Introduction

About thirty years ago Mrs. Marshall, of Sherrington, was dusting a large old book, when there fell out of it some yellowed papers covered with faded handwriting. These she brought to the notice of Mr. Robertson Scott, the Editor of The Countryman, who soon realised that they were a diary, “intermittently kept, but continuing over some seventeen years, from 1814 to 1831”. “The handwriting and orthography,” he wrote, “are those of a person who seldom writes and never reads,” though this is hardly correct, as the diarist evidently read the Northampton Mercury. Soon afterwards, in 1929, he published extracts in four successive numbers of The Countryman under the heading of “A Grave-Digger’s Diary : 1814-1831”. Some of the extracts were copied into the Beds. Times; but, so far as we know, the Diary has never been published in its entirety. A few years ago Mr. Scott kindly deposited it in the County Record Office (A.D. 1714) and he has consented to its publication here. In consequence of information supplied to him by interested readers, he readily acknowledged that the writer was not merely a “grave-digger”, but the parish clerk of Felmersham, Beds., from 1824 to 1834. He was certainly not very erudite; but obviously he was able to fulfil fairly satisfactorily the ordinary duties of a parish clerk.

Felmersham, a small village on the river Ouse, is about seven miles north-west of Bedford. Its church, founded in the twelfth century, is avowedly the finest village church in the county, and at this time the living was in the gift of Trinity College, Cambridge. The name Orpin has been fairly common in north Bedfordshire since the end of the seventeenth century, especially in Harrold. About the middle of the eighteenth century some members of the family seem to have migrated to Felmersham and Pavenham, which then formed one parish; for Edward Arpin (the name is also spelt Orpin), our diarist, was baptised at Pavenham in 1756, the son of William and Elizabeth Arpin. In 1777, when living at Radwell in Felmersham, he married Rachel Dawson of Stagsden, and their four children were baptised at Felmersham between 1778 and 1787.