The Church of England's articles began under Edward VI as the Forty-Two Articles of 1553, compiled by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and issued by royal mandate a few weeks before the young king died. The accession of Mary I swept them away with the rest of the Edwardian settlement, and Cranmer was burned at Oxford in 1556. When the Elizabethan church needed a doctrinal statement of its own, the Convocation of Canterbury took Cranmer's text up again in 1563 under Archbishop Matthew Parker, dropped several articles aimed at radicals no longer thought a live threat, added others, and brought the number down to thirty-nine. The Latin text agreed in 1563 and the English text finally settled in 1571 differ in one substantial respect: the article on the wicked who do not eat the body of Christ, left out of the earlier version, stands in the later one. Parliament required clerical subscription in 1571, and from then the Articles were printed at the back of the Book of Common Prayer, where they still appear.
They are not a systematic theology and were never meant to be. Each article answers a question that was genuinely in dispute in the middle of the sixteenth century, which is why the collection moves without much apparent plan from the Trinity and the ancient creeds to the sufficiency of Scripture, then to original sin, free will, justification, works before grace and predestination, then to the church, its councils, its ministers and its two sacraments, and finally to oaths, the goods of Christian men, the marriage of priests and the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome. What nobody was arguing about is largely passed over in silence.