Arthur Burns
Historian who chronicled the history of the Church of England
ARTHUR BURNS, who has died of cancer aged 60, was professor of modern British history at King’s College London, with a particular interest in the Church of England; he also played a central role in projects to make historical data more widely available to researchers via the internet.
He was the driving force, with Professors Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, behind the Clergy of the Church of England Database Project, a constantly updated digital record of the careers of every Anglican clergyman in England and Wales from the Reformation to the start of the Victorian age (15401835).
The project, begun in 1999, involved visiting more than 50 record offices across the country to unearth ledger books filled in by long-dead diocesan officials, followed by the recruitment of around 100 volunteers whose labours produced details of clerical appointments, ordinations and resignations, subsequently uploaded into a master database, launched in 2005.
As well as shining a light on such individuals as James Mayne, campaigning 19th-century curate of Bethnal Green, and Richard Thursfield, vicar of Pattingham, a man “frequently seen lying in the roads in a state of intoxication”, the material suggests that there were far fewer clergy than is generally assumed, partly because they often held more than one post at a time. Another surprise was the high number of women among patrons – people with the right to nominate clergymen to benefices.
Arthur Burns was born in Barnard Castle on February 7 1963 to Robert Burns and Barbara, née Hurst, but brought up in Ludlow, Shropshire, where he attended the local grammar school before going on to read history at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating with a First he did a Dphil under the Rev Professor Peter Hinchliff, and combined teaching at Mansfield College with a post as sub-editor of Past and Present. His doctorate was published in 1999 as The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England, in which he described how 19thcentury churchmen, faced with the pastoral challenge of a rapidly changing society, revived the office of rural dean and enhanced the role of archdeacons. He charted a resurgence in grassroots Anglican institutions led by older, “orthodox” Trollopian churchmen who resisted High Church-low Church partisanship.
In 1992 Burns arrived at King’s College London, and served as Vice Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities (2014-2017).
He co-edited a prizewinning history of St Paul’s Cathedral and published on the dynamics of reform in Hanoverian Britain.
In 2017 he was appointed academic director of the Georgian Papers Programme, a 10-year project to digitise 65,000 items (425,000 pages) in the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period.
At the time of his death Burns was working on a history of Christian socialism in the parish of Thaxted, Essex, notable among other things for the incumbencies of the “Red Vicar”, Conrad Noel (1910-1942), who caused ructions by hanging the red flag and the flag of Sinn Fein alongside that of Saint George, and Peter Elers (1973-1984), one of the first clergymen to declare his homosexuality.
An active member of historical societies, as vice-president (education) of the Royal Historical Society from 2012 to 2016, Burns did valiant battle with Michael Gove over the place of history in the overhaul of the national curriculum. Latterly he sat on the Contested Heritage Committee of the Church of England Church Buildings Council.
In 1998 Arthur Burns married fellow historian Sarah Stockwell, who survives him with three sons.