This article discusses the deposit since the 1950s of the Church of England's local and national records, with particular reference to the eighteenth century, in Lambeth Palace Library and elsewhere, especially local authority archive offices. These records illustrate the established Church's engagement during the “long-eighteenth century,” nationally, regionally and locally, with all levels of English society. The cataloguing and accessibility of these archives significantly contributed to the post-1960s burgeoning of English social and economic history, particularly research about poverty, literacy and education. Frequently such research has neglected the religious-faith base of the creators of these archives. However, parallel research about religion in the lives of laypeople and of English society generally in the “long-eighteenth century” has led to questioning the long-standing hypothesis of English society's secularisation following the seventeenth century Civil Wars. The article therefore provides a case study illustrating parochial and diocesan archives' evidence of religion permeating people's lives. Large numbers of better-off laypeople lived out their religious faith by establishing and sustaining voluntary elementary education for poor children in the 3Rs and the practice of Christian faith and subsequently securing apprenticeships or service for them. Evidence also suggests large numbers of poor parents took up these opportunities.
Lambeth Palace Library's primary function is to preserve the records of the Church of England, but there are ample opportunities for researchers to use these archives to better understand Britain's histories of citizenship, race relations, and migration in the twentieth century. Lambeth Palace Library (LPL) houses documents on projects on race relations undertaken by the British Council of Churches and the Church of England's Board of Social Responsibility's Race and Community Relations Committee, as well as Archbishop Michael Ramsey's correspondence from his tenure as Chair of the National Committee of Commonwealth Immigrants. These papers attest to the Church of England's significant role in urgent national debates on migrant rights and race equality, and the work of organisations representing the interests of Commonwealth migrants as they actively sought the support of church leaders in their campaigns. LPL collections reveal the important place British churches had in building networks, providing funding and supplying resources to support anti-racist organisations, and the ways ideas of Britishness were contested in the 1960s and 1970s around the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts and Race Relations Acts. Papers in LPL collections can also be used to critically examine post-imperial formations of Whiteness, xenophobia and the racialisation of British citizenship.
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