Woodford's diary is one of the most remarkable ‘ego documents’ of the early seventeenth century. It was first brought to the attention of the scholarly world in a brilliant article by John Fielding, who has since published an outstanding scholarly edition of the text for the Camden Society. As Fielding's researches have revealed, Woodford was an obscure provincial attorney. While his father had been a gentleman he had also been of ‘mean fortune’ and there is no evidence that young Robert attended either university or the Inns of Court. Steward of Northampton from 1636 until his death in 1654, as Fielding notes, Woodford's career conforms almost perfectly with Christopher Brook's account of myriad other provincial attorneys during the same period.

The diary covers the period from 1637 to 1641; unfortunately, for our current purposes, it starts only in the months immediately after Barker's execution and extends to the height of the crisis that preceded the Civil War. Written, in classic puritan style, to enable Woodford to monitor the highs and lows of his spiritual life, the diary records not merely his internal life but also his social round, as periods of spiritual exhilaration were intermingled with spasms of spiritual dryness and lassitude.

The account is dominated by three main areas of concern: Woodford's business life and in particular his debts; the health and welfare of his often pregnant wife and of their infant children and the religious and, to an extent, the ‘political’, condition of the realm. These three concerns, at times almost obsessions, structure – prompting, animating and holding back – the course of Woodford's spiritual engagement with his God and true religion. As we shall see below, both intensely personal elements – the state of his debts, the condition of his wife's breasts – are mixed together with other quintessentially ‘public’, ‘political’ concerns; concerns, both local – the course of Laudian reform in Northamptonshire, the suspension of various local ministers, the vicissitudes of a series of attempts to rail in the altar in All Saints church in Northampton – and national – war and rumours of war in Scotland, the course of the ship money trial, the calling and dissolution of the Short Parliament and the first weeks of the Long Parliament – are all associated together in the diary's account of the state of Woodford's relationship with himself, his God and his times.