With these words a young parson, Benjamin Armstrong, writing in 1842, began a journal which was to run to eleven volumes, and which he wrote in a clear hand nearly every day until shortly before his death in 1890. It reveals to us an intelligent, lively man with a wide range of interests, living through a period of religious turmoil and social change. His influence may well not have extended far beyond the mid-Norfolk market town of East Dereham, his parish for over thirty years, but the value of the diaries lies in the insight this record provides into the life of a hard-working and deeply committed priest, as well as the changing religious practices of the time and the growing community which he served.

In an idle moment in 1842, ‘mainly for pleasure’, the 25-year-old vicar, then at Crowle St Oswald in north-west Lincolnshire, took up his pen to summarise his earlier diaries before destroying them and beginning in earnest to keep a daily journal. He had been married six months to ‘an elegant, amiable and devoted’ wife. His younger sister Annie was also happily married with a baby, and his parents were in good health and living in Islington. He described his hobbies as being ‘mainly my profession’. This included church architecture, visiting the poor and sick and teaching poor children. ‘The composition of a sermon (I always write my own) affords me the greatest delight.’ However, the diaries show that throughout his life, he took a great interest in music, art and travel, all of which can be traced back to his early years. One pastime which he rather reluctantly gave up when he became a clergyman was field sports, from shooting rats as they scattered when a corn rick was taken down, to fox and stag hunting with the ‘foremost nobles of the land’. In later life we see him shooting and fishing and taking his son to watch a fox hunt, although no longer riding to hounds himself. The ancient church in the small market town on a main road and not far from the canal suited his inclination towards a high church Anglo-Catholic form of worship, which, as we will see, he gradually introduced in Dereham.