Specialising in Early Modern Britain, he wrote three books on the subject: The Royalist War Effort (1981), The Restoration (1985), and Charles the Second (1990).

[3] "I had begun in the 1960s by believing completely in the concept of early modern witchcraft as a Pagan religion of feminism, liberation, and affirmation of life.

In 1973 I debated against the historian Norman Cohn at Cambridge University, defending the historical legitimacy of Charles Godfrey Leland's "witches' gospel" Aradia, and was floored by him.

During the rest of the decade my belief in the old orthodoxy concerning the witch trials slipped away, as I read more and more of the new research and checked the original records (for England and Scotland) myself."

[7] Upon arriving in England, he attended Ilford County High School, whilst becoming greatly interested in archaeology, joining the committee of a local archaeological group and taking part in excavations from 1965 to 1976, including at such sites as Pilsdon Pen hill fort, Ascott-under-Wychwood long barrow, Hen Domen castle and a temple on Malta.

He 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.

[12] Another feminist critic, Max Dashu, condemned the work as containing "factual errors, mischaracterizations, and outright whoppers" and said she was "staggered by the intense anti-feminism of this book".

Many Pagans embraced his work, with the prominent Wiccan Elder Frederic Lamond referring to it as "an authority on the history of Gardnerian Wicca".

In his review for the academic Folklore journal, Jonathan Roper of the University of Sheffield noted that the work "could profitably have been twice as long and have provided a more extended treatment of the issues involved" and that it suffered from a lack of images.

On the whole he thought it should be "recommended to readers as an important work" on the subject of shamanism, and hoped that Hutton would "return to treat this fascinating topic in even greater depth in future".

[20] In 2003, Hambledon & London also published Witches, Druids and King Arthur, a collection of various articles by Hutton, including on topics such as the nature of myth and the pagan themes found within the works of J.R.R.

[23] The review by Noel Malcolm in The Daily Telegraph was a little more critical, claiming that whilst Hutton was "non-sensationalist and scrupulously polite" about the various Druidic eccentrics, "occasionally, even-handedness tips over towards relativism – as if there are just different ways of looking at reality, each as good as the other.

[26] Interviewing Hutton for The Independent, the journalist Gary Lachman commented that he had "a very pragmatic, creative attitude, recognising that factual error can still produce beneficial results", for instance noting that even though their theories about the Early Modern witch-cult were erroneous, Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner would help lay the foundations for the creation of the new religious movement of Wicca.

He 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.