Overview

This third volume covers the middle years at Letheringsett, in barley country. The diarist's husband takes on a brewery apprentice, her nephew Henry Raven (1777-?1825), born like her in the Norfolk village of Whissonsett. The full text of Henry's four-year farming and brewing diary is here intercut with Mary Hardy's abridged record, giving us incomparable insight into working life. The Hardys' business continues to prosper in spite of the war with France: conflict and high taxation form a recurrent backdrop to the diaries. Mary Hardy's world takes on a new dimension--the meeting house. She starts to go to Methodist meetings in nearby villages. It is a quest she spearheads, her husband rarely joining in. Only later does she persuade her daughter and son to take up Methodism too. The set of four volumes is offered at a special price (ISBN 978-0-9573360-4-9), where you can read more about this lavishly illustrated and annotated edition of the diary.

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9780957336025

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Reviews

Two reviews: Incredibly rich material (by the former County Archivist for Surrey, 17 Aug. 2013): Everything about the presentation of this incredibly rich material has been considered with the reader in mind ... If Margaret Bird had 'just' transcribed the whole of Mary Hardy's output, half a million words covering nearly 36 years, ... it would have been a work of an outstanding scale. However, over the last 25 years she has undertaken in-depth research on every topic and person that the entries encompass ... The detailed footnotes, which are rather unusually but very conveniently placed down the side of the page, illuminate what could be otherwise fairly obscure entries ... The [115-page] index is especially user-friendly. (by Maggie Vaughan-Lewis, Journal of the Aylsham Local History Society, Aug. 2013, pp. 294-6) Remarkable feat of scholarly dedication (Eastern Daily Press, 8 June 2013): Over the years I've read - and reviewed - many local books. But this project really is in a class of its own. In fact, I would go so far as to describe it as possibly the greatest single piece of scholarship on a Norfolk topic since the Rev Francis Blomefield embarked on his monumental survey of the county in the 18th century ... And the author has not finished yet: four volumes of commentary and analysis will follow ... By the time she's finished all that then surely the spirit of the Rev Francis ... will have to nod its head to Norfolk's most remarkable feat of historical dedication. (by Trevor Heaton, Books editor)

Author Information

The editor Margaret Bird has been an honorary research fellow in the History department of Royal Holloway, University of London since 2006. For both her first degree at St Anne's College, Oxford and her master's at Royal Holloway she specialised in aspects of English 18th-century history. She has been continuously engaged since 1988 in researching and editing this work, published in five volumes. She has now brought out not only the full text of this diary but of Mary Hardy's nephew Henry Raven, who as the brewery apprentice lived in the same household. Their unusual diaries together total more than 570,000 words. Four volumes of commentary and analysis will follow, entitled Mary Hardy and her World 1773-1809. In June 2015 Margaret Bird won the award of the British Association for Local History (BALH) for Research and Publication as the overall winner in the long-articles category for her article 'Supplying the beer', first published in The Glaven Historian in 2014. She drew on her Mary Hardy research as the principal source for this study of life on the road in late-18th-century Norfolk.

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