Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 350

Nicholas Peacock’s diary concentrates primarily on his activities as a farmer and land agent in County Limerick in the years before and after his marriage in 1747. This edition should be of considerable interest to agricultural historians on both sides of the Irish Sea. Peacock was from the cadet branch of colonists who had followed Cromwell’s army in the 1650s. He acted as land agent to other English settlers, the Hartstonges, even if his frequent distraints against tenants’ cattle, as well as his attempts to conceal his employer’s estate from the creditors, illustrate the starker outlines of the Irish rural economy. The same point is emphasized by the dramatic price fluctuations highlighted by Legg in her introduction, even if the diary makes little direct reference to the two severe winters and food shortages of the years 1739–40 and 1740–1. As Legg also shows, Peacock’s farming activities were diverse, and he was able to exploit the good alluvial soils of the area to grow oats, wheat and barley, as well as peas, beans, vegetables and good quality flax for fine linen production. He also raised sheep, cattle and horses. This agrarian production was sold at local fairs and markets, and paid for in a multiplicity of currencies that indicate Ireland’s chronic shortage of specie at this time, as well as by a series of intricate exchanges and credit relationships.

Through these years, Peacock’s over-riding concern was to get married, partly for financial reasons, and partly because of his desire to have a wife to run the farming household. After a failed attempt in 1740, and a relatively hard-drinking bachelor lifestyle thereafter, he succeeded in his object in 1747, with his marriage to Catherine Chapman, ‘ye begining of ye date of my happyness’, and the end of his serious drinking. Marriage brought extra spending on furnishings and clothes, and (in due course) the expenses of childbirth and rearing.

Rural accounts of this type are rare throughout the ‘three kingdoms’ in the eighteenth century, and are particularly unusual in Ireland, which is also less well served by estate accounts and correspondence. This makes the publication of this diary particularly worthwhile, and valuable for agricultural historians. It also provides two other opportunities. Firstly, it allows an important comparison between the Irish and English agrarian economies, and in the institutional practices and transaction methods of those two economies. Secondly, despite the relatively cryptic entries, it offers a glimpse into the Irish rural society, and the co-existence of the lower rungs of the Protestant ascendancy with Irish Catholic tenants. Peacock’s diary suggests that this relationship was reasonably harmonious, as he allowed his labourers and workmen to visit a nearby holy well on St. Patrick’s day, attended a Catholic wedding and accommodated a Catholic priest on one occasion.

The editorial standards are high throughout this volume, and the introduction provides valuable context, on Peacock’s origins, his family connections, and some of the important facets of his activities as agent, farmer, local officer and husband. There is also a useful glossary of terms, which reveals the meanings of unfamiliar agrarian and dialect terms (such as ‘callops’, from the Irish colpa, full-grown horse or cow). This edition of Peacock’s diary merits careful reading by historians interested in the rural economy and rural life in this period, and extends our understanding of both by some measure.