The farming year in 18th-century Sussex

You may (or may not) already know this, but researching the long 18th century in 2023 is rarely a life-affirming, paradigm-shifting conversation over wine with Plato in the groves of academe. It is seldom, even, a couple of tins of warm lager on the train home after guesting on an episode of Start the Week. It is sometimes, though, sitting in an archive transcribing the traces of long-vanished lives, conscious of the passing of time, quietly excited but still wondering if any of this actually matters, whether the partial recovery of someone else’s life really is the fullest way of living your own.

Reading Ian Marchant’s deeply moving new book involves the realisation that the excavation of the past can indeed be among the most pleasurable and purposeful ways of finding meaning in the present. This awareness is especially urgent for Marchant, since, in January 2020, shortly before the announcement of the first coronavirus case in the UK, he was diagnosed with incurable prostate cancer. Around this time, too, he discovered that he had an 18th-century ancestor who had kept a diary for 14 years. Unsure about how long he had left, Marchant sought relief from the rounds of chemo in the investigation of how one of his forebears had measured out his days.

Thomas Marchant (1676-1728) was a well-connected, prosperous Sussex farmer, who recorded his household and parochial business and the ways in which he spent his leisure time (including prodigious bouts of drinking and punishing hangovers) in a diary between 1714 and 1728. Edited by Anthony Bower, it was published by the Hurst History Study Group in 2005. It is mainly known to 18th-century specialists as a key document in the history of cricket, and by extension the recreation of the rural English ‘middling sort’, since Marchant regularly recorded (in extremely spare terms, it must be said) his son Will turning out for the parish team.