The Diary of Mary Hardy 1773-1809: 1. Public house and waterway 1773-1781

About

The editor Margaret Bird was an honorary research fellow in the History department of Royal Holloway University of London 2006-21. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2016. For both her first degree at St Anne's College Oxford and her master's at Royal Holloway she specialised in aspects of English 18th-century history. She has been continuously engaged since 1988 in researching and editing this work published in five volumes. She has now brought out not only the full text of this diary but of Mary Hardy's nephew Henry Raven who as the brewery apprentice lived in the same household. Their unusual diaries together total more than 570000 words. Four volumes of commentary and analysis followed in April 2020 entitled Mary Hardy and her World 1773-1809. In June 2015 Margaret Bird won the award of the British Association for Local History (BALH) for Research and Publication as the overall winner in the long-articles category for her article 'Supplying the beer' first published in The Glaven Historian in 2014. She drew on her Mary Hardy research as the principal source for this study of life on the road in late-18th-century Norfolk.