Parson Woodforde belongs beside Samuel Pepys as one of the great English diarists. He began his diary in 1759, when he was accepted as a scholar of New College, Oxford, and from 1761 he wrote almost every day until a few months before his death at the age of 63 (the final words of his diary were ‘Roast beef &c’). He left behind 68 little books in which are contained the most complete and delightful picture we have of 18th-century rural life. As Virginia Woolf said of his diary, it is ‘neither writing nor reading, but almost indistinguishable from living’.