fourth century, which would be consonant with Julian the Apostate’s (361-363) attempt to revive Hellenistic paganism. However, by the time that Theodosius – the last Emperor to rule over both the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire – began to vigorously enforce Christianity as the sole state religion from the 380s onwards, Roman Britannia was already in a position of significant material decline and marginalisation, and would be lost to the Empire in 409 or 410.

The pagans of post-Roman Britain left us no written record of their beliefs and practices, and all we have to go on are a handful of hostile references produced by Christian scholars such as Gildas and Bede. As Hutton emphasises here, we possess only the most tenuous of knowledge relating to the newly arrived deities beyond their names: Woden, Thunor, Tiw and Frigg. Indeed, he calls into question the commonly believed assumption that there was an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre. This appears to possess but the flimsiest of foundations, with Bede’s supposition that Eosturmonuth was named after such a goddess likely to have been a misunderstanding, with the name of the month (equivalent to April), simply meaning ‘the opening month,’ which Hutton suggests could well refer to the unfurling of leaves.

The material evidence for pagan belief during the fifth to seventh centuries is even more scant than that of earlier eras, for no single pagan temple from this period has been conclusively identified in Britain. What we are presented with, however, are changes in burial practice, that are clearly not Christian, and often include the interment of grave goods alongside the Saxon dead. It seems, however, that once the Anglo-Saxon, British and Pictish elites had adopted Christianity, the new religion readily established itself amongst the mass of the population. What greatly eased this transition, argues Hutton, was Christianity’s ability to present its new followers with an array of saints who functioned in a manner analogous to that of the old gods and goddesses who looked after a particular sphere of life, or a particular place.

There is much more that Hutton discusses in this book with respect to possible pagan survivals, including mediaeval Welsh and Irish textual sources, as well as folk traditions relating to a parallel supernatural realm populated by fairies, hobgoblins and so on. However, once the pagan Danish settlers had converted to Christianity, it is Hutton’s opinion that paganism ceased to operate as a coherent system of operational belief within the island of Britain. He also dismantles the widely cherished belief in a prehistoric ‘Great Goddess,’ tracing the emergence and development of this concept in modern times, and uses the concept of human sacrifice to show how remains – particularly decapitated ones – can be used both in favour of this theory, and against it. His treatment of these issues, and the subject as a whole, is even-handed, pluralistic and non-prescriptive. He encourages the reader to reflect, and to draw his or her own conclusions with respect to the evidence presented. For anyone interested in this area of our history, this book makes for a rewarding, and essential, read.

[Brecht Reintsema · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a journey! Absolute five stars for its use as a scholarly reference book, but about three stars for general reader enjoyment I think.

I started this book back in the summer of 2023, where I'd just bought it in Blackwell's in Oxford out of general interest in the subject. I read through about 3/4 of the book, but then I put it away for a moment and never really got back to it. I really enjoyed what I had read, and it is definitely not badly written, but it is such a well-researched book that it was very information dense. The part I had read was about Prehistoric Britain with a major focus on archaeology, which I did not really know anything of at the time. I enjoyed the ideas on British prehistoric paganism, but I did not retain much of the detailed information on all the specific types of monuments and their possible meanings.

Fast forward to the end of 2024, when I had just finished my uni Research Project on human interactions with the landscape throughout Dutch prehistory, and started following a Religous Studies course. For that, I have to write a very extensive essay which I decided to do on the Christianization of Britain and its influence on folk belief and interactions with nature. And then I remembered that I had the perfect source for that! So I (re)read the parts of the book from the Iron Age to the end (post-Christian paganism) and this was such JOY to work with as a reference source. The arguments are sound, references are given without distracting from the text, and it's actually very pleasantly written. I made notes and now really feel like I obtained the information, which is super interesting.

So long story short, if you are really interested in this topic, including prehistoric archaeology, I feel like this really is THE source to go for. If you are more generally interested in paganism, this might just be a bit too much. I recently saw the book Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism, which seems a bit less dense and with a much bigger focus on historic times instead of prehistory, so you might want to read that instead.

[Ana Moth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've really enjoyed Ronald Hutton's work when I've seen him on documentaries and quotes by other authors, but this is the first full length book I've read by him. I wasn't disappointed.

At first the subject looks very daunting. Something about which we know comparatively little for definite but a lot of assumptions are made, but Hutton handles it brilliantly. He accepts from the off that archeological remains from millennia ago have very little in terms of definite answers and uses it to his advantage. As well as cataloguing the various sites and finds (and later items and written testimonies) he explores the various interpretations of the evidence and places them in their context, resulting in a fascinating overview of how history is shaped by the time of its interpretation. Every age gets the ancient British pagans it needs.

[Jelmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely detailed and extremely well-researched.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hutton argues for an informed plurality of interpretation, grounded in the known facts.

'It is not possible for example, to argue convincingly that Stonehenge was built by extraterrestrial aliens, Mycenaeans or Egyptians, or dates from any period other than the third millennium BC. It is equally impossible to declare that it was a factory or a royal dwelling or anything other than a ceremonial site. It now equally at odds with the evidence to publish the view that Early Neolithic Britain did not know anything resembling warfare, or that any active pagan religion survived anywhere in the island, in opposition to Christianity, throughout the Middle Ages let alone much longer. Much else, however, regarding the nature of prehistoric British society and religion and the way in which ancient paganism blended with medieval and early modern pagan culture remains entirely open to personal choice.' (398)

It's an interesting approach. Outline the evidence, present the often conflicting interpretations, in some case track the history of those fashions, then, when certainty is impossible, as it in most of the book, step away and encourage an informed subjectivity.

Basically, nothing is known about the specifics of prehistoric belief, very little is known about pre Roman or Anglo-Saxon beliefs, the idea that paganism surivived into the Christian middle ages as some kind of organised, underground belief won't hold water. Beyond this you are on your own.

I see the point, and admire the approach, but after a while it feels as though Hutton is trying so hard to be reasonable that he begins to sound evasive. I don't share his belief in the power of evidence. I suspect there are people who are convinced Stonehenge was built by aliens and will continue to believe so, because Hutton is the last person to pretend anyone can prove they didn't. Just as there are people who are convinced Druids have existed in secret enclaves until they emerged again in the modern period and that witches were the devotees of a female earth cult that predated Christianity.

One aspect of Hutton's writing that is very enjoyable is the way he can almost become a different writer when he is describing landscape. Brief passages of natural description, some of only a few words, some a sentence or two, bring the landscapes he describes to life.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine book, even if it is a bit of a slog. My interest in the book came from wanting to prepare for a trip to northern England that would include some sites from a very long time ago - Hadrian's Wall, Lindisfarne, etc.. So I wanted to find a book that summed up the current state of research on Pagan Brittain but which will not come across as being as complex and inaccessible as the ultra technical materials that are often associated with specific study projects around iron age buildings or plots of land. I am not opposed to such material. Rather, I lack sufficient depth to appreciate (or keep track) of all of the craft involved in archaeology and am more than willing to give the experts some room to sum things up and communicate them to laymen.

The book succeeds. It focuses strictly on pagan religions in Britain before and during the rise of Christianity. The results are fascinating and should amaze interested but non-specialist readers. I like Hutton's tone in presenting the various contesting interpretations and story lines in any active research area. I also appreciate his position that artifacts need to be interpreted in terms of the social and economic context - granting that we know much about that context. The book reads like it could be a critical graduate text for students beginning to familiarize themselves with the area. It is clear from the text, however, that there is a lot of complex work going on and from the detail provided in this book, it is fascinating to get a better sense of how these scholars think and how they go about their business. While I suspect that there are lots of people who have read some archaeology, I also suspect that most general readers are not well versed in the science that permits us to characterize and analyze the past - especially prior to the time of abundent documentary evidence.

The only trouble I had with the book was that it is so deep and details that it went beyond the needs I had in preparing for a trip to England. I don't want to pan the book for going above and beyond my needs - that is not the author's fault. Overall, it was well done and rewarding work.

[5greenway · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wide-ranging review of sources, with a fair-minded guide. Holds the interest throughout, although at times I felt definitions were a little too fuzzy and individual subjects (like the cult of saints) were maybe dealt with a little cursorily. Also had the usual downsides of concentrating on a specific geography: you can't bring in enough contextual sources without losing all the focus.

The conclusion, which put 'experts' in the role of providing non-experts with the constraints and information to make an informed decision about some culture-specific questions looks a little over-optimistic, given the current bad-tempered culture wars, into which so much history is roped in.

A good read. Always an enjoyable author.

[Peter Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books where you learn something new on every second page, and the pages in between those each give you pause for thought. The main thing you learn is that many of the commonly held assumptions about this topic are simply wrong, and that much assumed ancient pagan practice or evidence has in fact a much younger pedigree. Still I do like the way that while he politely and painstakingly unpicks the supposed deep history of many of these things that he still leaves space for them to still be an important or comforting symbol for some people despite losing their claimed deep history.

[Martin Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will annoy some people because it repeatedly emphasises that a lot of theories about past religious beliefs in these islands are based on inadequate evidence or pure speculation. In particular, it scotches a lot of theories about the survival of ancient customs into modern times; there's no evidence that yew trees were held in any particular reverence in pre-Christian times, and they're incredibly hard to date anyway. I found it a highly stimulating read. My only criticism relates to the way it's printed; the (black and white) photos are a bit murky, and the margins are so small that each page is a large block of uninterrupted text, making eye-skip a constant hazard. Still worth reading though.

[Waldo Varjak · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the time I opened this book, I had already studied and made my notes on the following, in order:

1 - Primitive Culture Volume I
2 - Primitive Culture, Volume II
3 - Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages
4 - Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape and
5 - The Elder Gods: The Otherworld of Early England .

It seemed to me a logical progression to move from the general to the specific, and I am glad I did it this way because, as Ciaran Mcgrath highlighted in his review, Dr. Hutton demonstrates a thorough consideration of how experts - such as those I have studied and whom the author cited in nearly 100 pages of endnotes - interpret the evidence available. As Tim Pendry wrote in his review, Dr. Hutton writes with great pedagogical care by first laying out the evidence and then explaining the different interpretations before shifting gears and comparing an alternate reading for the very same evidence. The author goes on to demonstrate how Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, a concept borrowed from quantum mechanics, affects the readings according to the current trends of their day. Thus a feminist atmosphere will affect a feminist type interpretation of the evidence: the historian as academic storyteller.

The scope of this book is huge as the investigation within suggests. Under a less certain writer such a book is likely to be a mess, but Dr. Hutton knows his stuff and can turn a pretty phrase when other writers of prehistory assume the reader is more knowledgeable than he or she may be in actuality.

Did you know how a barrow is created? Likely you know the meaning of mounds like Weoh or Hearg but the barrow is constructed on level ground with rooms and passages and then topped by earth to create a mound as a roof. It is like burying a ship except it is burying a simple crypt. I had no idea about this process even after reading 5 books discussing barrows. Barrows could have been dug inside an existing mound for all I knew before Dr. Hutton kindly disabused me of equating barrow construction, something I have never experienced, with children's snow forts.

Or how about imagining the wonder of taking in a prehistoric sacred site that no longer registers in our modern imagination? Liam Guilar commented about the author's ability to describe landscapes in his review but, here, Dr Hutton vividly describes one:

"The landscapes of the waters of lowland Britain have perhaps changed more since prehistory than any other rural environment. A few pockets of undrained marsh survive as native reserves, but gone for ever, to rich farmland, are the vast expanses of fenland, with the sighing of the wind in millions of green reeds and the feathery blond heads of sedge, and the whistling wings of mighty waterfowl flocks; and encounters with more spectacular wildlife such as the swoop of the osprey or fish eagle, the booming of bitterns, the strut of courting cranes, the heavy flight of a pelican, or the slap of a beaver’s tail as it dives in the pool besides its dam. By sunlit day, they would have glittered with some of Britain’s most brilliant butterflies, the swallowtails and large coppers, while by night the pale flames of ignited marsh gas, the will o’ the wisps or punkies, would have danced above them instead. Lowland rivers, often dredged, embanked and straightened, bear only occasional resemblance to their ancient selves when they would have been looped and braided watercourses, with many more inlets, channels and meanders, and aquatic plants."

On the whole I agree with H.E. Bulstrode's assessment in his review that the author is even-handed, pluralistic and non-prescriptive throughout his subject, encouraging the reader to reflect and to draw his or her own conclusions with respect to the evidence, which presents in accessible, informative writing. Some may treat as a spoiler Dr. Hutton's conclusion by revealing we can know practically nothing for certain - but a distilled conclusion is not the reason to read this book. Read this book for its journey because that is rewarding and, I certainly believe in my case, an essential read to understanding.

I had read 5 books on the subject prior to this one but I feel now as though I have read just one because with this 6th book I have a firmer, even nuanced, understanding of the other ones I have read before. While those books are excellent in their own right, this one is the mortar that binds them.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. I would first and foremost describe it as "reassuringly academic." While the author does come down rather hard on theories that are demonstrably untrue, he is very good at laying out where the evidence can potentially point in a variety of directions, who has argued in favour of which direction and how, and leaves it up to the reader to decide what they believe.

I'd argue therefore that in many ways it is a good book for undergraduates, as a sort of General Guide which can signpost to further reading on specific areas.

All this is helped by a very good writing style and organisation of content. I would thoroughly recommend.

[kristiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is almost criminal how such interesting topics could be made so boring to read about. The 400 pages of text in this book did not even provide a good study material on this topic, so this book fails as a curiosity read and as a textbook.
The sentences in this book are long winded and wordy for no apparent reason. The good bits of knowledge about pagan Britain were hidden in between empty information of researchers and their speculations.
A lot of work has been put into this book but for what? The information it sets out to present is made very inaccessible and vague by the writing. At times the author's narrative tone and word choice comes across as pretentious. And the conclusion of the book fell just as flat as the bulk of this work.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

it turns out that we know basically nothing about the beliefs of british pagans but that's not the book's fault

[Jeff]

Doesn’t even mention witches or fairies until the last chapter. Otherwise it’s mostly an in-depth analysis of rocks and grassy knolls. 10/10 absolutely hardcore!!

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 400-page survey of pre-Christian belief in the British Isles is not just an assessment of the historical and archaeological evidence but also an appraisal of historiography, cultural history, sociology, anthropology, and folklore. Hutton sets himself a significant task of charting such vast and ambiguous terrain, which could not be achieved without considerable depth of reading, research and expertise that the endnotes attest to.

Hutton leads with a sceptical, evidence-based approach to the subject, which barely ever wavers. Despite this – and considering how easily it could have gone the other way - I don't think I've read a history written with such sensitivity and generosity to both its subject and the wider context of its study. Much space is dedicated to the contributors of historical knowledge from a wide field, including a roll-call of professional scholars from across the decades, but also to amateur enthusiasts, and writers who have approached the source material from different perspectives entirely - such as the earth mysteries movement of the 1970s.

The author's emphasis on a "plurality of interpretation" as opposed to any singular hypothesis is admirable, and given that the scarcity of evidence allows for little certainty in any one argument, is sensible. This approach welcomes a multiplicity of views on a broad spectrum of likelihood, which, at times, falls somewhat short - occasionally Hutton comes across as a little too doubtful of reasonably evidenced arguments, or overly tolerant of leftfield perspectives which - in my view – don’t necessarily deserve the attention given to them.

In general, however, this approach works, and the wide range of views considered forms a fascinating historiography and cultural history, deserving of a book in itself. We see, for example, shifts in perspectives from Victorian preoccupations with race and colonisation through to late 20th – and early 21st-century preoccupations with identity politics – and the corresponding emphases that emerge in contemporary historical and archaeological interpretation.

I really enjoy ambitious books like this that attempt to examine themes across large swathes of time, and it was useful for me in other ways in that it helped re-plot a few blind spots in my own historical knowledge. The division of prehistory and history as not just a fixed point in time but a concept that could expand and retract with colonisation and the spread of literacy and belief was fascinating to consider. So too was the brief overview of the Dark Ages in Britain and the emergence of medieval kingdoms where religion – pagan or Christian – took something of a backseat to the power struggles at play.

Perhaps the book’s main weakness is the sheer enormity of its scope. It seems much more could be said or considered in light of the various arguments presented, and some chapters tread lightly over material which may deserve more consideration than has been allowed. Yet this is a survey, and the sheer amount of ground covered – not to mention the timespan - is impressive. The extensive endnotes also provide plentiful jumping-off points for the inquisitive reader.

Where Hutton’s approach falls down slightly is in his latter chapter, which considers pagan legacies. Here, more than a few popular assumptions around pagan ‘survivals’ are given just treatment, in tune with the book’s overall sceptical interrogation of the evidence. Yet, towards the end, this tone perplexedly shifts, with a couple of claims that don’t feel particularly substantiated. For example, a brief section on fairy lore states plainly that this is a pagan survival, without the consideration of argument and interpretation that previous sections were lavished with. Had the author run out of time, or words, by this point? The remainder of this chapter, and the abrupt conclusion, both feel rather rushed.

However, these last few pages are largely an exception to the otherwise excellent study on display here. One last word for Hutton’s writing style, which is eminently concise and accessible, occasionally veering into the rare but welcome poetic description – a self-indulgence, perhaps, of the author’s open permission to imagine a world largely lost to us. This, and the earlier point around shifting historiographical zeitgeists, underlines something I’ve long thought myself: of the need to distance ourselves from the concerns of our own time and to dare to imagine a world where the whole breadth of life – whether experienced as belief, memory, environment, or society – operated within vastly different priorities and motivations.

[Polly · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has long seemed to me a very sad state of affairs that while many of us British people are raised immersed in the tales of Greek, Roman and Norse mythology and religious stories set in the Middle East, most of us know comparatively little of our own native mythology and folklore. Given its murky, fragmented, mysterious nature, this isn't surprising. We lack a pantheon of gods with coherent backstories and relationships - our culture is a juxtaposition of successive layers of cultures brought to the islands from elsewhere: Celtic, Roman/Roman Empire Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman, etc. Add to that the fact that no written records predate the arrival of the Romans, and subsequent documents are scanty, unreliable, and often third-hand at best, and you've got some real mysteries on your hands.

The British landscape is covered in monumental legacies of the past, from humble hill forts, ominous barrows, and deliciously macabre skeletons, to awe-inspiring megaliths like the famous Stonehenge. The earth is so rich in remnants of a long, long past that they're around every corner, often only noticeable because of National Trust or English Heritage signs. Despite this, with the exception of a couple of famous legends such as King Arthur and Robin Hood (who are themselves fraught with ambiguity), there really isn't a coherent narrative that explains and unites these pieces of ancient pagan spirituality.

Material evidence, as Ronald Hutton eloquently points out, is plentiful, but limited. Every piece of evidence is subject to a plurality of explanations, each of which is impossible to confirm or deny based on the available evidence. Hutton takes care in each case to not only describe the nature of the evidence, but the different interpretations that have been suggested and adopted at different times and in different contexts. He shows how, often, the choice of interpretation is dependent on the context in which it is found, and sometimes say more about that culture than the one being investigated.

Hutton goes on to emphasise that a lack of definitive answers to the mysteries of the past can, in fact, be very positive. In our modern day multi-cultural, diverse, individualistic Britain, providing an array of possible narratives from which people can choose based on which they instinctually relate to, is more appropriate than one which potentially excludes sections of the population.

Pagan Britain is a dense and scholarly book - and it is all the better for it. Hutton's knowledge of an enormous length of history spanning thousands of years is prodigious, but his writing is friendly and companiable - as though he is taking you, the reader, on a ramble through the forgotten past. The detail with which he describes some of the archaeological records can at times be overwhelming, but I encourage the reader to persevere; that detail provides a rich context and subtlety to the reader's understanding that makes it well worth it.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in not only understanding more about Britain's complex and mysterious lost past, but also in the biases and problems inherent in the one dimensional explanations often offered to the public. I know that I for one will be treating newspaper headlines and English Heritage signs with a great deal more healthy scepticism in the future!

[Ciaran Mcgrath · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than just an overview of Paganism through the history and prehistory of Britain (Ireland is occasionally touched on), this is also a thorough consideration of how the experts and amateurs interpret the evidence available. The wealth of material discussed is fascinating, but equally impressive is the author's willingness to highlight where interpretation and wishful thinking stand in for evidence.

[Bettie]

Spotted in The Guardian. To seek the best deal...

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the reviews on the back of this book says, "Any book from Ron Hutton is something of an event." Indeed. In my case, it was a nearly 8-month slog through some of the densest writing I've ever encountered. Even the margins are tiny so each of the 400 pages looks like a wall of text. So many of the reviews made this book sounds like it was going to be a Jared Diamond or Nathaniel Philbrick-esque pop history. It was not. It was like printed NyQuil.

But of course, the upside of cramming so much academic information into one book is that you have ALL the information crammed into one book. I honestly feel like I could show up at an archaeology or prehistoric religious studies conference and be part of the conversation. If you read this book, you will never need to read another book on the topic, ever again. It is all here.

I confess to picking this up in the first place because I grew up in England in the mid 90s, and made many trips to Stonehenge when friends or family came to visit us. I remember all the visitor information being vague and uncertain... Stonehenge is a mystery, etc. Even their little book store was thinly stocked. At some point then, I read Bill Bryson's Road to Little Dribbling where he visits Avebury and can't find any information about it. THEN I read Voyager in the Outlander series where they find a f**cking stone circle in Haiti and that just seems bananas to me. So I thought I would sort myself out and get all the info from this very authoritative text.
And you know what I learned? Nobody knows anything. Stonehenge, the standing stones at Lewis, Avebury... all still incredibly mysterious. All anyone can say is they were almost certainly ceremonial, and almost certainly not built by aliens. There was a brief opportunity to get recorded history of pagan practices when the Romans colonized the British Isles, and typically tried to integrate with local gods/religions, but written records are still frustratingly sparse. For all the speculation and folklore around Druids, there are only two written accounts of suspect reliability from Roman writers; also sparse on details. This window of opportunity then closed a few hundred years later, when Christianity became the state religion, brought by the Romans and then later adopted by the Anglo-Saxons. There seems to have been a long-standing assumption in academic circles that Christianity was merely a veneer; that underneath it all, from pre-Roman Britian to the Victorian age, there was a formal pagan religion with gods, rules, and magical practices, handed down in secret. But recent academic work can find no evidence of this, other than the vague, general folklore of a parallel spirit world that we (or well-trained witches and wizards) can interact with, populated with fairies, elves, hobgoblins, magic spells, charms, etc. In fact it seems that rather than hiding paganism and sorcery behind Christianity, the British of the Middle Ages integrated the two, merging practices and traditions in music, worship sites, folklore, burial customs, seasonal festivals, and even right down to the specific practice of decorating your home at Christmas/winter solstice time with greenery.

I might be exhausted and glad to be finished with this book, but I also now feel like an authority on the subject. I think I will look up Hutton's other book about Driuds (Blood and Mistletoe?) for some holiday reading this year. Oh, I see that one is 500 pages. Merry Solstice to me!

[Amanda Wood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This did not give me anything I was hoping for in a book about pagan Britain. The entire book could be summed up as "X researcher thinks this, and Y researcher thinks this, but we just don't know and never will!" Who wants to read that? Maybe I vastly overestimated the contents of this book as being for a gen pop readership, because this was a very dense academic text, the likes of which I haven't encountered since my undergrad days.

A HUGE amount of this book (over half) focuses on mesolithic/neolithic Britain - think cave paintings and the oldest human remains found on the islands. It turns out that so little is known about this period that every single idea about what structures or burial practices could have meant are pure conjecture. It ALSO turns out, much to my surprise, that researchers also apparently know very little about basically every era after that as well, including how native pagan religions survived into the Roman period in Britain. Actually, that's not entirely true - there is a wealth of information to be had, but this author chooses not to speculate or form any kind of conclusion about any of it. A great deal of the conclusion of this book is spent telling readers that since we know basically nothing for certain, they're welcome to come to their own conclusions about the data presented. Again, maybe as a layperson with no academic knowledge of pagan anthropology and a mere unacademic curiosity about the subject, I'm not the target audience of this book.

This text is undoubtedly extremely well researched and the author is a very skilled writer for academic audiences, but I learned very little. Even the status of pagan practices in the medieval period to the present is presented as an educated guess at best, which doesn't sit right with me and is incredibly frustrating. Obviously the author can only present the evidence that's been found, but it seems like there are more conclusions to be drawn than the author claims. Almost every other sentence is appended with some version of, " ... but since we really have no way of knowing, everything that is conjectured here could be completely and totally false." I find it very difficult to believe that so few conclusions can be drawn with any degree of certainty.

Honestly, this was such a slog. If you're using this for research or some other academic purpose, great, but I don't know how enjoyable it can be for an average reader.

[A W · Rating 5 out of 5]

What did the prehistoric people who would eventually become the British believe? This is a far from simple question to answer since they had no written culture for much of their history and although many of the marks they left behind on the landscape have become iconic images, they are also decidedly enigmatic.
If anyone is going to come close to the task, then Professor Hutton is surely the man for the job. Not providing an off the peg answer of course, but doing something almost as difficult, bringing together the complex strands of the most up to date research on the subject and weaving them into something a non-expert can both understands and enjoy reading.
The breadth of material he brings together is staggering, as is the period it covers, running from the Palaeolithic period to the arrival of the Romans and soon after of Christianity. Along the way he touches on the various debates about the meaning of Stonehenge, Avebury Ring and many other less well known, but sometimes even more fascinating sites.
This involves bringing together archaeology, history, anthropology, academic disciplines that all have a propensity for disagreeing with each other and fighting amongst themselves. He also gives a fair hearing to the folklore and esoteric explanations that have sprung up around what these curious artifacts might have meant to their builders.
In doing so Hutton, a leading light in studying the pagan aspects of British history and how it has influenced later re-inventions of the ‘old ways’ as something other than an amusing eccentricity, shows an admirably open mind. This matters since many of the ‘traditions’ we imagine to be impossibly ancient are really half understood corruptions of what might have gone on back in the heptarchy.
History, more than most academic disciplines, thrives on disputes with the young Turks always out to pull down the old guard. It takes a truly brilliant mind to bring together all the different factions and an even more remarkable talent for communication to make those of us outside the common room understand why the row matters.

[Rowdy Geirsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a mixed bag and not exactly what I had expected it to be, which is somewhat due to my own ignorance on the specific subject matter and the manner in which the book is packaged and marketed (the blurb on the front cover that it is a “synthesis of archaeology, history, anthropology, and folklore” being a prime culprit). Basically, this book is an extensive survey of Britain’s pagan past—as its title suggests—but because its pagan past is mostly prehistoric, the bulk of the book focuses on archaeology. History, anthropology, and folklore are touched on, but are secondary to archaeology. And archaeology can provide for some very dry reading. So be prepared for some lengthy descriptions of stone monuments, bog deposits, and graves that go back to the very beginning (the Palaeolithic). Because so little is actually known about the belief systems, rituals, lore, etc. in general of Britain prior to the arrival of the Romans and, subsequently, Christianity, there isn’t nearly as much for Hutton to say on those matters. Also, just to be nit-picky, there is a bit of an imbalance in photos—there are many more photos in the first half of the book than the second.

Hutton does a good job of presenting the facts and the different points of view and opinions that scholars have generated over the years about the pagan past. In fact, the part of the book I found to be most interesting were the discussions about how these attitudes have varied as time has passed, and how so much of what we think we know about pagan Britain now is likely just a by-product of the wishful thinking of 19th and 20th century historians and writers and their early modern predecessors (the Green Man and the Great Goddess are good examples of this). Hutton covers this material well, and makes a solid effort to provide examples and counter-examples. His approach sticks to the facts, points out the differences in mindset among interpretations, but remains neutral rather than attempting himself to advocate any one option of interpretation. Overall, I found the book to be informative and comprehensive for its chosen subject matter, but a bit of a slog to get through.

[Phloebus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hillary Mantel has a quote that 'history isn't the past. It is just what is left in the sieve after the centuries have flowed through it'.

Pagan Britain is a wonderful exploration of those remaining grains and a manifesto for turning lack of knowledge into a source of strength.

The general thrust is that anyone wanting to find out The Truth About Druids or The Real Meaning Of Stonehenge is going to be disappointed. We do not know, and we cannot know. This book is a comprehensive chronological overview of Pagan Britain and also a 400-page open admission of ignorance.

In a world where everyone else promises 'solutions', this might seem like a perverse approach, but it works here for two reasons:

1) The author shows, time and again, how previous solutions reflect their advocates' views more than the evidence. Historian during the British empire? You'll be keen on waves of invasions then. 1970s Corduroy Marxist? Those post-holes tell us a lot about class struggle. On the edge of academia, let's guess, you've got edgy views...

2) There really *isn't* much evidence to go on.

Once this sinks in, the approach becomes rather exhilirating. Provided (always!) that we stick within the boundaries provided by the evidence we have great freedom to create our own histories.

Which, of course, is a reflection of our own age... Looking around modern Britain it is impossible to view the present as monolithic, so why try to impose that straitjacket on the past?

[Iain · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you seek some light reading, keep seeking.
If you are comfortable with reasonable weighty academic writing and have a passion for pre-history, then you would do worse than to dive in.
Should you do so, you’ll be rewarded by a tremendously erudite and comprehensive, epic immersion in Britain’s spiritual story from pre-history to the Middle Ages.

Hutton’s genius and one of the triumphs of this book is his ability to pull together findings and theories from academically separate disciplines and in doing so, makes clear the benefits to be gained from cross-discipline research along with highlighting the gaps that are left in our collective interpretation of our past in its absence.

This is a superb piece of historical, archaeological and anthropological writing in learned and thoroughly referenced prose. Importantly, it is unflinching in its honest treatment of the archaeological record - and importantly the lack of it.
Never reaching for questionable conclusions, Hutton goes to great lengths to discuss what a paucity of artefacts, reliable datable context and contemporary sources means for the disciplines and in doing so leaves us intellectually empowered and richer for it.