Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 299

Following the publication in 2013 of four volumes of Mary Hardy’s diary, along with that kept by her nephew Henry Raven while an apprentice at the Hardy family’s brewery, Margaret Bird has now produced four volumes exploring 39 distinct topics covered in the diaries and portraying Mary Hardy’s world. The first two volumes include family and working life, and quickly dispel any notions that Georgian country life was remote, static and changeless.

Although historians had been made aware of the diaries and the wealth of information in them by the extracts published by Mary’s descendant, Basil Cozens Hardy in 1957 and 1968, it is only now with their publication that their full value can be appreciated. Their significance has been ably demonstrated in Margaret Bird’s exhaustive and detailed work. There are many reasons why the diaries are so valuable. They are a detailed daily record covering 36 years. They are written, not by one of the gentry or aristocracy, but are a factual account written by a busy woman and active member of a working family, covering the domestic, agricultural, manufacturing, shipping, political and religious concerns with which she was fully involved. There is no introspection, opinions are rarely expressed and no conversations recorded.

The daughter of a village grocer, Mary married William Hardy, an excise officer who was moved from posting to posting. His ambitions were elsewhere, and starting as a manager of a rural brewery in the Norfolk village of Coltishall, he raised money through mortgages and property owned by his wife to buy his own brewery in 1781, developing his business to the point where the family fortunes enabled the purchase in 1803 of the neighbouring Letheringsett Hall and the extension of his landholding in the parish. The diary is a disciplined record of events and reveals a husband-and-wife partnership in both domestic and business matters. Mary died aged 75 in 1809, just as her son was enlarging the hall, developing the grounds and extending the estate, thus ensuring entry to the gentry class.

In Volume I we are introduced to Mary’s family, early married life in Coltishall and the move to the north Norfolk village of Letheringsett. Appendices cover a dictionary of Norfolk dialect, a recipe book compiled by Mary’s daughter and a complete list of the servants working for the family from 1772. A helpful family chronology starting in 1732 is included as an appendix in both volumes. Volume II covers the family’s business interests; the running of the farm, milling, malting, brewing and the managing public houses tied to the brewery, with appendices detailing other Norfolk and Suffolk breweries and the tied public houses. The evidence from the diary is painstakingly put in the context of both the place and the time in meticulous detail making extensive use of the most up-to-date secondary literature, occasionally challenging long-held views based on evidence in the diary.

Beginning with an overview of Norfolk and specifically the villages of Coltishall and Letheringsett, the author questions the view that villages in the densely populated north and east of the county were ‘remote’. While recognizing that both settlements were on major routeways (Coltishall was on a navigable river and Letheringsett on a main road) the author points out that, while living in Coltishall, Mary Hardy was within three miles, an easy walking distance, of 17 other parishes, some admittedly very depopulated by the eighteenth century and, similarly, from Letheringsett, 25 could be visited. Using both census and map evidence Bird builds up a picture of the landscape, society and economies surrounding these two villages.

The origins of the two diarists are then explored in detail. Mary Hardy, born Mary Raven, came from a large extended family of Ravens in the small Norfolk village of Whissonsett. The many branches of the family, which included farmers and craftsmen as well as her parents, who ran the village grocer’s shop, are all described in detail, as is William Hardy’s Yorkshire background. Born in 1732, he joined the excise in 1757 and remained an officer with postings all over the country for 12 years. During postings in Norfolk he met Mary and they were married in Whissonsett in 1765. Shortly after he left the excise service, a poorly paid and itinerant occupation not suited to married life, and took on the brewery in Coltishall in 1772.

A second section entitled ‘nurturing the young’, deals with an under-researched topic. The subject of childbirth, the role of the ‘gossip’ or a supportive friend during labour, and the choice and hiring of wet nurses are all covered in the diary and comparative material discussed. This is followed by the subject of schooling. All her children attended local schools. The type of education available for the ‘middling sort’ has been little researched, but Margaret Bird includes a detailed study of the local endowed grammar schools attended by her two sons, and the ladies’ academies thought suitable for her daughter. In this she was helped by the survival of an extensive archive held by Gresham’s School, which began as an endowed grammar school in Holt, the nearest market town to Letheringsett.

The third section describes the two houses, one at Coltishall and one at Letheringsett, inhabited by the family. While the Coltishall house was on a scale suitable for a brewery manger, Letheringsett Hall was a much grander affair, especially after it was extended by Mary’s son (another William). As a result of extensive research, Margaret Bird has managed to establish that the rather heavy Doric portico was the work of the Holt architect, William Mindham. Although his obituary in 1843 described him as ‘an eminent architect of Holt’, this is the first time any work has been ascribed to him. Mary Hardy died in 1809, just as the major works began on the house and much of this section dealing with the laying out of the grounds describes changes made after the diary ends. One detail however is of particular interest and was typical of the ‘enlightenment’ thinking of the time. Beauty could be made to serve utility and profit and this is clearly shown in the complicated water works which provided the pure water needed by the brewery across the road as well as the power to work the malt mill with the creation of ponds and water features near the house.

Of particular interest is the section on servants. Throughout the period of the diary two maidservants were kept, one responsible for cleaning of the house and the other for cooking and the dairy. This seems a very small number, especially as the size of the establishment increased with the move to Letheringsett Hall and the amount of entertainment of visitors on business that had to be provided often at short notice. This heavy workload, coupled with Mary Hardy’s exacting standards and her husband’s short temper may help explain the high turnover of servants, with over a third leaving before their yearly contract ended. It is clear from the diary that Mary often worked alongside her maids. Their living and working conditions are all discussed and compared with the situation elsewhere, but, as Margaret Bird admits, the voice of the servants themselves is rarely heard.

The impression we get of Mary Hardy is of a down-to-earth, hard-working businesswoman, fully engaged in the family business, turning her hand to running a pub when the need arose. It comes as something of a surprise to see her portrait painted in 1785, when she was 51, in which she is beautifully dressed in ribbons and lace with ornately coifed and decorated hair. A painting of 1794 when she was 64 shows her in much plainer clothes, possibly influenced by the more rigorous dress code of Methodism, which she had by this time embraced.

In Volume II we move on from family affairs to the world of work, both on the farm and in the brewing and malting business, beginning with the farm workforce and the role of the ‘farm servant’. It is clear that the accepted meaning of this phrase, particularly in pastoral districts, to describe a young, yearly paid living-in servant does not apply in arable Norfolk. Although these men were hired for a year, they were frequently married and living in local cottages. Their hours were long and there was little time off during the year. When farm work was slack, they would be diverted to help in the maltings and brewery, often delivering beer to the tied pubs across the county.

While at Coltishall, William Hardy hired 41 acres in Horstead and Coltishall for four years from 1774. The lease was transcribed into the diary and a five-course rotation, including an extra crop of barley was practised. On moving to Letheringsett in 1781, he bought alongside the brewery and maltings, 46 acres of scattered holdings. This rose to nearly 400 acres when in 1800 his son bought the 350-acre Letheringsett Hall Farm, thus beginning the formation of the Letheringsett estate, which by 1842 amounted to 2000 acres. In spite of these purchases the family always saw themselves as brewers and maltsters rather than farmers running a vertically integrated enterprise producing much of the hay needed for their dray horses as well as barley for malting, brewing the beer, and then selling it to their tied public houses. It is this record of a mixed business rather than the more usual farming diaries, accounts and General Surveys, that make the account so interesting. The diary gives the dates of the ploughing harvest, and the sowing of barley, which fluctuate wildly and are an indication of varying climatic conditions. The establishing of cropping patterns is difficult to identify as are yield figures or sowing densities, but it is clear that barley was the dominant cereal in this prime barley-growing part of the county. In common with evidence from elsewhere muck carting and manuring was a time-consuming activity and it seems that some was bought in. Store cattle, whose manure was regarded a vital part of any good farming system, were bought at the various autumn cattle fairs, but we learn little about their management and the day-to-day running of the farm, which was left to the Hardys’ highly competent farm manager. Once he had taken over the running of the family business in 1797 William Hardy junior spent time and money on improving his riverside pastures and creating water meadows there. He had frequent meetings with those promoting the technique, but little about his project itself. He bought a flock of the deeply unfashionable Norfolk horn sheep which no doubt grazed on them. A few house cows were managed by Mary herself, and pigs were kept and fed on the waste products of the maltings.

Two-thirds of this second volume is taken up with the family’s main occupation: malting, brewing, and the management of up to 100 public houses. The diaries provide an unusually precise description of a working life in which the Mary and her husband were actively involved. Both at Coltishall and Letheringsett the Hardy’s were small-to-middling brewers with an output of 3500 barrels a year at most while the large Norwich brewers produced 13,000 barrels. The whole business was run by the family plus a clerk and four to five workers, who would be responsible not just for the malting and brewing, but delivering to their outlets in a 50-mile radius, as well as occasionally being diverted to farm work. The diary shows a rapid turnover of clerks and it seems that Mary’s husband William, was an exacting and unsympathetic employer. In 1787, their son, William, left school at 13 to become a brewery apprentice and later, in 1793, Mary’s nephew Henry Raven became an apprentice too, leaving for London in 1797. He too kept a detailed diary that complements his aunt’s, explaining both the malting and brewing process. The diaries to shed light on the role of rural breweries from the late eighteenth century and contrasts with other brewery histories which concentrate on large urban concerns whose records often only begin a century later.

It is fortunate that some of the buildings at Letheringsett survive, and detailed drawings were made of them before their conversion to housing in 2013–15. The long two-storey maltings are architecturally impressive and dominated the view of those travelling north from Holt. They were damaged by fire in 1827 and it is not clear how much rebuilding there had to be, but some of the fabric may well date back to the mid-eighteenth century. William Hardy junior gradually took more control of the brewing business, finally succeeding his father in 1797, and was responsible for initiating remarkable improvements. A supply of clean, soft water was essential for the brewing process and the diary describes the digging of a soft water basin across the road in 1787–88. The following year a leet from the river was diverted under the road through a tunnel to provide power to a malt mill at the end of one of the malthouses and in 1792 a house for the clerk was added.

A final section of Volume II deals with the tied system of pubs which was well-advanced in Norfolk by 1800. There were 25 pubs tied to the Hardy brewery by 1797 with 22 more by 1838, challenging the accepted view that the system of ‘tying’ did not develop until after the change to brewing porter, which required a dark-coloured malt and took longer to mature. A study covering the relationship between breweries and publicans in rural areas is rarely possible and this is one of the many aspects of these journals that makes their study so valuable. Here the relationship was close with publicans frequently calling and being entertained at Letheringsett. However, pub finances were often precarious and publicans, made up of a shifting population of mobile people, frequently fell into debt. Debt was often allowed to build up; after all, an indebted innkeeper was tied by bond and could be difficult to replace if he left or was forced into bankruptcy.

The volume ends with an explanation of the taxation and excise system of the time and an analysis of the financial success of the Hardy businesses as revealed in the journals. The material on which to base a consideration of the financial success of the business is scanty and difficult to interpret, partly because there were so many different elements (the farm, malting, brewing and servicing the pubs), and partly because of the lack of detailed accounts. The period covered by the diary is one when brewers, maltsters and farmers were making increasingly good livings and the family were making a healthy profit of up to £2000 a year, allowing for investment in the business and the purchase of land and Letheringsett Hall in 1803. Although direct comparisons are difficult, capital valuations provided when William junior took over in 1797, and in preparation for his retirement in 1838, appear to show a rise from £16,000 to £65,000. Appendices cover the system for the collection of excise duties and the many officers employed, a directory of breweries in east Norfolk and Suffolk between 1750 and 1809 and finally details of the 101 public houses supplied by the Letheringsett brewery between 1773 and 1896.

These two volumes, amounting to nearly 2000 pages, are the first half of a mighty four-volume work and demonstrate how the diaries reveal an entirely different picture of the female role in business and society to that portrayed in the more usual journals of leisured ladies studied by Amanda Vickery and others. The Hardy family came from humble origins and, within two generations beginning with the purchase of Letheringsett Hall, joined the gentry class. Finally, in the 1890s, the maltings and brewery were sold to a Norwich concern and the family finally disassociated themselves from an industry that had been the source of their wealth.

One of the many values of the diaries which Margaret Bird brings to our attention is the contrast between the working wife and genteel society. Mary and her husband worked as a team and she was not averse to hard and sometimes menial work, supporting the family enterprise, even when it meant taking over the running in an emergency of one of the family’s tied public houses, if necessary, taking her small children with her. On top of domestic duties, she would entertain visiting tradesmen, excise officers and tenants and note in detail matters relating to the brewery, the maltings and the tied public houses. This is in great contrast to the journals of the gentry where the worlds of men and women were separate and clearly defined. In contrast, Mary was an equal business partner with her husband, yet when the occasion demanded, she could sit, beautifully dressed, for her portrait. That such a busy woman could find time to keep a journal is remarkable.

Be in no doubt that Margaret Bird has produced a formidable, detailed, well-researched tour de force showing clearly what can be learnt about a little-studied branch of rural society, the upwardly mobile operators of successful rural businesses, through the pages of a unique journal. Any problems with the density of the text in these beautifully produced volumes are greatly alleviated by the wealth of page-by-page illustrations and the marginal notes and references, which are easy to follow.