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Where was it written?
This is a difficult question to answer as it may have been written in more than one area, but there are several pointers in the diary text.
First, we have several recognisable places mentioned: Hereford, where Parson Cross's 'Aunt Thomson' lives; Gloucester, where Mistress Cross's new husband has his business and Chepstow, where the penurious Jones couple hail from.
Telford, also mentioned, didn't exist in the eighteenth-century as it was a new town named after the famous Victorian engineer, Thomas Telford. It could be a mistranscription of Yelford in Oxfordshire, not far from where Jeanne herself lived. If so, maybe Anne later moved to this area, but more likely Telford is an addition of Jeanne's. So if we go by the stories handed down in Jeanne's family and the travelling distances undertaken by Anne's visitors from the remaining places, a fairly remote part of Herefordshire remains a good bet.
As well as possible dialect clues, we also have the less usual practice, at least in the established church, of the local people appointing their own parson. This did occur in places described as perpetual curacies.
Then there are the names of people, farms and fields. The kind of names that occur in the Diary also occur along the Welsh borders and are well represented in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. Finding a cluster of personal, place and field names which match with those in the Diary would, on the face of it, pinpoint where Anne lived. But we have to allow that if the diary was written in more than one place, such a find might be erroneous. Also, we need to sift out Jeanne's additions from the original names and match what we find to historical records.
It's all a bit like swimming in treacle but it's only by amassing data and matching it to the diary that we can hope to home in on where Anne once lived and worked. Currently, it's still not clear just where the Diary was written.
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