JOHN McMANNERS, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, will be remembered in scholarly circles for his distinguished contribution to the history of France, her Church and her revolution.

John McManners — known to family and friends as Jack — was born on Christmas Day, 1916, in the coalmining area of Co Durham. His father, Joseph, was a miner who, in 1930, was ordained into the Church of England, ministered to his own people in Ferryhill as curate and vicar, and finished his ministry in York. His mother, Ann, was a schoolteacher.

McManners, who would keep his soft Durham accent all his life, went to the local school at Ferryhill and the Alderman Wraith Grammar School in Spennymoor. In 1935 he went up as a history exhibitioner to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and discovered the excitement of scholarship as he sat at the feet of the medievalist A. B. Emden, whose tutorials often stretched out into three-hour marathons. He took a first in the history school in 1939 and was poised for further years of research when the war broke out and he joined up.

He was commissioned into the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and served with them through the shifting fortunes of the campaign in the Western Desert. He was at the siege of Tobruk, commanded a company in the retreat to the Alamein line, and fought through Alamein to the fall of Tunis. After victory, as a major at Cairo GHQ, he served with the 210 British Liaison Unit (Greek Mission), and one of his proud possessions was the decoration of the Order of King George II of the Hellenes, awarded him by the King of Greece in 1945.

In 2002 he published Fusilier, a book of recollections about his war service, which was praised as a thoughtful, sensitive depiction of men at arms. It did not romanticise the brutality of war or the harshness of barrack-room life. Neither did it shy away from the absurd moments of a military campaign — the spirit of Evelyn Waugh’s Guy Crouchback was never very far away. Above all it combined a warm picture of the hard men with whom he served with an attempt at a theological comment on bloodshed and chaos: “You can, almost in despair, turn to the God who suffers with His creation, accepting the burden of sin that arises from human freedom, and taking it on Himself.”

The war over, but deeply affected by his experiences, McManners returned to his native county and to his father’s vocation. He read theology at St Chad’s College, Durham, and was ordained deacon in 1947 and priest in 1948. After serving a curacy at Leeds Parish Church, he returned to Oxford, to his former college as chaplain and lecturer and, from 1949, as chaplain and Fellow in history.

While teaching a wide range of subjects, he also represented the college, disguised as an undergraduate, in the tennis VI and the second XI hockey team, as well as administering decanal discipline with a mixture of firmness and an understanding of youthful fallen human nature. His carefully prepared puns produced appreciative groans from generations of undergraduates.

In 1951 he married Sarah Carruthers Errington and they started out on a happy married life. With their first son they lived in married quarters within the college, an unheard-of thing in times of undiluted male society.

In 1956, after much heart-searching but drawn by a boyhood fascination for Australia, McManners moved to take up the chair of history in the University of Tasmania. He arrived in Hobart to find himself embroiled in an unhappy controversy over the dismissal of the professor of philosophy, Sidney Orr. It was a cause célèbre with important implications for university administration in Australia, and McManners’s deep belief in justice and fairness forced him, despite his hatred of strife and intrigue, to take sides against the Establishment. In 1959, after three years of this unhappy atmosphere, he was relieved to be offered the chair of history at the University of Sydney.

In later years he often talked of his enjoyment in being part of a large, vigorous and experimenting department, and of the beauty of his house on Kangaroo Hill overlooking the bay. A taste of Oxford, when he returned to the UK as visiting Fellow to All Souls in 1965, did not diminish his affection for Australia, and he would happily have remained there if the desire to be nearer his aged parents had not persuaded him to return to England in 1967.

There followed five years as professor of history in the University of Leicester until, in 1972, the Queen appointed him to the Regius Chair of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford and to a canonry in Christ Church. He settled into his splendid lodgings in Tom Quad, continuing his research and writing, and reinforcing the historical importance of his chair, which some historians in the university had come to view with suspicion and unfriendliness.

His first book, in 1960, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: a Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century had established him at once as one of the foremost scholars in the field of French history, and his subsequent books, especially The French Revolution and the Church (1969) and Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (1972), confirmed this reputation.

McManners’s scholarship reflected the qualities which made him popular: humour, a sympathetic understanding of the saintly and of the wicked, and the ability to breathe life into a mass of detail and documentation.