Sept. 2024: That other prolific Norfolk diarist James Woodforde

Margaret Bird has become Chairman of the Parson Woodforde Society. For the moment Margaret will not be accepting invitations to speak on Mary Hardy and related issues. She has spent 36 years bringing the diarist Mary Hardy to the public, publishing in nine volumes and regularly giving illustrated presentations.

Now James Woodforde, that other prolific 18th-century Norfolk diarist, has claimed her attention.

Mary Hardy and Woodforde are in exalted company. They are named among just nine ‘Georgian witnesses’: key diarists from the mid-17th to early 19th centuries who observed and recorded Georgian daily life.

The two appear alongside such famous names as John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Fanny Burney and William Cobbett.

The Parson Woodforde Society

In 2021 Margaret Bird became the President of the Parson Woodforde Society (PWS), founded in 1968 to extend and develop knowledge of the life of the Revd James Woodforde (1740–1803) and the society in which he lived.

She also served as Acting Chairman of the Society for 18 months to September 2024, at which point she resigned the presidency and was elected Chairman.

She has been busy redesigning and uploading material to the Society’s website, a valuable resource in its own right. It contains a wealth of information concerning Woodforde’s career in his home county of Somerset, his time at Oxford, and his role as parish priest at Weston Longville, north-west of Norwich.

It has been a fascinating time. The website tries to dispel many popular myths about the clerical diarist. He was no glutton; his quiet spirituality illuminated all his actions; and in his younger days he revealed a combative, assertive aspect of his character quite unlike the more retiring persona of his later years.

Woodforde’s world in a dozen objects

As a way of enhancing the appeal of a rural 18th-century cleric the website features twelve objects from which we can learn a great deal about the diarist, his extended family and the era in which he lived.

These objects include Woodforde’s longcase clock, now in the Society’s possession, and the Custance family pew at Weston. Descriptions of these objects spark discussions of the way of life of the time, as with the Royal Arms in his parish church. Even the depiction of the cream jug of a clerical neighbour of Woodforde’s, also in the Society’s possession, leads to an analysis of loneliness and depression among the clergy.

Woodforde as a total contrast with Mary Hardy

It is wrong to characterise Woodforde, as is often done, as a typical Georgian parson. As argued elsewhere on this website, there was no such being. The clergy appear in both diaries in all their complex variety.

The diaries read very differently, despite being written only 18 miles apart in the latter part of the century and being contemporaneous with one another from 1773. Mary Hardy came from a family with strong commercial and manufacturing interests; Woodforde was of farming and clerical stock. The Hardys were staunch Whigs, attracted to the radicalism of Charles James Fox; Woodforde was an equally steadfast Tory—although he never voted in the county elections after moving to Norfolk in 1776. He felt too ill to get to the polling booth in Norwich in 1802, and the county elections had been uncontested since 1768.

Even the manuscript diaries offer a complete contrast. Mary Hardy wrote her 36-year daily record in just five huge ledgers in a generous hand, using numerous contractions; tidiness of presentation is not to the fore. James Woodforde wrote his daily record 1759–1802 in no fewer than 72 notebooks and on more than 100 loose leaves of paper. These were lodged in the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1959 by members of the Woodforde family. The clerical diarist took immense care with the look of each page, and wrote in a tiny hand which is very hard to read without a magnifying glass.

Comparing diarists’ work can be very rewarding, as explained by Professor Richard Wilson at a talk in 2013. He contrasted the diary of Mary Hardy with that of a 19th-century Norfolk clergyman, the Revd Benjamin Armstrong, Vicar of East Dereham.

Points of connection

As well as serving as ‘Georgian witnesses’ Woodforde and Mary Hardy have other points of connection.

Both were thankful for the arrival of peace in 1783 after the end of the American war. Both joined the throng in Norwich in March that year to watch the procession of the woolcombers celebrating the resumption of trade following the end of hostilities with the Americans, French, Spanish and Dutch.

Woodforde did not care to visit alehouses and minor public houses. He had none of the Hardys’ free-and-easy ways. He did patronise leading inns however, such as the Pitt Arms, as it then was, at Burnham Market (seen at the banner at the head of this page) and the Feathers at Holt. Both houses were supplied with Letheringsett beer and for some of the diary years were tied to the Letheringsett brewery.

You can read about Woodforde’s uneasy relationship with licensed houses on the Parson Woodforde Society website:

https://www.parsonwoodforde.org.uk/features-object-weston-old-hart

As noted at the end of that piece,

It is perhaps ironic that a man who turned his back on his local should nevertheless have a very successful brewery named after him. Ray Ashworth, who in 1981 founded Woodforde’s Norfolk Ales, later known as Woodforde’s Brewery, chose to name his fledgling enterprise after the enthusiastic clerical home brewer who produced strong audit ales for his tithe frolics at Weston Rectory.