Memorials of old Derbyshire

by Unknown

“To view the height of one wall erected and made in or about one parcell of one pasture called the Champion within our saide foreste, how brode and depe the Dike in and about the same wall is, whether the same dike be drye or standinge with water for the most parte of the yere, pasture notwithstandinge the said walle and dike, and whether the said wall and dyke be noisome or hurtefull to or for our deare and game there, and to thinderance of the grasse for our said deare, or be better for the cherisshinge of our said game and deare there or not.”

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.