There’s something ironic about Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament. His 1605 plot failed but in a strange twist, the place accidentally burned down about 200 years later.

But although we remember Mr Fawkes each Bonfire Night, historian and Parliamentary archivist Caroline Shenton points out few of us realise the Houses of Parliament he tried to destroy are not the ones we see now. When Ms Shenton, who lives in Charlbury, went to work for the Parliamentary archive almost 15 years ago, one of first things she learned was that in the autumn of 1834 almost all the records of the House of Commons were destroyed in the fire.

“I was surprised I’d never heard of it,” she said.

“And although it must have been a terrible blaze, I couldn’t find much information about it. “I was incredibly curious and started ferreting through records to see what was there.”

Starting with the record of public inquiry, she moved on to contemporary accounts before shoving it into a drawer and forgetting about it.

Eight years later, she decided to pick up where she had left off and it soon became “a complete obsession”.

Because there is no single account of the fire, she drew on hundreds of snippets taken from diaries and eye-witness accounts. “It was real detective work and I found out there were a lot of myths around the fire,” she said.

In fact, she became so fascinated, she detailed it in a book The Day Parliament Burned Down, published last year.

It has won a slew of accolades, including being named 2013 political book of the year.

The reason the destruction of Parliament has been forgotten about, she believes, is because today’s Houses of Parliament is so iconic, the earlier building has been all but obliterated from memory.

The fire was caused by the burning of old tally sticks, pieces of long, thin wood used in the Middle Ages to provide a permanent receipt of the amount of tax collected.

By the 19th century, they were no longer in use and a pile of them being destroyed in the basement triggered the blaze that wiped out an 800-year-old building. “A whole chunk of history has gone” she says of the lost records.

“We don’t know what we lost. “Happily, we do have House of Lords documents, as they all survived the fire, and much of the stuff was duplicated.”

She shares a literary agent with Man Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel and gives talks at literary and arts festivals all over the country. Invitations to be a guest on political shows, such as the Westminster Hour, radio programmes and local history societies also regularly arrive.

“I really like telling people the story,” she explained.

She emphasises that Parliament is not a lofty place, removed from everyday life but has a strong influence on local communities.

For centuries, it has touched the lives of ordinary people everywhere, she points out.

She encourages people to go to their local archive to find out more about the history of their local area, describing the Oxfordshire Record Office in Cowley as “great”.

She’s well aware that historians and archivists have to battle a public perception that they are a crusty, dusty lot, buried under realms of ancient parchment.

Hence her tongue-in-cheek choice of ‘dust shoveller’ as her Twitter name.

Although, as she points out indignantly: “Any archive worth its salt will not have dusty documents. “It’ll be in nice new boxes cleaned up and kept at a perfect temperature.”

Born in Evesham, her family moved the short distance north to the West Midlands and she studied history and English at St Andrews University.

She graduated in medieval history, winning a prize for the best finals of her year.

After a year spent working for a public relations company in Cambridge, she concluded that line of work wasn’t for her but it helped sharpen her writing skills.

On returning to academia, she completed a doctorate at Oxford’s Worcester College on the court and household of Edward III. While researching at the Public Records Office, now the National Archives, she spotted a job advertisement for medieval cataloguers that might have been written with her mind, as she ticked so many boxes.

From there, she progressed to senior archivist before moving on and up to the Parliamentary archives.

She enjoys living in Charlbury because it keeps her in close proximity to the Bodleian and adds “there’s not a more beautiful view than that along the Evenlode Valley as you drive to Burford”.

In her own work, she tries to be as clear and understandable as possible.

“I hate reading history books that are deliberately obscure,” she said.

“History at any level should be really easy to read.

I tend to throw books across the room, or out of the bath if I am reading there, if they are poorly written.

Pride of place in her sitting room is given to a harpsichord, played by her husband Mark Purcell, 45, who is curator for the National Trust’s 168 libraries.

While she was at Worcester, he was studying history at Oriel. He ran the chapel choir and they met when she auditioned as a soprano.

She apologises for the piles of books and papers everywhere in their sitting room.

“Both of us are in the process of writing books, so every surface is piled up with papers.

“We’re a paper-heavy household at the moment,” she joked.

She hasn’t sung for years, not having time what with the two-hour each-way daily commute to London.

Of working at the Houses of Parliament, she says “It’s a wonderful building and I don’t think you ever get over the sensation that you are walking through a film set. “The only other place I have had that feeling is Radcliffe Square.”

She’s busily penning a sequel to The Day Parliament Burned Down, which will be published in 2016. Meanwhile, she’s on a mission to let people know there’s treasure, rather than dust in archives.

“We have 500 years’ worth of stories to tell, so there’s always some fabulous new nugget to discover.

“There are millions and millions of stories yet to be uncovered and helping people to find them is what being an archivist is about.”