Distinguished clergyman and historian of Christianity

The Rev Owen Chadwick, who had died aged 99, was an educator and a prolific historian of Christianity whose works encompassed sweeping narratives, like his two-volume history of the British Victorian church, as well as incisive biographies and vivid pictures of rural church life.

Long associated with Cambridge University, Chadwick was master of Selwyn College there for nearly 30 years, beginning in the mid-1950s, and Regius professor of modern history from 1968.

After an initial work in 1950 on John Cassian, the monk and theologian who brought the ideas of Egyptian monasticism to the West in the fifth century, Chadwick turned out a long series of histories remarkable for their variety, authority and engaging style.

“What is memorable about Chadwick’s writing is its pleasing economy and uncluttered clarity of articulation,” colleague John Morrill, a fellow at Selwyn College, observed. “He wrote as he spoke: to read him is to hear him.”

The Reformation (1964), one of two volumes Chadwick wrote for The Penguin History of the Church - the other was The Christian Church in the Cold War (1993) – was required reading in colleges for decades.

Comprehensive history

When he and his younger brother, Henry, an eminent historian of the early church, were asked by Oxford University Press to produce a comprehensive history of Christianity, he took on the task of overseeing what turned out to be a 16-volume work,

The Oxford History of the Christian Church

. He contributed three volumes himself,

The Popes and European Revolution

(1981),

A History of the Popes, 1830-1914

(1998) and

The Early Reformation on the Continent

(2001). Henry Chadwick died in 2008.

Chadwick was inspired not only by great doctrinal disputes but also by the day-to-day rounds of church life in rural outposts.

Characteristically, he produced both The Victorian Church, a magisterial history published in two volumes, in 1966 and 1971, and Victorian Miniature (1961), an account of a feuding country squire and parson, each of whom kept a diary, which recalled the novels of Anthony Trollope.

William Owen Chadwick was born in 1916 in southeast London, where his father was a barrister. After attending Tonbridge School in Kent, he went to St John’s College in Cambridge to read classics and, just as important by his own account, to play rugby.

Double degree

He earned a degree in history in 1938. Deeply influenced by his teacher, Martin Charlesworth, a Christian historian, and by the imprisonment of the theologian Martin Niemöller in Germany, he stayed an extra year to study theology, earning another first-class degree.

Chadwick enrolled in a theological college near Oxford to study for holy orders. After the Church of England ordained him a deacon in 1940 and a priest the next year, he served for two years as a curate in Huddersfield before becoming chaplain at Wellington College in Berkshire.

In 1947, he was named dean of chapel at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, and in 1949 he married Ruth Hallward, who died this year.

He became master of Selwyn College in 1956. At the time, the college had only junior status at the university, but under his leadership it flourished, becoming a constituent college in 1958, the same year he was appointed Dixie professor of ecclesiastical history. In 1976 Selwyn became one of the first of Cambridge’s all-male colleges to accept women as students.

Chadwick began a two-year term as vice-chancellor of the university in 1969, a time of political turmoil and student protests, which he addressed with democratic reforms.

After retiring from the university in 1983, he was chancellor of the University of East Anglia from 1985 to 1994.

In 1966 Chadwick was put at the head of a commission to redefine parliament’s role in church affairs. The recommendations of the Chadwick Report, as it was known, retained ties between the Church of England and the state but gave the church greater control over the appointment of bishops. It also ended parliament’s nominal control over changes in doctrine and ritual, putting power in the hands of a new body, the general synod.

British Academy

He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1962 and served as its president from 1981 to 1985. He was knighted in 1982. In his later years, he spent much time in Cley next the Sea in Norfolk, of which he was also priest in charge.

Chadwick's many other works include The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1976) and biographies of the Catholic convert John Henry Newman and Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s and 1970s. He also wrote, for the general reader, A History of Christianity (1995).

He is survived by two sons, Charles and Stephen, and two daughters, Helen and Andre.