Mary Hardy

Mary Hardy (née Raven; 12 November 1733 – 23 March 1809) was an 18th-century English diarist. She depicted commercial and working life in the countryside, being actively engaged in her husband's farming and brewing business. Her 500,000-word record, compiled daily from 1773 to 1809, reveals the exacting, time-pressured nature of pre-mechanised work for the middle and labouring classes.

Early life Mary Hardy spent nearly half her life in the small village of Whissonsett, in central Norfolk, where her father Robert Raven was a grocer, maltster and later a farmer. She came from a long line of village shopkeepers, manufacturers and farmers in Norfolk, the county from which she never moved. Living beside her family's small malthouse may have trained the young Mary Raven in the time-awareness and methodical work patterns seen later in her diary. Her meticulous recording lifts her from the obscurity in which she and her extended circle lived and gives insight into the forces to which they were exposed.

Her husband William Hardy was born on 26 January 1732 at Scotton, near Knaresborough, in the West Riding of Yorkshire; he died 18 August 1811 at his daughter's farmhouse at Sprowston, near Norwich, Norfolk. He probably met his future wife while posted to East Dereham, a few miles from Whissonsett, during his years as an excise officer 1757–69. His official duties brought him into contact with maltsters, brewers, tanners and other rural manufacturers; his wife seems to have been most at ease with this "middling-sort" class, and they had few gentry friends.

The diary ranges exceptionally widely as the family were engaged in so many activities, from garden development and estate acquisition to politics and the defence of their home area during wartime invasion threats. Family matters were also to the fore, Mary Hardy and her husband being intimately engaged in the upbringing and training of their children. The diarist is notable for the breadth of her coverage and her restrained, unemotional style akin to log-keeping. The result is "one of the most consistent, revealing and enduring sources of its period".

Conversion to Methodism

Mary Hardy resembled Woodforde in being a loyal adherent of the Church of England, until in the mid-1790s she adopted Methodism as well. For a while she attended both church and meeting house. A few years before her death she ceased Anglican worship and became a fervent follower of John Wesley — not in purpose-built chapels but in cottage meetings. In 1808 she opened a meeting house in her washerwoman's small cottage.