Thursday, the ninth of July. A warm day, close and still. On the walk in this morning I noticed the lime trees outside the Methodist chapel had come fully into flower — that heavy, almost narcotic sweetness that sits at the back of the throat. By the time I reached the town hall steps I had already half-forgotten it, which is perhaps the point of noticing things on a walk: they prepare you for the day and then release you.

I spent the morning with a bundle of churchwardens' accounts from the 1740s, checking figures against a transcript a visiting researcher left last spring. On the whole his transcript is reliable, but he has misread a sum in the 1743 entry. What he has written as four shillings and twopence for "mending the north isle window" is, in the original hand, fourteen shillings and twopence — a significant difference when a labourer's weekly wage in that decade appears to have been somewhere around eight or nine shillings. Someone's fortnight of work, then, for a pane of glass and a bit of lead.

Tucked at the back of the same bundle, loose and unfolded, was a single sheet in a different hand altogether: a brief note, apparently from a glazier, acknowledging receipt of payment and mentioning — this is the part that stopped me — "the boy sent by Mrs Hartley to hold the ladder." The boy has no name. The record is entirely silent on him beyond that clause. He held a ladder in the cold, or possibly the rain (the accounts note a wet autumn that year, though only because it affected the hay price), and then he walked back to wherever Mrs Hartley kept her household, and that is all we have of him.

I ate my lunch in the churchyard as usual. The lime blossom smell had followed me, or I had carried it on my coat.

Conservation work in the afternoon: rehousing a set of eighteenth-century apprenticeship indentures whose previous box had warped. The parchment is sound but the folds want relaxing; I weighted them gently under blotters and left them to settle. The names on the indentures are good solid market-town names — Burrows, Tanner, Flint — that turn up in the parish registers for two centuries on either side. History at this scale is less a story than a repertoire. The same names, trying their luck, generation after generation.

I find myself wondering about Mrs Hartley. She had a boy to send on errands, which suggests some kind of establishment — not wealthy, perhaps, but not poor either. The glazier knew to apply to her, which suggests she was the person in the household who dealt with tradespeople. Whether she was a housekeeper, a widow managing her own affairs, or something else, I cannot say. The churchwardens' accounts were not interested in her circumstances, only in their window.

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