Forte mihi posthac non adeunda, vale”;
in translation:
“Buxton, whose fame thy milk-warm waters tell,
Whom I, perhaps, no more shall see, farewell”.
A hundred years later the hall was taken down and a “most commodious edifice” raised by the Earl of Devonshire, Bess of Hardwick’s great-grandson. In old maps may be found a picture of the former building, which is thus described by Doctor Jones, in 1572, in his treatise on the Buxton waters:—
“A very goodly house, foure-square, foure storeys high, so well compacte with houses of office beneath and above and round about, with a great chambre and other goodly lodgings to the number of 30: that it is and will be a bewty to behold, and very notable for the honourable and worshipful that shall need to repaire thither, as also for other. Yea, the poorest shall have lodgings and beds hard by for their uses only.... A phisicion to be placed there continually, that might not only counsyle them how the better to use God’s benefyte, but also adapt their bodies making artificial baths, by using thereof as the case shall require, with many other profitable devyses, having all things for that use or any other, in a rediness for all the degrees as before it bee longe it shall be the scene of the noble earle’s own performing.”
For the gentlemen Doctor Jones recommends the diverting exercises of bowling, shooting at butts, and tossing the wind-ball. The ladies may enjoy the calmer pleasures of walking in the galleries, and “if the weather be not agreeable to their expectacion, they may have in the ende of a benche eleven holes made, into the which to trowle pummets or bowles of lead, bigge, little, or meane, or also of copper, tynne, woode, eyther vyolent or softe, after their own discretion, the pastime Trowle Madame is termed. Likewise men feeble, the same may also practise in another gallery of the new buildings.”
Even in those days men of note came here to take the waters—the lords Leicester and Burleigh amongst others. In the Harleian MSS. one may see a letter to the Earl of Essex, in which the latter writes:—
“Your Lordship, I think, desyreth to heare of my estate, which is this: I cum hither on Sunday last at night, took a small solutive on Monday, began on Tuesday, yesterday I drynk of the waters to the quantity of 3 pynts at 6 draughts; this day I have added 2 draughts, and I drynk 4 pynts, and to-morrow am determyned to drynk 5 pynts, and mixt with sugar I fynd it potable with pleasure even as whey. I mean not to bath these 8 dayes, but wyll contynew drynking 10 dayes.”
The Earl of Essex himself writes, several years later: “The water I have drunke liberally, begynning with 3 pynts, and so encreasing dayly a pynt I come to 8 pynts, and from thence descendyng dayly a pynt till I shall ageyne return to 3 pynts, wch wil be on Thursday next, and then I make an ende”.