The account book of a Derbyshire farm of the eighteenth century

Abstract

The Osbome Farm Ledger (1697–1745) is a primitive personal ledger in paragraph form, relating to the affairs of William Osborne senior (1648–1720) and his son William Osborne junior (1675–1745), successive owners of Burrows Hall Farm, Brailsford, Derbyshire. The principal objectives of the paper are to assess the usefulness of this type of agricultural accounting record to both the eighteenth-century farmer and the present-day accounting/business historian.