Arthur Burns
From the Army to the Church: The Post-war Clerical Career of British Military Men
This paper attempts to open up a neglected subject, the interrelationship between professions in the early nineteenth century. It offers a preliminary report on an investigation into the extent to which the post-1815 Anglican clergy was marked by its exposure to the conflicts of the Napoleonic era, both in terms of a change in the life-experiences of the clergy, but also as a point of reference in the performance of the range of roles clerical professionals undertook in this period, from pastoralia to the magistracy.
Arthur Burns is Professor of Modern British History at King’s College London and a Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. With colleagues at the Universities at Kent and Reading he has been a pioneer of the use of web-based databases in advanced historical research in collaboration with the wider public, creating the Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835, and has published widely on the history of the Church of England since 1750, and his interest in wider questions concerning reform is reflected in the volume he co-edited with Joanna Innes, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (2003). He is currently working on the history of the parish of Thaxted, Essex, in the twentieth century.
