At Home - Bill Bryson [9]
There was so much distinction among clergymen that it is easy to forget that such people were in fact unusual, and that most were more like our own Mr. Marsham, who if he had any achievements at all, or indeed any ambitions, left no trace of them. His closest link to fame was that his great-grandfather, Robert Marsham, was the inventor of phenology, the science (if it is not too much to call it that) of the relation between climate and periodic biological events—the first buds on trees, the first cuckoo of spring, and so on. You might think that that was something people would keep track of anyway, but in fact no one had, at least not systematically, and under Marsham’s influence it became a wildly popular and highly regarded pastime around the world. In America, Thomas Jefferson was a devoted follower. Even as president he found time to note the first and last appearances of thirty-seven types of fruit and vegetables in Washington markets, and had his agent at Monticello make similar observations there to see if the dates betrayed any significant climatological differences between the two places. When modern climatologists say that apple blossoms of spring are appearing three weeks earlier than formerly, and that sort of thing, often it is Robert Marsham’s records they are using as source material. This Marsham was also one of the wealthiest landowners in East Anglia, with a big estate in the curiously named village of Stratton Strawless, near Norwich, where Thomas John Gordon Marsham was born in 1822 and passed most of his life before traveling the twelve miles or so to take up the post of rector in our village.
We know almost nothing about Thomas Marsham’s life there, but by chance we do know a great deal about the daily life of country parsons in the great age of country parsons thanks to the writings of one who lived in the nearby parish of Weston Longville, five miles across the fields to the north (and just visible from the roof of our rectory). He was the Reverend James Woodforde and he preceded Marsham by fifty years, but life wouldn’t have changed that much. Woodforde was not notably devoted or learned or gifted, but he enjoyed life and for forty-five years kept a lively diary that provides an unusually detailed insight into the life of a country clergyman. Forgotten for 120 years, the diary was rediscovered and published in condensed form in 1924 as The Diary of a Country Parson. It became an international best seller, even though it was, as one critic noted, “little more than a chronicle of gluttony.”
The amount of food placed on eighteenth-century tables was staggering, and Woodforde scarcely ever had a meal that he didn’t record lovingly and in full. Here are the items he sat down to at a typical dinner in 1784: Dover sole in lobster sauce, spring chicken, ox tongue, roast beef, soup, fillet of veal with morrells and truffles, pigeon pie, sweetbreads, green goose and peas, apricot jam, cheesecakes, stewed mushrooms, and trifle. At another meal he could choose from a platter of tench, a ham, three fowls, two roasted ducks, a neck of pork, plum pudding and plum tart, apple tart, and miscellaneous fruit and nuts, all washed down with red and white wines, beer, and cider. Nothing got in the way of a good meal. When