Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 136

The economic, social and cultural world of the farmer’s wife is largely a mystery to the historian. In contrast to day labourers and servants on the farm, whose work has been effectively reconstructed in recent years through the careful analysis of estate and farm account books, documentary sources detailing the daily routines of the farmer’s wife remain extremely scarce. Gordon Mingay’s comment, made in the early 1960s, that ‘farmers’ wives and daughters do not emerge very clearly from the contemporary records’ is still pertinent (English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1963, p. 246). Although an attempt was made a few years ago by this reviewer to recover the contribution made by the farmer’s wife using practical farming manuals, encyclopaedias and dictionaries (Verdon, Agricultural History Review, 51, 1, 2003), their place in the farming world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still remains obscure. Ruth Facer’s book is therefore an extremely welcome and valuable volume.

It traces the practical, religious and literary life of Mary Bacon, a farmer’s wife from Hampshire. She came from a strong agricultural and religious background and, from her marriage to William Bacon in 1765, farmed successfully for the rest of the century, first in the village of Cliddesden and then at Aylesfield farm, north of Alton. Although representative of the farmer’s wife of the ‘middling sort’, what is unusual about Mary is that she kept a detailed ledger that has survived and is now housed in the Hampshire Record Office. The ledger, first used as a farm account book by her yeoman farmer uncle Augustin Kinchin, was taken over by Mary in 1789 and she continued to write in it until 1807, by which time she was a widow. Facer is right to argue that the document gives ‘a remarkable insight into the work and mind of a farmer’s wife’, providing a ‘very valuable contribution to the limited knowledge we have of this group of women’ (p. 6).

This book is not a complete transcription of the ledger. Rather it rearranges the content into coherently themed chapters (agriculture, religion, the kitchen, medicinal remedies and so on) and sets it within the context of the age using a wide range of other printed material including newspapers, diaries, farming manuals, almanacs and chapbooks. An inventory of goods listed in the ledger reveals that Mary and William were a prosperous couple who took pride in displaying their status through the acquisition of good-quality furniture and furnishing, and who liked to entertain. Where Mary emerges most vividly however is in the section on human and animal ailments, indicating a cost-conscious concern for animal health and status-conscious interest in community welfare; in the section on cookery, where she shows a particular pleasure in cakes and puddings; and in the chapters on her literary and religious interests, which were central to her life. Facer uses this evidence to show that Mary was a woman of fashionable tastes, of rounded but perhaps limited education. Frustratingly there appears to be much less in the ledger on work. There are few clues as to the number of farm workers or domestic servants employed, although Mary had the help of at least two maids, and the income and expenditure of the farm and household are not kept in the ledger. Instead the climate seems to have preoccupied Mary, and her detailed descriptions of the effects of the weather offer interesting insights into what it was like to live through a cold winter in the late eighteenth century.

Ruth Facer immerses herself in the world of her subject and seems to be quite protective of Mary, offering speculations about what she would have thought or done. She hopes that as Mary lay dying ‘she was a peace with herself’ and found solace in her religious meditations (p. 173). The style and structure make the book accessible for all audiences, and it includes some lovely illustrations. There is no conclusion however, and this could have been a space to contextualize the Bacons in a little more detail. In particular, more on the ‘middling sort’ and how typical the Bacons were of this group in rural society would have been useful. Davidoff and Hall’s pioneering work on the rural communities of East Anglia between 1750 and 1850 (published as part of Family Fortunes) would have offered an additional perspective. That said, this is a fascinating book and certainly succeeds in offering a window into the life of the farmer’s wife in the second half of the eighteenth century.