He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Oxford. He was vicar of Congresbury, Somerset from 1867 to 1882, and then went to London as a reviewer and contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography. He was President of the Royal Historical Society from 1905 to 1909. Hunt wrote over 200 of the Anglo-Saxon entries in the Dictionary of National Biography, including for Wulfstan the Cantor.^[1]

He wrote:

• The Somerset Diocese, Bath and Wells (1885)
• Bristol (1887), part of the 'Historic Towns' series edited by Hunt and Prof. Edward Augustus Freeman.
• The English Church in the Middle Ages (1888)
• The English Church, 597-1066 (1899), the first volume in a series of which he was editor
• the tenth volume of Political History of England (1905–07), of which he was joint editor with R. Lane-Poole
• The Irish Parliament (1907), edited from a contemporary manuscript.

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Hunt, William (1842–1931), historian and biographer by Robert W. Dunning.

• Works by William Hunt at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Hunt at Internet Archive