Brought out a churchwardens' account today from 1779 — a small volume, boards worn soft as cloth at the spine, the ink a good iron-gall brown that has kept its contrast. Midway through the disbursements a figure stopped me: two shillings and fourpence for mending the sexton's coat. Not the coat itself, which would be the parish's responsibility in any case, but the mending of it. Someone's hands, someone's needle and thread, and no name anywhere for them. The record is silent on who did the work. I find myself wondering whether it was the sexton's wife, or a woman in one of the cottages near the churchyard gate, or simply whoever was to hand that week.
I walked in this morning through the back streets behind the market, past the fruiterer's where they had crates of early apples out on the pavement, and I thought about prices, as I sometimes do. The mending of a coat for two shillings and fourpence in 1779 — a journeyman carpenter might have earned perhaps eight or nine shillings for a full week then, so it was not a trivial sum. Whether that reflects the difficulty of the repair or simply what a skilled needlewoman could ask, I cannot say.
The volume also records fourpence for a new broom for the church. These entries are easy to undervalue. A broom, a coat, a candle — they suggest a building that required constant small maintenance, and people paid in small coin to provide it.
There was one line I could not fully read: the ink had run slightly where water had reached the page at some earlier point, perhaps during storage, and two words near the right margin were gone. The record offers what it offers. I rehoused the volume in a fresh folder and noted the damage for the next conservation review.
After lunch — churchyard bench, cold coffee, a good sandwich — I went back to the parish registers for the afternoon. The name Bridget appears three times in baptismal entries between 1761 and 1775, different families, no obvious connection. Names repeat in a place across generations and one can rarely say why. It may be fashion, it may be a respected neighbour, it may be nothing more than chance. I set it aside as a curiosity and moved on.
What I value in this work is not the lesson the documents might teach. It is, I think, the company. The sexton's coat. The broom. The woman whose needle we cannot name.
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