OLD COUNTRY LIFE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
By Sir George Reresby Sitwell, Bart., F.S.A.
The charm of country life, as we know it in England, lies almost as much in old associations as in scenery and sport. An ancient hall without its records is a body without a soul, and can never be fully enjoyed until one has learnt something of the men and women whom it has sheltered in the past—of their lives and manners, their love affairs, their wisdom, and their follies; how the oak furniture gave way to walnut, and the walnut to mahogany; how they laid out the gardens, raised the terrace, clipped the hedges, and planted the avenue. Such reflections have committed me to a task which has proved heavier than I desired or anticipated. Indeed, I should never have persevered with it had I not early come under the influence which an old house so often exercises upon those who live under its roof; sometimes for evil, as when a family inheritance of ill-health depends upon faulty drainage or a waterlogged soil; sometimes as a spur to ambition, an incentive to effort, or a liberal education in art.
My father died when I was two years old, and at the time I first went to school we used to spend but a few months in the summer at our old home at Renishaw, in Derbyshire. The building is of great size, giving an impression of past wealth and power, the “olde richesse” which Chaucer tells us is the foundation of “genterye,” and the Jacobean plaster work and stone-tiled roof bear witness to its antiquity. Most that was interesting within its walls had been swept away in 1849, when the failure of the Sheffield Bank completed the wreck of my grandfather’s affairs. The library, a gradual growth of three hundred years, and the collection of Civil War pamphlets, had been scattered abroad, and little of the original furniture remained except the tapestries, pictures and china, and a few old cabinets of tortoiseshell, rosewood, or ebony. Of family history, absolutely nothing had come down to us but the tradition that our ancestors had lived there since the reign of Elizabeth, and a story concerning a portrait of the “Boy in red” (his name was forgotten), who had died by drowning, and whose ghost was supposed to haunt the house. Yet there was enough left to excite interest and to provoke enquiry. I remember finding, on one of my holiday visits, amongst the old books in the hall, a Greek grammar of the days when Shakespeare was at school, and in it my own name, written by an earlier George Sitwell just three hundred years before. The lumber room, with its Georgian panelling and arched window looking out upon the staircase, had always excited my curiosity, and being allowed to poke about in it on rainy days, I came upon many strange and dusty relics of the past, the flotsam and jetsam which had stranded there during several generations—old portraits and brocaded dresses, portfolios of eighteenth century prints, the wreck of a machine for perpetual motion upon which somebody was said to have wasted twenty years of his life, a collection of minerals (two compartments were labelled “Rubies” and “Emeralds,” but the specimens were not so large as one could have wished), flint lock guns, rapiers and swords, and a spring gun which must have been a real terror to poachers, writing desks with letters and little treasures still stowed away in them, and, most precious of all, a few old chests, heaped up with manuscripts, parchments, and books. Within these, in the utmost confusion, lay rentals, subsidy rolls, estate accounts, and household books of the seventeenth century; bundles of old letters which had turned yellow with age or were fast falling into dust, inventories of furniture and linen, quaint little almanacs, bound in brown or red leather, and fastened with silken strings or clasps of brass; tradesmen’s bills of Queen Anne’s reign, with printed headlines or little engravings of shop signs and articles of merchandise; wills of all dates, from the fifteenth century onwards; and charters, many with fine seals attached to them, of six or seven hundred years ago, and preserved in little round or oblong boxes of thin oak, to which the original covering of black leather still clung in shreds and tatters.
Curiosity, and the rather wild hope of hitting upon autographs of Cromwell or Shakespeare, led me to examine these documents, and by the end of my second year at Eton I had unconsciously learnt to read them. After that time, my holidays were spent away from Renishaw, but before I went to Oxford I had occasional opportunities of following up the search amongst the numerous boxes of old manuscripts in the muniment room and elsewhere in the house, and thought myself rewarded by finding at one time impressions of the great seals of Elizabeth and James, an original grant of arms, or a letter-book of Charles the Second’s time; at another, King Richard’s charter to the Guild of Eckington, a “protection” from General Lord Fairfax, a household book begun in the year of the great plague, and a packet, sealed up two hundred years ago and never opened since, which proved to contain papers relating to fines, decimation, and sequestration under the Commonwealth. Still more interesting were the old letters written by various members of the family, and these I put carefully on one side, having already formed the idea of publishing a selection from them. In 1880, the year before I came of age, I commenced to write them out for the press in my leisure hours, and nine years later the work of printing my first volume was begun.
Amongst the many thousands of letters and papers at Renishaw, it was not my good fortune to discover any of real historical importance. This collection is not, of course, to be named in the same breath with the Paston letters, nor can it be compared, either in bulk or in interest, with the Rutland, the Talbot, or the Verney manuscripts. Yet even the correspondence of an undistinguished family may illustrate the history of earlier times. The letter of 1661 upon the causes of the Civil War, the account of the Whitehall plot to assassinate Oliver Cromwell, the printed summonses to appear before the Commonwealth Commissioners at York and Westminster, the series of Civil War fines, the Restoration letter-book, and the papers relating to Titus Oates and Sacheverell, supply some new facts, and are not without value. The order for the disbandment of the Derbyshire regiments in 1646, the bargain for supplying the sheriff’s table in 1652, the letter to the London Post Office authorities in 1664, the amusing description of a journey to Nottingham in a stage coach, the agreements between the gentlemen of Derbyshire in 1690 and 1736, the certified extract from the Hatfield Court Roll of 1337, and the account of a riot at Sheffield in 1756, have at least a local interest. One is glad to know what the country gentlemen of the time thought of the hypocrisy of Cromwell and the indolence of Charles the Second, of the Great Rebellion, the “Sickness,” the Popish Plot, the Revolution, the South Sea Bubble, and the invasions of 1715 and 1745; but, as would naturally be expected from a family correspondence extending over three hundred years, these letters are valuable rather as illustrating social life than as records of public events. Concerning housekeeping, education, methods of travelling, visits to London, and changes of fashion and manners, they have much to tell us; of battles and sieges, the fall of ministries, the prosaic virtues of the Georges, and the innate depravity of the Pretender, not too much.
Macaulay, in his famous third chapter, writes of the “gross, uneducated, untravelled country gentleman” of Charles the Second’s reign; a “man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and the accent of a carter”; a man whose “ignorance and uncouthness, whose low tastes and gross phrases would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian.” It is not easy to reconcile this description with the accounts given by contemporary observers. The portrait certainly does not err on the side of flattery, and those who are familiar with the printed literature and unpublished records of that age will ask themselves with amazement whether it can be a likeness. Macaulay asserts that the country squire of that period never visited London and never opened a book. Contemporary writers tell us that the latter was always riding post to London, and spending his substance there when he ought to have been occupied with the care of his estate, and that there were more private libraries in England than in any other country in Europe. Now it is possible, of course, that Macaulay knew more about the manners of that age than did the people who lived in it; but it is also possible that he wilfully and maliciously caricatured a class of men which he had political reasons for disliking. The “gross, uneducated, untravelled country gentleman” was usually a Tory.
Country Gentlemen on the London Road.
It may readily be admitted that in the seventeenth century country gentlemen could understand the local dialect, for intercourse with their tenants and the servants and labourers in their employ would otherwise have been difficult or impossible, and that the accent of some Yorkshire squires might betray their origin as surely as that of some Irish gentlemen to-day. But life in the country is no proof of rusticity, and everyone who speaks with a brogue is not necessarily a carter. At the time of which Macaulay writes, civilization was not confined to London. York and Derby, to the inhabitants of those counties, were “town” in the same sense that London is to their descendants. London had not yet gathered to itself all the business, the fashion, and the culture of the nation, and country gentlemen still flocked in winter to cities which had once, perhaps, been the capitals of independent kingdoms, and were even now centres of society, of learning, and of government.
Neither in his virtues nor in his failings was the country gentleman of Charles the Second’s time such as Macaulay has portrayed him. His chief pleasure did not consist in drinking himself under the table with strong beer, for excess was the exception and not the rule with the class to which he belonged, and claret and sack, malago and rhenish, were the beverages he was accustomed to, both at his own house and at the taverns. His principal employment was not “handling pigs, and on market days making bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop merchants”; on the contrary, though a good judge of horses and oxen, bullocks and swine, he left the stocking of the home farm and the sale of produce to the steward who collected his rents. He was better educated in Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, divinity, and law, than the country gentlemen of to-day, and more competent to manage his own affairs; his taste (at least in building, furniture, gardening, and dress) was more refined; he was keenly interested in public events, and willing to make sacrifices for public objects; he took a kindly and helpful interest in his poorer neighbours; though proud of his position, was sensible enough to send his younger sons into trade; and though he could not “shoot flying,” had a proper feeling for sport. He was not free from the narrowness and want of charity, the aversion to change and to new ideas so often found in those who have made divinity and the classics the study of their lives, and religious bigotry was his besetting sin.
The letter-book of 1662–6 throws much light on the George Sitwell, of Renishaw, of that period. In appearance he was somewhat over the middle height, and, as became one already well advanced in middle age, rather neat and precise than fashionable in his dress. He wore a long periwig, scented with orange flower water, a slight moustache and tuft of hair upon his chin, a grey broad-brimmed beaver hat, large bands of white linen or cambric, a dark grey cloth coat of simple cut, unbuttoned at the waist, and with the wristbands turned back to show the soft linen cuffs underneath, a sword belt and sword, cavalier breeches open at the knee, riding tops of wrinkled buckskin, and square-toed shoes, with high heels, and tongues to protect the instep from the stirrup. On his arm he usually carried a horseman’s cloak.[80] His face, with its good forehead and eyes, strong and clear-cut nose, and well developed chin, gave an impression of force of character, tenacity of purpose, and good reasoning powers; and this impression was strengthened by his conversation, for even the most casual acquaintance could not fail to observe that he was a man who had been accustomed to think and act for himself, a man not only well educated, but gifted with a sound judgment and a marked talent for business.
He was an old cavalier who had garrisoned his house for the King, and had suffered fines and “decimation” under the Commonwealth. In 1653 he had served as Sheriff, and had brought with him to Derby a chaplain after his own mind, who preached a dangerously clever Assize sermon on “Magistracie and Ministery, the State and the Church.” In a remarkable letter to Lord Frecheville, written in April, 1661, he expresses his opinion that the “late unhappy warr began about disputes in religion,” and was the work of “crafty, wicked men,” “proud, insolent, factious, seditious spirits,” who, finding it “best to fish in troubled waters,” had made “Godliness their gaine” and “religion the cloake to cover their intentions.” Such opinions were common enough at the Restoration, but it is startling to find at such a moment the expression of a belief that there had been faults on both sides, and that “flatterers of Soveraignty” were as much to blame as “flatterers of popularity.” “We have,” he adds, “a good, a gracious, and a prudent King, who, though he hath not had long, yet hath had grand experience of men, which makes him delight in and love those who are honest. He knows very well that those who were the greatest flatterers of his ffather of happy memory, divisers and promoters of monopolies and revivers of ould obsolete laws, therby to lay uncoth and strange burdens upon the people, proved his bitterest and worst enemies.” Justice between man and man the writer considered to be the “sinews of all Commonwealths,” and the laws of England the people’s “birthright” and their defence against “arbitrary power.” At the first outbreak of the Civil War he had signed two petitions inviting Charles to return from the North to meet his Parliament; and after the Restoration his chief desire in politics was to see “an Unity at home which will be a stronge Bullworke against our advarsaries.” But he was sorely troubled at the King’s neglect of business and the corruption of the public service.
Some account of his fortune and surroundings is a necessary prelude to a study of his manner of life. The Renishaw estates[81] produced at this time about £800 a year, and from other sources—chiefly from the iron furnaces and forges[82] upon his property, for like many of the greater and lesser landowners of that district he was interested in the iron trade—Mr. Sitwell received an amount at least equal to his agricultural rents. In order that the meaning of these figures may be understood, it is necessary to explain that in the seventeenth century the nation was poorer, manners were simpler and more primitive, and the value of money was not the same. The purchasing power of money, as most intelligent schoolboys are aware, was then, according to the usual estimate, four times what it is at present.
The loyal Duke of Newcastle, who is said to have been the wealthiest subject in Great Britain at the outbreak of the Civil War, had a rental of only £22,000 a year. After the Restoration, the greatest estates in the kingdom hardly exceeded £20,000 a year, and in 1669 the average income of peers, taken one with another, was estimated at £3,000, of knights at £800, and of esquires at £400 a year. Mr. Sitwell, with a revenue of £1,600, was therefore possessed of a fortune above the common; he pleads guilty, in one of these letters, to having a “good estate,” and it is clear that in his own country he had the reputation of being a very wealthy man.
His house, “the capital messuage called Renishawe”—situated some six miles from Chesterfield, then a walled town and the “fayrest in all the Peake Cuntrie”[83]—had been rebuilt out of the savings of his minority shortly before his marriage in 1627. It stood (and yet stands, for the old hall is the centre of the new) on the summit of a rocky hill projecting into the vale of Rother, which here narrows to two or three hundred yards, and commanding fine views towards the north and south. On the latter side, a richly cultivated country, cut up into innumerable inclosures by hedgerows, and scattered with forest trees, formed a pleasing contrast to the wild and rugged moorland by which Eckington was approached; and beyond it, to the south and south-east, rose that beautiful ridge upon which Barlborough, Bolsover Castle, and Hardwick stand. The turrets and battlements of these three famous houses, towering up on the hillside above the groves and woodland which surrounded them, were all visible from Renishaw; and to the south-west the country rolled on in successive ridges of meadow land and common towards the faint blue line which marked the edge of the Chesterfield moors in the far distance. From the north front of the house, Mosborough Hall could be seen across the green valley through which the Mosbecke flows to its union with the Rother; on the left, beyond the church and village, lay the ancient woods and picturesque manor park of Eckington in a deep cleft between the hills, and to the right the view down the vale extended for many miles into Yorkshire. East of the house, the promontory upon which Renishaw stands was bare of planting, being sheltered by the higher ground beyond the river, and by the woods of Park Hall and Barlborough, and on the west a plantation of oaks and ashes protected it from the prevailing winds which sweep down from the distant moors.
The river below the house was crossed by a highway, described in a letter of 1665 as a “great road from the West parts of Yorkshire towards London.” Approaching from the London side a traveller would catch his first glimpse of Renishaw from the point where the manors of Barlborough and Eckington meet. The building was three-storied and of stone, with a four-gabled front facing the east, and, towards the south, a battlemented hall between two projecting wings, of which the nearer was furnished with a great bow window. It was surrounded with orchards and walled gardens, and behind it a plantation of ancient trees formed an impressive background. Below lay the cliffs and rocky slope known as Broxhill, then unplanted, but deep in fern and gorse; in the left foreground a line of willows marked the winding course of the river as it approached the bridge, and to the right the ancient mill and water meadows beyond were framed in by the wooded steep of Birley Hill. Proceeding along the causeway (built as a protection against floods) and across the bridge, the road turned sharply to the right and to the left again, and so mounting the hill passed within fifty yards of the house.
This road, with its wayside oaks and strips of green, was not, as might be imagined, a quiet country lane, but a highway full of life and colour and movement. Here, past the court gates, and in full view from the first-floor windows of the house, flowed by throughout the summer months a ceaseless stream of traffic. The smocked carriers cracked their whips as they passed with their covered waggons and long train of patient packhorses, or shouted to the women passengers crouching behind them in the straw. Postboys with budgets of letters cantered by, sounding their horns as they turned down to the village. Beggars in rags, with their little bundles carried upon staves across the shoulder, and wandering pipers and fiddlers, turned to look at the house; Scotch pedlars, with cheap linen cloth in their packs; and hawkers or chapmen with wallets full of little trifles—gloves of cordevant and sheep leather, tobacco boxes, ribbons and shoe-strings, almanacs, horn-books, jocktalegs, and ballads on the Dutch war and the hearth tax. Gentlemen in long boots, riding suits and cloaks, and velvet caps, trotted past, followed by mounted servants; or honest yeomen in coarse cloth and worsted stockings, with their wives in homespun and steeple hats riding pillion behind them. The little processions of marketing and fairing folk came and went; brown barefooted mower-women at hay and corn harvest; labourers in their loose frocks tied in at the waist, patched breeches and hose, and tall hats with vast projecting brims; country women riding to market between baskets of farm produce, with chickens or ducks swinging from the saddlebow; labourers’ wives trudging it on foot with wicker trays of vegetables or fruit upon their heads; farmers’ wains drawn by huge oxen, older and bulkier than any which can be seen to-day; and, in autumn, droves of swine on their way to the woods. Often Lord Frecheville’s or Lord Deincourt’s chariot and four passed the gates, the coach of some neighbouring gentleman bright with heraldry and gilding, a train of charcoal waggons bringing fuel to the Staveley ironworks, or of others laden with long saws and brewers’ squares, cannon shot, fire-backs, or sugar-stoves; and more rarely a ponderous furnace-hearth drawn by twenty oxen, a company of militia in their buffcoats faced with crimson plush, a gentleman riding to the poll at Derby at the head of his tenantry, or the cavalcade of some great nobleman journeying towards London with three coaches and an armed escort of thirty or forty attendants on horseback. It was an ever changing panorama of human life, an endless procession labouring towards an unknown goal, for in the seventeenth century the nation was to be studied rather on the roads than in the cities, and for commerce, for travel, and for news, the roads were all that the railways and telegraphs are to us, and more.
Arrival of a Guest at a Country House.
From the busy world outside one entered a little haven of peace and rest within the gates. The main entrance to Renishaw, which was immediately off the road, led by wooden doors between stone piers into a close court, the walls being planted round with fruit trees and the borders with flowers, and so by a broad paved walk between two grass plats to the steps of the porch. The building itself was of the usual Jacobean type, with mullioned windows protected by string-courses, gables and cupola tiled with stone, and battlemented roof over the hall. In plan, it was a double E, the central member being given by the porch on the north and by the great hall chimney to the south; on the former side the projecting wings contained a buttery (to the east) and a kitchen, on the latter a great and little parlour. Entering the porch, a second door led into a hall of moderate size (twenty feet by twenty-four), handsomely paved with grey and yellow stone, and ceiled with heavy cross beams covered with plaster. Upon the oak panelling, stags’ heads, escutcheons of arms, and maps of Europe and of Jerusalem were hung, and the centre of the room was occupied by the long table at which the family dined. On the opposite wall, between two windows corresponding to those on either side of the porch, was a great fireplace of stone, framed in by a mantel of carved oak. There was an oak cupboard by the kitchen door, and here also hung a buffcoat and some pistol-holsters. In the window lay the family Bible.
A Ball at an Assembly Room.
On the left hand two doors opened out of the hall, the first into a paved and arched entry which led past the buttery hatch (on the left) to the garden entrance; and the second to the “Great Staircase,” finely wainscotted and carved, and lighted by windows to the east. At the foot of the stairs was the door into the great parlour, about thirty-four feet long by twenty broad, by far the finest room in the house. A large bow window at the further end, and three windows to the east, looked out upon the flower garden. The ceiling of graceful renaissance plaster work, light and in low relief, was designed with large quatrefoils and diamonds, the points of the latter running out into branches of quince, oak, or vine, or large fleur-de-lis of varying patterns. In the centres of the spaces between were moulded ornaments of mermaids, dolphins, squirrels, roses, octofoils, and winged and coronetted lions’ heads. On the walls, immediately below the ceiling, was a frieze, also in plaster, which exhibited a running pattern of vine leaves, grapes, and birds, stopped at intervals by strapwork escutcheons, with renaissance masks and heraldic lions’ faces upon them. Richly carved panels of oak, with floral designs of lilies, roses, etc., supported the frieze, and beneath them was plainer panelling broken up at intervals by flat pilasters decorated with foliage or fruit. On this panelling a few family portraits were hung; the furniture here, as elsewhere in the house, was of carved oak, already a generation old, and there was much needlework of the kind ladies then occupied themselves in making. The mantelpieces were also of oak, one which showed in high relief the sacrifice of Isaac, supported by figures of Samson and Hercules, being especially noticeable. The fire backs in all the principal rooms had been cast at Foxbrook furnace, some two miles away, from moulds of a flower-pot, a phœnix, or the royal arms and supporters.
On the right of the hall were two doorways corresponding to those on the left. The further led by double doors into the little parlour, a small room with two windows to the south opening upon the garden, and two to the west looking out across a little green court to the brewhouse and the trees which overhung it. In the centre of the ceiling a great double rose of plaster, more than two feet in diameter, covered the junction of the beams. On the walls, maps of the World, France, Paris, and Ireland were hung, and a few Dutch pictures. The nearer door on the same side of the hall communicated with the little staircase and the kitchen, the latter room remarkable for its great three-centred chimney arch of stone, and for the pewter plates and dishes and brass stewpans and pudding pans which were ranged upon the wall. A back entry led into the kitchen court, or “well court,” a large yard built round with offices, stabling, coach-house, brewhouse, dairy, laundry, ovens, and barns. This was closed by great gates at night and contained many bays of building.
To return to the house; the bedrooms were furnished with curtains and rugs of green, purple, or “sad colour,” the great oak bedsteads decorated with hangings of needlework, and the walls covered with tapestry or wainscot. On the first floor was the “great chamber,” over the great parlour, and another of smaller size (here, under a sliding board, a secret receptacle in the floor for money or papers was found a few years ago) above the buttery. The “hall chamber,” like the hall below, was panelled with oak and ceiled with cross beams covered with plaster. This was the owner’s bedroom, and the windows to north and south, sheltered from sun and wind by the projecting wings, must have made it the pleasantest in the house. It was entered from the landing of the great staircase, and a door in the further wall led to Mr. Sitwell’s study, above the little parlour, and to the little staircase. In the study Mr. Sitwell wrote up the letter-book, passed the accounts of his steward, Thomas Starkye (Starkye came up the back stairs), and interviewed his tenants; on the panelling over the mantelpiece a carbine and some pistols were hung, and recesses in the thickness of the wall harboured a small library of books on divinity, law, and the classics, of which the greater part had been collected by Mr. Sitwell, though a few had been brought from the older house at the head of the village. Above the kitchen was another large bedchamber, given over, I suppose, to Mr. Sitwell’s youngest son, the only one of his children who was still under his care. The plan of the third story was similar to that of the second, the chamber over the hall chamber being again the only means of communication between the two staircases. This was occupied by Mrs. Heays, the housekeeper, who probably had one or two of the younger maidservants to sleep with her; and here in the long winter afternoons they wove and spun by the light of tallow dips, and talked over the gossip of the village. The two rooms to the east had formerly been used as nurseries, but were now guest chambers; and on this side also was a store-closet over the stairs. On the west, the study chamber was occupied by the cook and kitchenmaid, and that over the kitchen by the maids. The men-servants and grooms probably slept over the stables. At the Sacheverells’ house at Barton, an inventory of 1691 shows a “maids’ chamber,” a “men’s chamber,” and a “grooms’ chamber,” and this no doubt was the usual arrangement at the time.
The house was surrounded by a number of gardens,[84] courts, and orchards, the walls of which were full of pears, apples, plums, peaches, cherries, and nectarines. From the garden door one went out into a corner of the south garden, somewhat wider than the house, which projected into it. This was laid out in gravel, with borders against the walls, broad walks round and across the square, and designs of flower beds disposed in Jacobean knots, edged with box, and relieved by pyramids of yew. Out of this to the left you went into the bowling green and several courts and gardens, with green and gravel walks, walled in and full of flowers and fruit. Beyond them lay the little orchard, at the further extremity of which was an ancient dovecot of stone, perched on the very edge of the cliff, and overlooking the wild and tangled slopes of Broxhill and the flowery banks and winding course of the river below. Returning to the south garden, a door opposite the house led into the great orchard, some four and a half acres in extent, in which were a pair of butts for archery,[85] and side alleys bordered with flowers. From these sheltered paths, the further wall of the orchard being below the slope of the hill, pretty glimpses could be obtained of moorland and river, and distant spires and seats; and here also, at the south-west corner of the garden, was one of those square stone-tiled buildings without which no garden in the seventeenth century was supposed to be complete. This garden-house was set against a grove of ancient oaks and ashes, which protected it from the rays of the afternoon sun; to the north, both wind and view were cut off by the house, with its broken roof-line of battlements and gables, and tall central chimney thrown into shadow by the projecting wings; but towards the other points of the compass, a wide panorama of country was spread out to view. Mounting the steps which led to the little oak-panelled room above, one could see, over the tops of the apple trees and the Gothic coping of the green-clad garden walls, Killamarsh Moor, and the little village of Wales, in Yorkshire, from which the Hewitts took their rise; the wooded hillside just across the river; and high above the common, the ancient woods and manor houses of Park Hall and Barlborough; the Mansfield road, which skirted past the forest towards Nottingham and Derby; Emmett Carr, Barlborough Common, and Marsden Moor; the splendid cliff and keep of Bolsover, famous for the Earl of Newcastle’s prodigal entertainment to King Charles; Scarcliffe and Palterton, once with Eckington a part of the Domesday Barony of Ralph Fitz-Hubert; the old and new halls of Hardwick, where the Earls of Devonshire had their seat, standing out like twin towers above the trees which surrounded them; and beyond the horizon, the spire of Tibshelf Church on the Nottinghamshire border. Nearer, between Renishaw and Hardwick, stood the little hall of Netherthorpe, in which Robert Sytwell had lived in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, and the grammar school hard by he had helped to found; Lord Deincourt’s woods at Sutton Scarsdale; and Owlcotes, another of Bess of Hardwick’s houses; and to the right, the Chesterfield road mounting up a green spur two miles away towards Lord Frecheville’s ancient house and park and the iron furnaces of Staveley. Beyond Staveley, which, like Bolsover, Sutton, and Renishaw, had been garrisoned for the King in the Civil War, the spire of Brimington could be seen; and above the hollow in which Chesterfield lies, the distant hills which lead up to Clay Cross, Ogston, Ashover, and the Derbyshire moors. To the west of the garden house, a close walk between hedges led down the hill to the low meadows and the river, and from this side also was a footpath across the demesne to Foxton Wood, some two miles away, where the bluebells were a sight to see in spring, and the bracken in autumn, and good fishing and shooting were to be had. The hedgerows in the demesne contained many oaks and ashes, but there was no ornamental planting of any kind; in the woods, swine were still turned out in autumn, and another relic of mediæval agriculture was the continued use of oxen for ploughing.
Houses and gardens such as those which I have just described can hardly have been the work of coarse and illiterate men. Their beauty and appropriateness, to which Lord Macaulay was blind, are recognised by the better taste of to-day. One can see that they were planned with infinite care and contrivance, every natural peculiarity of site, climate, and outlook being turned to account, and that the country squires who built them were thinking not merely of their own selfish enjoyment, but of future ages. In the marriage indenture of Mr. Sitwell’s eldest son in 1656, one of the considerations mentioned is that the said messuage and lands “may be settled and established in the name and blood of the said George Sitwell the ffather, soe long as it shall please God to continue the same.” From such phrases one learns not only the old builders’ pride in their houses, but the spirit which animated them, and which alone can inspire good work in building and laying out.
Renishaw was a quieter place than it had been ten years before, when Mrs. Sitwell was alive, and the house full of young people; but its owner, though he “hated ill-husbandry,” still kept a plentiful house. He was constantly visited by various relations and friends, and throughout the summer neighbouring gentlemen would occasionally ride over to dinner and bowls, and Yorkshire acquaintances call and drink at the gates, or rest their horses for an hour or two on the way to London. Mr. Sitwell’s eldest son, and his daughters and sons-in-law, were often with him, and Christmas especially, when the hall was decorated with holly and ivy, and the Chesterfield and Staveley fiddlers came over, and there was dancing in the great and card playing in the little parlours, was a time of entertainment and family reunion.[86] The preparations for Christmas and the New Year began early in November with the brewing of a couple of hogsheads of “Christmas beer” and the manufacture of “a brawne”—a mighty dish, for it is valued in the household book at £2, the price of four muttons or forty turkeys. When that season had arrived, the fat hogs were killed, gifts were made to the servants, and money distributed among the poor of the parish; turkeys, fowls, and rolls of brawn were sent as “tokens” to absent friends; the tenants came with their rent capons,[87] were regaled in the hall with beer, beef, mince pie, and plum porridge, and spent the evening in boisterous games; and a doe was usually sent over from Sheffield Park as a present from the Duke of Norfolk. It appears by one of these letters that Francis Sitwell and his wife and children were always expected from Gainsborough at Christmas, and no doubt the Wigfalls came across in the evenings from their house a few hundred yards away, the Burtons and Stones from Mosborough, and Dr. Gardiner,[88] whom Mr. Sitwell had presented to the living of Eckington eight years before, brought his children from the rectory. Indeed, friends and tenants were entertained with so much conviviality that the example proved dangerous to the younger members of the family. In the last week of 1662, John, the London apprentice, was in trouble with his master, and exactly a year later, Mr. Sitwell, while protesting that he had “ever been wary to encourage” his son in such courses, had to express a hope that in future he would “nether thinke Christmas nor any other time lawless to play the foole in,” but when he recreated himself among friends would “make choyce of sober, civell company, and keepe good howers.”
The owner of the letter-book mentions on one occasion an engagement to be at the Wigfalls’ house for a christening, and no doubt he celebrated the baptism of his own grandchildren, born at Renishaw in July, 1661, and October, 1662, by entertaining his neighbours with music and card playing, according to the hospitable custom of the time. On the 14th of February there was dancing and drawing of valentines, and the Chesterfield Sessions in April, the fairs at Chesterfield, Sheffield, and Rotherham, races and bull-baitings for those who cared for such frivolities, bowling parties at Renishaw and other houses in the neighbourhood, the village wake and the “hare-getting supper”[89] to the harvesters on the demesne, helped to enliven the monotony of rural existence. But during much of the year when Mr. Sitwell and his youngest son were alone, life at Renishaw was quiet and orderly enough, and one day passed very much the same as another. At about seven o’clock they breakfasted upon beer, cold meat, Westphalia ham or neat’s tongue, oatcakes, and white bread and butter. After breakfast, William walked down to pursue his studies at the rectory, and his father rode out with Starkye to inspect his farms and iron furnaces, or to attend to the parochial and county business in which he interested himself. At eleven o’clock,[90] the servants, headed by the housekeeper, Mrs. Heays, filed in to family prayers in the hall; and immediately prayers were over the butler laid the table, with its cloth of homespun linen, pewter plates and dishes, beer and wine glasses, silver salts and spoons, porringers and tankards, for the noonday dinner,[91] and put out the silver bottles and stoneware jugs, edged with silver, upon the oak cupboard by the kitchen door. Mr. Sitwell sat at the head of the table, with his back to the map of Europe and the great staircase; and his son, in a grey cloth suit, fine worsted under-stockings, scarlet silk over-stockings, and riding shoes, at his left hand; and together they conversed about William’s studies and the big trout in the Rother, the flower garden and the home farm, John’s last letters from plague-stricken London, Robert’s adventures at Aleppo, and George’s prospects of making a fortune in Spain. The meal, plain but substantial—it consisted usually of broth served in porringers and eaten with oat cakes, a joint with vegetables, poultry or game, a pudding or tart, cheese and fruit; but on Fridays of fresh and salt fish alone—was washed down by a glass or two of tent or malago and a tankard of ale, and followed by a pipe of tobacco in the little parlour or the garden-house. After dinner, Mr. Sitwell wrote letters in his study, and read the gazettes and newsletters which his cousin forwarded by every post from London; a little later in the afternoon, he played bowls on the green, walked through the folds, looked at the horses, foals, and oxen, and strolled across the demesne to watch the mowers or harvest folk at work. Supper, the second “state meal”[92] of the day, must have been early too; and after a pipe of tobacco, a tankard of ale, and a game of cards or shovel-board in the great parlour, the evening finished with family prayer. On Sundays, the old coach, with its two bay mares, took Mr. Sitwell and his son down to church at Eckington; there, in the large square family pew by the second pillar on the right of the nave, with the servants ranged behind them, they listened to the village fiddlers and Dr. Gardiner’s learned but lengthy sermon; and when service was over, they carried the doctor and his wife back to dinner at the hall. Mr. Sitwell was a good judge of horses (in 1666 he was buying horses for Lord Ogle’s troop), and took some trouble in the breeding of them;[93] his peace-offering of four pheasants to the Duke of Newcastle in January, 1664–5, shows that he shot with a fowling-piece; the use of two coursing similes in the letter-book suggests that he may have kept greyhounds; and it is likely enough that he occasionally rode with Lord Frecheville’s staghounds,[94] for the pale of Staveley Park bordered upon his demesne. He was certainly an active man in spite of his years, and fond of an outdoor life.
Stag Hunting.
Amongst the relations and friends already mentioned as visiting Renishaw in 1662–6, the names of several occur in the letter-book. Mr. Sitwell’s cousins, William and Roger Allestry (Roger represented Derby in Parliament as his brother had previously done, and the features of both, set out in all the glory of Restoration periwigs, are known from engraved portraits), came at intervals to stay with him; and another kinsman, John Spateman, of Roadnook Hall, in Ashover, formerly a Justice of the Peace under the Commonwealth, was there in June, 1666, on his way to plague-stricken London. Captain Mazine, the “great horseman,” so good natured in supplying Mr. Sitwell with the latest news of the Dutch war, was expected from London in July, 1665. “I suppose,” the latter writes, “I shall have the happiness to kis yor hand in the Country shortly, wch I desire the more yt you may be out of the Danger of the sickness.” In June of the previous year, the Captain had been staying at Welbeck, and had apparently ridden over more than once to dinner and a game of bowls at Renishaw. Mr. Sitwell meditated calling upon him in return, and in reply to a message confessed that he was behindhand with him, but when occasion offered would endeavour to come over. William Revell, of Ogston, one of the “Lovers of Huntinge and Hawkinge” in Darley Dale, upon whose lives and deaths (he died in 1669) the Ashover poet wrote his “Elegy”:
“Then I to Ogston, there to break my fast
They all in mourning stood at me aghast,
To think my friend and lover was departed;
And so I left them, all most heavie hearted:
What shall I doe (thought I) to hide my head,
Seeing so many Gallants now are dead?”
—was often with his father-in-law at Renishaw; and William Sacheverell, who afterwards distinguished himself so highly in Parliament, and served as a Lord of the Admiralty under King William, rode over occasionally from Morley to see his sister, Mrs. Sitwell. William Simpson, a city lawyer, came down in October, 1662, January, 1662–3, and again, bringing with him a copy of the King’s Speech to the Parliament, in June of the same year; and in the following September, “Cozen Franceys,”[95] as appears by a gap in the correspondence, followed by the expression of a hope that he was “well got home,” enjoyed the country air for two or three weeks in Derbyshire. There are casual references also in the letter-book to country neighbours who called and dined at Renishaw, as, for instance, John Bradshaw, of Brampton Hall, a cousin of the regicide, in September, 1662; Lionel Copley, of Rotherham, in July, 1665; and John Magson, of Worksop, a rich merchant, whose fortune is estimated in one of these letters at twenty-five or twenty-six thousand pounds in January, 1662–3, and November, 1664. The last was probably a Quaker, as Mr. Sitwell addresses him without ceremony by his Christian name and surname.
The household to be provided for was not a large one, and in many respects it was self-sufficing. The finer German table linen, damasked with hunting scenes, which came in soon after the Restoration, had hardly yet found its way into the midland counties, and rough table-cloths were still made in the house. Flaxen and hempen sheets, pillowbears and window curtains, and woollen blankets, were woven by the maid-servants; and I notice that in 1678–80, two stone of flax, two of hemp, and two of wool, were purchased every year for use at Renishaw. By the maids also the mattresses of the heavy four-poster beds were stuffed with feathers from the fold. Cloth sufficient to provide two suits of livery apiece for five or six men was bought at about four shillings a yard at Mr. Newton’s shop in Chesterfield, and made up in the house by John Staynrod, the village tailor. Wheat for bread, and oats for the oatcakes, so much favoured in Derbyshire, were grown on the farm, and ground with querns in the house as flour was needed; and ryebread was also eaten, probably by the servants. Pickling, preserving, and salting,[96] and the concoction of currant and gooseberry wines, were carried on under the supervision of the housekeeper; and baking, churning, and cheese-making at the ovens and dairy in the kitchen court. Ale in the cask or bottled, and November ale, and beer of various denominations—strong beer, small beer, stale beer, bottled beer, March beer, and Christmas beer—were brewed in large quantities, and about sixty-eight hogsheads represent the annual consumption.[97] The practice of laying in large quantities of salt beef and mutton at the commencement of November had already been abandoned by the richer classes, and fresh meat was eaten all the year round. From the home farm, orchards, and river, meat, fish, eggs, milk, cream, vegetables, and fruit were supplied; turkeys and fowls were bred there, and game could be obtained in any quantity from the woods, and pigeons from the dovecote. Salt fish from Scarborough or Hull was bought in Chesterfield for the Friday dinners. Wax candles for the hall and parlours were procured from George Hattersley, a chandler in the village, at the cost of four or five shillings a dozen; and tallow candles for the bedrooms were made in the house. Soap, in the form of “washing balls,” was manufactured at the farm at the cost of a shilling a dozen, and about fifty-two dozens represent the annual consumption. Pit coals were obtained from Eckington Marsh at half-a-crown a load, the carting being done upon “boon days” by Mr. Sitwell’s tenants. Groceries were bought in Chesterfield, a groom or footman being sent over on horseback, or a commission given either to the carrier or to one of the little company of “market folks” who trudged over from the village on each succeeding Saturday. At the last-named town there was an apothecary (Wood), a furniture shop (Shentall), and a bookseller (Crofts). Cases of knives for the table could be bought at six shillings in Sheffield from James Stainforth, who in 1662 served as Master Cutler. A chirurgeon (John Fleming) resided at Eckington, but on one occasion a poor boy, in whom Mr. Sitwell had interested himself, was sent over with the carrier to Nottingham for the great Dr. Thoroton’s advice.
But though a country house, at least in regard to the common necessaries of life, was supplied from the demesne, and did not as now depend upon shops in the village and neighbouring town, it is surprising to find how many small luxuries were ordered in London or even imported from the Continent. The packhorses of Hemingway, the Sheffield carrier, were constantly burdened with Westphalia hams at tenpence the pound, capers at the same price, and currants for the daily pudding; with newspapers and books, writing paper, French hats for Mr. Sitwell’s grandchildren, bottles of cinnamon water, orange flower water, strong water, and Rosa solis, and runlets of various wines. From London Mr. Sitwell procured also his own dress and that of his son, tobacco at eighteen shillings and sixpence a box, and silver plate. As might have been expected from one of the older generation, he was fond of good sack, which he ordered in London or on occasion from the “Angel” Inn at Chesterfield; but he supplied himself also with barrels of tent wine and malago from Spain, where one of his sons was a merchant. From that country also chests of oranges and lemons, and barrels of olives and of raisins, were forwarded to him. Sugar, on one occasion, he imported from Barbadoes, but it proved to be too coarse for his use. Chests and barrels too heavy for one horse to carry were sent by Nottingham wagon, or by way of the Humber and Trent to Bawtry, and thence by road to Renishaw. Letters from London to Renishaw were posted on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and arrived in time to be answered on Fridays and Tuesdays. The charge was threepence for postage, and fourpence to the “foot-post” from Chesterfield, and if carried to the posthouse they seldom failed.
I must not pass away from the subject of housekeeping without saying something about the extraordinary cheapness of meat, and especially of game, at this period. In the Renishaw “house-book” for 1671, a price is set against all the articles supplied from the farm or bought in the village. A veal is valued at ten to twelve shillings, a mutton at six to ten, a lamb at five to six, a beef at £3 15s. to £4 4s., a porket at ten to eleven shillings, and pigs at from 1s. 3d. to 1s. 6d. each. Chickens could be had for threepence and fourpence, pullets at sixpence, ducks at fourpence to eightpence, geese, capons, and turkeys at a shilling, pigeons at elevenpence or one shilling a dozen, and rabbits at sixpence to 1s. 2d. a couple. Partridges and teal were eightpence a brace, woodcock eightpence to a shilling, wild ducks a shilling, plovers fourpence to sixpence, and snipe fourpence. Cheeses were eightpence to tenpence each, and butter was fourpence a pound. Household loaves, not of white bread, were a shilling each, and flour for manchet or for the kitchen 1s. 3d. a peck.
Acquaintances Meeting in London.
According to Macaulay, not one gentleman in a hundred travelled once in seven years beyond the nearest market town; but the truth is that the country squires were often upon the road, and few who lived within five days’ journey of London failed to visit it occasionally. In Derbyshire, from the end of November until the beginning of April, the highways were impassable for wheels and very unpleasant for horsemen, and even April is said in one of these letters to be “too soon, for the ways will be bad.” Mr. Sitwell rode up to London every spring, usually in the last-named month or in May, and he sometimes visited it a second time in August. His plans were laid a month or six weeks in advance, and a week or ten days before starting a box or trunk of clothes was sent on by carrier. He left Renishaw at seven o’clock in the morning, attired in a riding suit, top boots, a horseman’s cloak, and a “mounteroe,” or Spanish travelling cap, of velvet. Pistols were borne in the holsters, for Sherwood was a noted haunt of highwaymen, and behind him rode a footman in livery, carrying his portmantle (it contained clean linen, a nightdress, nightcap, and change of clothes) and hatcase upon the saddle. The first night was spent at Nottingham, after a ride of thirty miles through the forest; the second at Harborough (twenty-eight miles); the third at Dunstable (thirty-five miles); the fourth in London (thirty miles). The charges incurred by himself, his man and horses, in riding up, amounted on one occasion to £1 13s. 6d., and in returning to £1 1s. 6d., and one horse was killed in the journey. In London, Mr. Sitwell frequented the “Greyhound” Inn in Holborn, next door to “Furnival’s” Inn, and there he paid about eight shillings and fourpence a week for chamber rent and washing, and eighteen shillings and eightpence for hay and corn for his horses. Food and minor expenses came to about £1 6s. 8d. a week. While in town, he met his friends at the Royal Exchange, and dined with them at one of the many taverns near it; strolled about in Gray’s Inn Walks; went by water to Westminster—his cousin, Roger Allestry, was a Member of Parliament; supplied himself with clothes, books, silver plate and tobacco from the various shops; visited his son, the scapegrace John, who was in the silk trade, being apprenticed to Nicholas Delves, Esquire;[98] and on Sundays attended divine service at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, or St. Paul’s. He had business also to attend to, for on one occasion I find him paying a sum of £200 “att the Southe Porche of St. Paule’s, London.” Sometimes, I suppose, he walked in Hyde Park, or visited Whitehall, where the King and Queen dined in public; but there is no evidence that he had any taste for the theatre, the cockpit, or the coffee-houses. His stay in the “Metropolitan City” usually lasted for a fortnight or three weeks, and the total cost of the visit was about twelve pounds, though as much more was often laid out upon various purchases.
Upon the ignorance and illiterateness of the country squires, Lord Macaulay is never tired of dwelling. He tells us that their language and pronunciation were “such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns,” and that a gentleman “passed among his neighbours for a great scholar if Hudibras and Baker’s Chronicle, Tarlton’s Jests, and the Seven Champions of Christendom lay in his hall window among the fishing rods and fowling pieces.”
Equally ill-founded, as far as I can judge, is the historian’s attack upon the “gross uneducated country gentleman,” and his assertion that in Charles the Second’s time a knight of the shire had seldom a library as good as may now be found in a servants’ hall or a tradesman’s back parlour. For the class of which he writes was at least well schooled, and few country houses were without a little collection of books upon the classics, divinity, law, and current politics. Mr. Sitwell had received an excellent education, as is evidenced by a Latin manuscript in his handwriting upon the art of logic, and several Greek and Latin schoolbooks still preserved at Renishaw. In his will, he thought his “printed books” equally worthy of mention with the pictures and maps, the wainscot, ceiling, and glass in his house at Renishaw. From the books still remaining there, and from an old catalogue taken in 1753, it is possible to reconstruct his library, and to form an opinion upon his tastes and the extent and limits of his reading. Upon the shelves in the study cupboards, Homer and Aristotle, and most, if not all, of the greater Latin writers, were represented. For divinity, there were Fox’s Acts and Monuments; Usher’s Chronology, Annals, and Body of Divinity; the Works of Tertullian, Polycarp, Eusebius, Ignatius, Chrysostom, Justin Martyr, and St. Augustine; Leigh’s Critica Sacra; Corneille’s Livre de l’imitation de Jesus Christ; Meditationes de vita Christi, by Vincentius Brunus; the Methoda Theologiæ of Andreas Hyperius; Justus’ Lipsius De Cruce; Crellius’ Of one God; Culverwell On the Light of Nature; Hakewell’s Apology; Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ; Durell’s View of the Reformed Church; A Defence of the Catholic Faith, by Grotius; Dr. Fenton’s Six Sermons against the Church of Rome; Spencer On Prodigies; Hammond’s Fundamentals, and his volume on God’s Grace and Decrees; a History of the Inquisition; Whittaker’s Controversial Tracts of 1588; Bilson’s Anti-Christian Rebellion of 1585; Wigand’s Jack of both Sides, published in 1591; and Fuller’s History of the Holy War. Law was represented by Coke’s Institutes; Pulton’s Statutes, and his works on the King’s Peace and on Offences and Misdemeanours; Scobell’s Acts of Parliament; Rastell’s Statutes; the Institutes of Justinian; an Explicatio Juris inter Gentes, and the Civiles Doctrinæ of Lipsius; History by Daniel’s Wars of York and Lancaster; Rushworth’s Historical Collections; Sleidan’s History of the Four Empires of Antiquity; and a Historia Universale, published at Venice in 1605. Literature by Bacon’s Essays and his Latin Works; the Colloquies and Praise of Folly of Erasmus; the Princeps of Machiavelli; Milton’s Defensio Populi Anglicani; and King Charles’ Works. Other books worth mentioning were Boquet’s Discours execrable des Sorciers, and his Histoire de Faust; a Life of Tycho Brahe; Galen’s Medicine; Descartes’ Philosophy; Galileo’s Systema Cosmicum; Harvey’s De Generatione Animalium and De Cordis et Sanguinis Motu; Burgersdijck’s Philosophia Moralis; Gassend’s Astronomy; Alsted’s Physica Harmonia; Baker’s Arithmetic of 1607; Tacquet’s Mathematics; Oughtred’s Trigonometry; Butler’s Rethorick; Keckerman’s Logic, and the Logic of Molinæus; Wright’s Theory of Navigation; Bosse’s L’Art de Perspective; Mendez Pinto’s Voyages, translated by Cogan; Hornus de Originibus Americanis; Corderio’s Colloquies; an Introduction to Geography; a book on the Art of Speaking, and another, published in 1639, on the Actions of Gunnery. Tied up in parcels were a number of pamphlets relating to the Civil War and Restoration, and including the Bishop of Worcester’s Sermon on the Coronation of Charles II., Cotton’s Panegyrick on the King, A Noble Salutation to Charles Stewart, and A Plea for a Limited Monarchy, published in the same year. Dr. Gardiner’s Assize Sermon of 1653 must not be forgotten, in which he speaks of his “honoured friend and patron,” Mr. Sitwell, as a “cordial friend to Religion and Learning, Piety and Sobriety”; nor Evelyn’s Sylva, in which the owner of Renishaw is once mentioned, for he had supplied the author with information concerning the giant oaks of the Rivelin and Sherwood. The library as a whole is that of a practical man who wished to make the best of both worlds, and to whom the classics, divinity, law, politics and science were the only subjects worthy of serious attention. Milton had not yet published his Paradise Lost, and to the country squire of that day literature meant the classics, and English poetry and prose were a world unknown.
Though “noe politition nor statesman,” Mr. Sitwell took a keen interest in home and foreign affairs. News books, papers of news, letters diurnal, gazettes, royal declarations and speeches, and Acts of Parliament, were constantly forwarded to him by his cousin, Ralph Franceys, who resided in London. Franceys frequented the Exchange, and the taverns and coffee-houses about it, and kept him informed of “what is said in the City”; and, in addition to the items of news thus supplied, Captain Mazine (well known by sight to all who have studied the engravings in the Duke of Newcastle’s book on horsemanship), Peter Pett, the naval commissioner, and other correspondents in London told him what they heard, and he had occasionally a “particular relation” of some important occurrence, a confirmation “by one who lives neare the Court,” or a copy of “a letter to the Mayor of Hull which a friend of myne saw.” He was thus better acquainted than most of his neighbours with what was going on in the world, and it is curious to find that in February, 1660–1, the loyal Marquess of Newcastle owed to him the first intimation of the date of the elections. “His Excellency,” writes Sir Francis Topp, the secretary, “hath commanded me to let you know that he will not expect you until your own occasions may give you the opportunity, and then you shall be very welcome. We presume you writt about the choosinge of Knights and bourgesses, which we conceave is by some directions of the Councell, for we have noe newes got here of ye writts.”
Guest Arriving on Horseback.
The owner of the letter-book describes himself as “one of those fooles of the world who love to be busie,” and, in spite of his age, led an active and in many respects a useful life. His duty as a commissioner for the royal subsidies took him frequently to Chesterfield and Derby, and at the latter town, as became one who had served as Sheriff, he attended the Assizes, and sometimes served upon the Grand Jury. He often “waited,” either upon public or private business, or merely to “tender his service,” upon the famous Duke of Newcastle at Welbeck, the Earl of Devonshire at Hardwick, and Lord Scarsdale at Sutton, and more rarely upon Lords Deincourt, Frecheville, and Byron. On Tuesdays, when Sheffield market drew in the neighbouring gentry, he sometimes met his acquaintances at the “Angel” Inn, near the Irish Cross; and on Saturdays, as already explained, he dined at the eightpenny ordinary at Chesterfield on fish, mutton, chicken, and ale, and when dinner was over, joined his friends, Cornelius Clarke, of Norton Hall, Samuel Clarke, of Ashgate, and Mr. Watkinson, of Brampton, in the enjoyment of a game of shovel-board and a bottle of sack. He visited the fairs at Sheffield, Rotherham, and Chesterfield; rode up to London at least once a year; and at intervals paid visits of a few days to his “son Revell,” at Ogston Hall; to Doncaster, where he stayed with his daughter at Nether Hall, or with his wife’s brother, Mr. Childers, of Carr House; and to Nottingham, whence I have no doubt he ran over to see his “brother Sacheverell” at Barton. All these excursions were on horseback, and a start was made from Renishaw as early as seven o’clock in summer and eight in winter, as is shown by appointments to be at Chesterfield “before eight oth’ clock” in June, and at Whitwell “between eight and nine oth’ clock” in February. This hour, however, was not too early for letters to be written before mounting, as may be seen by one which concludes—“So breifly, for I am just putting foot into stirrop, I remaine your freind to serve you.”
There was also much local business to be attended to in Eckington and the neighbourhood. In April, 1661, just after the elections were over, Mr. Sitwell was intrusted with the proceeds of the subsidy which had been imposed upon the township for the buying of trophies, in order that he might convey it to the Sessions. A little later, being commanded upon the news of Lambert’s rising to march to Derby with whatever force could be raised, he advanced money to honest poor men his neighbours, who walked as far as Chesterfield before they learnt that their services would not be required. At another time we find him endeavouring to procure men and horses for Lord Ogle’s troop. In 1665, the bridge at Renishaw being so decayed with age that any little flood made it impassable, Mr. Sitwell applied to the Court at the Sessions for money, as it was required for the work of repair. The bridge was of stone, and approached at either end by a causeway supported upon small arches; and he supervised the rebuilding of it from the very foundations, and, partly at his own expense, made it “soe that for many generations the country will not need to be att further charge.” There is a letter to the jury in a local lawsuit, and two others, requesting the Justices to discharge or bail prisoners before trial. In January, 1663–4, when a doubt has arisen as to the proper manner of collecting hearth money in the parish, he writes to Sir Simon Degg, asking the latter to direct the constable what he is to do therein; and in December, 1665, a pauper who had been sent by warrant of two Justices from Eckington to Treeton having been returned by Sir Francis Fane, a letter is carried to Treeton by several persons who are ready to swear that the unfortunate man had no settlement in Eckington.
The owner of the letter-book had a warm and somewhat arbitrary temper, and when roused could “speak plaine English” (not, indeed, as Macaulay would have led one to expect, in oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse, uttered in the broadest accent of his province, but pure, nervous, incisive English) with force and directness. In other respects, he was a good Christian, who believed that it was the “duty of every man to be careful in the service of God,” but abhorred the cloak and the mask of pretentious piety; supported the institution of Bishops and the “decent, harmless ceremonies” of the Church of England, but “meddled not with controverted points of faith.”
In disposition, the writer was a kind-hearted man, and in spite of a great deal of public and private business, he found time to help other people in their troubles. He twice redeems a debtor out of the House of Correction at Chesterfield, and endeavours to assist him when imprisoned there for the third time. He writes on behalf of “Whittles’ boy”—“a poore ffatherless and Motherless boy, an object of pitty to move one, if not to releeve him, yet to helpe him to right from those who would doe him wrong”—to the Rector of Aston and Sir Francis Fane, begging them to hear and determine the differences between the lad and his “knavish uncles”; provides him with clothes and other necessaries, and finds money to release him from a cruel master and to keep him from starving. He sets himself to help Mr. Leigh, of Coldwell Hall, who had lately fallen into a sad condition of poverty; pays £4 in order to have a son, Joseph Leigh, apprenticed to a tailor in Sheffield, and urges another son in London to “write by the next post after this comes to you, to hould up the hartt of the ould man.” Later on, he drafts a petition on behalf of the father applying for a place in the Duke of Norfolk’s Hospital or Almshouse, at Sheffield. He urges a spendthrift husband to make a settlement of his property upon his wife, who had brought him a little fortune in marriage, and was willing upon such terms to free him from his debts and to maintain his children. He endeavours to incline to mercy the creditors of a former maidservant at Renishaw, who had married a man already deeply in debt, seeing that she was willing, in her own phrase, “to part with all they had, quick and dead, to pay theire debts, soe that they might have the freedome to beginn the world new and to live by theire labor.” It was a common practice at this time for litigants to avoid the cost and delay of a lawsuit by referring their quarrel to some neighbouring gentleman for his “doom and award,” and Mr. Sitwell, believing arbitration in such cases to be a “very charitable good worke,” both rendered such services himself, and made arrangements also on behalf of others. He was “shy of his reputation” in Derbyshire, where he was “well known in his country”; anxious to do his duty by his children, and not, as he puts it, “to bringe trouble on those I leave behinde me”; and considered the possession of a good estate carried with it “an ingagement thereby to be regardfull of the welfare of one’s Country.” It may be inferred from the use of certain phrases in the letter-book that then, as now, public spirit, truthfulness, and courtesy were considered to be the distinguishing marks of the class to which he belonged.
Such, in real life, were the Tory squires upon whose memory Lord Macaulay has heaped the coarsest epithets of a not very refined vocabulary, the falsest coin of a not very sterling rhetoric; for I have no reason to believe that the owner of the letter-book was otherwise than an average specimen of the class to which he belonged, neither better nor worse than his neighbours who sat next him at the market ordinary, discussed the Dutch War with him over a quart of sack and a pipe of tobacco at the “Redd Lyon,” or rode over to a mid-day dinner and a game of bowls at Renishaw. The impression left upon the mind by such documents as the letter-book is not one of rudeness, but rather of comfort, education, and refinement. Of the ignorance and uncouthness, the drunkenness, the pig-handling, the low habits and gross phrases, the oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse, the vulgar taste which aimed at ornament, but could produce nothing but deformity, there is not a trace; and instead of meeting with “the deportment, the vocabulary, and the accent of a carter,” and the manners of “rustic millers or alehouse keepers,” we find a class of men useful in their generation, public-spirited and intellectual, courteous in their dealings with each other and compassionate towards the poor, and better judges of taste in architecture and gardening than at least one of their critics.
A Gentleman and his Servant on the Road.