[95] Ralph Franceys of Friday Street, London, a descendant of the Foremark family. He, or his father, had served as Bailiff or Mayor of Derby in 1624 and 1632, and his mother was nearly related to the Sitwells.
[96] In February, 1665–6, Mr. Sitwell ordered from London a hundredweight of good white sugar, the Muscovados sugar consigned to him from Barbadoes having proved unfit for his use. For preserving, the whitest powdered sugar was necessary. (See Verney Letters, iii., 278.) In a pocket almanac of 1699 which belonged to Mr. Sitwell’s grandson and namesake, there is a note that the latter has lent to Mrs. Stringer his “wife’s two Receipts Bookes.” These have unfortunately been lost, but the receipt-book of a neighbour, Mrs. Colepeper, amongst the Colepeper MSS. in the British Museum, enables one to form some idea of their contents.
[97] In the last six months of 1665 (leaving out one doubtful entry of £1 5s.), £10 0s. 9d. was spent upon malt for brewing at Renishaw. Malt in that year cost £1 3s. to £1 3s. 6d. a quarter, and these payments will therefore indicate a yearly use of something over 17 quarters, which, according to Markham’s English Husbandman of 1613, would give 51 hogsheads of ordinary beer and afterwards 17 hogsheads of small beer. Seventy hogsheads would allow nearly three quarts a day per head to Mr. Sitwell and his son and a household of four men servants, two footboys, and six women servants. They could not, of course, have drunk so much, but the calculation makes no allowance for visitors. At Barton, the seat of the Sacheverells, £16 was paid during the year 1685 for twenty quarters of barley for malting.
[98] This Nicholas Delves is the person who put Titus Oates to school as a free scholar at Merchant Taylors’ in 1664. See William Smith’s Intrigues of the Plot, 1685, page 25.
[99] First mentioned in literature by Dr. Cox, Churches of Derbyshire, ii., 132; see Folk-lore, xii., p. 394 seq.
[100] Jeayes, Derbyshire Charters, Nos. 560, 1429.
[101] My informant did not know the meaning of this word. It is accented on the final syllable.
[102] Told to me by Sarah Ellen Potter, aged 14, the daughter of Mr. George Potter, of Castleton.
[103] In Prof. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, part v., p. 233 seq.
[104] As regards “Mirryland town,” it appears that the soil of the Morayland, in North-East Scotland, is gravelly, and much improved by summer rains. Hence the distich:—