September 25, 2026

A Saturday, so I came in for only the morning, to finish rehousing a bundle of churchwardens' accounts from the 1780s that have been waiting since August. The box they came in had softened at the base, and three of the folded leaves had fused at a corner — not badly, just enough to require the bone folder and patience. I got them open without loss. The satisfaction of that is small and total.

The accounts themselves are routine: window glass replaced, the sexton paid four shillings for a quarter's work, lime purchased for the churchyard path. But in the margin of one page, in a different hand and a darker ink, someone has written a single name — Hannah Morse — and beneath it, in figures: 2s. 6d. for lying-in cloth. No other mention of her anywhere in the volume. The record is silent on who she was, whether she was a servant to the churchwardens or a parishioner receiving relief, whether the cloth was for a birth or a death or both. Two shillings and sixpence was perhaps two days' wages for an unskilled labourer in the 1780s. Whatever it purchased, someone thought it worth entering. That is the whole of what I can say with confidence.

I ate my lunch in the churchyard. The horse chestnuts are turning. A conker had split open on the path and lay with the two halves separate, the nut still bright inside, the way a locket looks when someone has forced it.

I find myself wondering, as I sometimes do on the walk home, whether Hannah Morse appears anywhere else — a baptism register, a burial, a settlement examination. Perhaps she does, under a married name I haven't thought to check. Perhaps not. The record offered her name and a price, and then closed around her again. That is not unusual. That is, in fact, the ordinary condition of the evidence.

It is enough for a Saturday.

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